MIDSUMMER by Glen Armstrong, reviewed by Joe Kidd

 

In today's modern arena, there are few poets that I have discovered, that can do what Glen Armstrong does with such ease and consistency.  That is, to observe what is normal, even mundane, and present it as an unexplored world.  Glen has a poet's talent that enables him to experience and translate his visions into colorful, surreal actual occurrences.  

This book plays with words.  They become shiny stones.  Armstrong writes in a comfortable and relaxed style.  Nothing to prove.  No ranting, no complaining, no diary entries here.  It's not about him, but it is all him.  We can tell that Glen is fascinated by what he sees, and not uptight about what he does.

What he does a lot of is connect images that are not normally connected.  Things that exist with things that do not exist.  The poems in this book are numbered,  not titled.  That is how it must be.  It would not suit the work to give it a preconceived point.   Example:

XX

the poets and folksingers

who weave their parallel universe

have never heard of you

no naked foot

hastens upon its wings

no face brightens

as your name is rescued from

muddled thoughts

yet you breathe

in and out

warm nothings

owing legend everything

free to slip through windows/bricks

pines/sleepy witnesses

saying nothing

maybe

they dream

staying nimble

saving your kisses for now

These poems are free of constraint, they are short, they are brilliant, they are unique.  Their language is captivating and alien.  The book is filled with lines like this:  

"but that largely imagined membrane/separating the night

from my own unseen depths/is thin"

"information the shadowy trees might have/can be coaxed with a feather"

"expose any aperture/and that other world/starts whispering"

"explosives and bugs/big enough for their own middle/initials"

The front cover of Midsummer is a photo of two empty lounge chairs facing the sea on the sand under a palm tree.  It tells me that Glen is on vacation here, he's got this thing.  After reading Glen Armstrong, I am drawn to the classics.  Yeats, Wilde, Keats, those are the poets who are equipped to follow.  I've been considering this review for a few months, not sure of an approach.  Most likely I have left some important facts out.  All I really want to do here is call on those who read poetry and understand poets, to call on Glen Armstrong.

Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester Michigan.  He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters.  His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit, Cream City Review, and many others.

Reviewed by Joe Kidd (www.joekiddandsheilaburke.com)

for GAS: Poetry, Art, & Music

GAS Featured Poet: Vernon Frazer

Vernon Frazer has written more than thirty books of poetry, including Anchor What (Unlikely Books),IMPROVISATIONS and Avenue Noir, three novels and a short story collection. His poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous print and electronic publications. His latest poetry collection is Gravity Darkening.

Working in multi-media, Frazer has performed his poetry with

the late saxophonist Thomas Chapin, the Vernon Frazer

Poetry Band and as a solo poet-bassist. His jazz poetry

recordings and multimedia work are available on Youtube.

Frazer resides in central Connecticut. He is widowed.

Poster published by Unlikely Books

Vernon states:  "As a jazz and William Burroughs aficionado, my recent poetry fuses improvisation with cut-ups. At times, I orchestrate the text to create a multiple voice on the page. When in doubt about how to read my page, read it in every possible way." 

Takeout Delivered

her room mother

condemned iteration muttering

                           whenever

     quivering lips

     parlayed discomfort again 

                           when cannibalization pickled 

                           the backyard respiration con

                           the six-speculum sport room

              

   communion pawned the windows

         for                             vegan

    woodpile                   peregrination             

  shake-ups                   caravanserai    

                    coachmen

                            in the sky

             disposable resourcefulness

             trading away with confusion

                          a stale wisp

                          foiled metal’s furnaces

she hugged the convert

to finer vermouths and scarves

          yet 

                burning divisions 

                                            over

                              drainpipe confidences

                     

             curtails admixture jangles

                             from the wrist

                             the telltale dripping

                             of standing lost

                                       shattered a sideswipe      

In Search Of

enzyme underling reaches

happiness annihilation mediators

              outspread

                              shavings cluster

                   its own tautology

                             cannot release 

                                      lurid rhetoric 

                                            where braking 

                             *

swollen adobe surprised 

trill palms past the cigar song

prolonging the darkening                 topic

                   once creaking mildly

         when transforming

         their autumn gate dance

         from the heavy went

                    to shadow

                                     beginnings

                        sealed in the materializing 

                             *

between craven reasoning 

the urban thrombosis choir 

waxed where their shifters

               furnished the tableau

               reverberating introduction

the thunderstruck slanted

      against sure parka longitude

              despite stagecoach instructions

                    emanating grifters

                    bouncing for a dead envelope

                                                 monetarily bulging

 Gone Psychic

subgum illusion tracer

no courier tilled the basin mix

nor 

     a stilled hypotenuse

     riding the retro crux in style

          the rains crane

          wet-necked cribagge sticks

     reek aplomb

     regaining its nether post

     new vision declared

          a sublminal envy curtain

               curtailed

                             happenstance remission

                   hinting at raincoat

                   exposure and rosary factory outlets

                   lovebeads canned

                                                 ova buttoned

          loose origin persuasion

          pineal from a vacant forehead

                           erasing    

                           past futures for one

                                              present     

POWER by Linda Hogan, reviewed by Su Zi

  

The hungry reader can be a seeker, a welcoming mind to ways of perception that sometimes influence our daily realities, a person for whom certain works may be their touchstone in life. Perhaps the discovery of a work fulfills the dream of being soul-feeding. Sometimes, the hungry reader will discover a work and also discover many works by this writer; to what wonderment we might find whole canons, whole Wikipedia lists of a previously, perhaps minimally, explored genres. Such might be how a reader receives Linda Hogan’s Power (Norton, 1998). Hogan has a resume of books, awards and residencies that position her merit, and is included in low-level search responses for Native American Writers, as well as an extensive list by Wikipedia of Native American Women writers.

The influence of the first people of any area is often present in place names, sometimes family names. In the general culture, beyond the fight against slurs, there’s the horror of appropriation and embarrassing grammar. Sometimes, beyond woo-woo and performative uses of leafy incense, dead bird parts and other totem objects, there might come the perception of this other way of being, this other way of life beyond that of the dominant culture. For multi-cultural people, the presence of personal culture in their  life can be a frictive experience, and reviews of Power tend to emphasize that aspect of the novel, along with the coming-of-age modernization of the hero’s journey. A literature course that includes this work might also include a list of two dozen binary considerations as essays topics; the novel hoists these with ease –- for our ways of being include dates versus seasons and how we view the land. 

While Hogan’s novel has a plot based on true events, and a symbolic array of characters, the considerations of the work extend into a view of environmentalism that Hogan handles with a deft use of elegiac language: “It’s the way she lives in the place where Cuban lizards climb trees and plants look enough like gold in the deep shade and slant of afternoon sun that the Spanish believed there were riches here, in this place that is now darkening with storm and smelling of rain”( 17). In the best hurricane sequence since Zora, the novel proceeds to lay out the multiple symbols, characters and events that propel the narrative. Of note is the re-occurrent and apparitional appearance of four women who are ‘walking slightly above the ground as if they are gliding and have no feet”(24). These women appear, together or singly, throughout the novel, and they are both literal and symbolic figures of ancestry, of a way of being at odds with the culture of cars and casinos.

Lest the reader fear for their air conditioning, Hogan almost spoonfeeds this ancient world perception to the reader, as it is everpresent in a manner that is deemed lyrical or beautiful on dust jacket blurbs. Perhaps an academic would note this as setting, but Hogan’s work endeavors to give voice to nature, to force the reader to perceive how it would be to live with that awareness: “The frogs are loud this morning”(102) or when visiting the town “A few trees stand, alien and foreign, in a ground that not long ago was all theirs. The ground belonged to them and the marsh birds and the possum. I believe they are surprised to be alive at all, those lonely trees, and nothing in the world acknowledges them”(115). The sense of the living world, of life forms beyond our own having birth on our shared earth is more than mere plot mechanics, it is a perception steeped onto every page.

With the effects of climate crisis being now daily news, Power’s now nearly quarter century of existence as a publication highlights aspects of our awareness that are overdue for overhaul. It might be that the reader has recently come to some speculation about how we experience time, and maybe how the land upon which we live begs us to reconsider our ways of being, if we would only listen.

Linda Hogan has had awards and fellowships. from The Lannan Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA, and was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer when John Updike received it. It was her first novel; MEAN SPIRIT. Her other books have also received awards or nominations. She has a fellowship from the Native Arts Foundation. She also received the 2016 PEN THOREAU AWARD, an honor also awarded to EO Wilson and Peter Matthieson. Her novel PEOPLE OF THE WHALE has been very popular in Taiwan and China, POWER is set in Florida, with a focus on the Florida panther. It has been used with both adult and younger audiences. SOLAR STORMS includes both the James Bay HydroQuebec project in the far north, and is also about adoption in Native communities. DWELLINGS has been a best seller in Japan and done well in U.S. Her new and selected book of poetry, DARK. SWEET. is now available, and she has just finished a new novel, THE MERCY LIARS, not yet in print. Hogan is respected for her work in Indigenous knowledge, Native Science and wildlife rehabilitation as well as her writing that includes ecosystem research. She has a new book of poems, A HISTORY OF KINDNESS coming out from Torrey House Press in April 2020, and a book of essays on relationships with animals and their place in her wilderness region, in Native life, and as fellow travelers with us in an increasingly difficult world. This will be published by Beacon in Fall of 2020. The Radiant Lives of Animals.

IMPERMANENCE by Ren Powell, reviewed by Henry Stanton

We are guided through Ren Powell’s spare and resonating book of poetry by a Virgil of sorts.  Though the bust scribbled with the author’s poetry is ostensibly inanimate, it is, in fact, alive and invigorated, like the book, with the power of poetic utterance.  While the bust is alive, it is still a shade to the reader, as Virgil ultimately was to Dante – a visitor from that other world with who we can dialog but who ultimately moves in mysterious, wondrous and evasive ways.   We travel from one sacred ecosystem to the next, where we are introduced to a locus of insight by the appearance of the bust-in-place and by the revelations of the poetry.  Our guide through the book chaperones us through some exquisitely beautiful poetry – spare and understated, quiet sometimes silent and wordless, always vibrating with soft-spoken intensity.

This is such a neat trick.

By trick, I mean nothing like gimmick.  I am speaking of the trick of the coyote, the shaman, the artist.  Ren Powell deftly disorients us and astonishes us and reveals the subliminal and universal to us so that, at the end of the book, we have no clear sense of where we have been and how we got here.  Impermanence, with all its ramifications of “fleeting, disappearing, lost” in the deepest sense is also a referral to the eternal and infinite.  This book is so beautiful because it offers us poetry that is intimate and relevant in the most immediate way of being human.  Here it is exquisite, important and now it is gone.   And, here we find offered to us timeless understanding, the experience of rich organic beauty, a trip into the unknown source from where beautiful poetry emerges. 

From renpowell.com:

This project began with meditation on the idea of impermanence. And with this image, with the body-as-story slowly losing shape. With our narratives falling apart, becoming loose elements that can/will be rearranged in another story. Which is what history is, after all.

The bust was made of plaster and paper mache (using my handwritten poems for the project ripped into strips). I photographed the bust in various locations in the Jæren landscape of Norway. It was supposed to break up slowly in the waterfall during filming. However, it was taken by the current and slipped under an old mill house - trapped by the torrent of water, the wooden beams, and the rocks.

But this is what happens when we try to plan our stories. Isn’t it? Everything falls apart. That’s the way of things.

A Mad Orphan Lit. Publication
A Conceptual Multimedia Artwork:
42 Poems
Plaster/paper mache bust (video) and photography
Acrylic Monoprints

Moroccan handmade paper (hardcover)
Double-Needle Coptic Stitching
(note: this intentionally loose stitch allows for an open-back and “lay flat” binding)
15 X 20 cm, 60 pages
Text block: 160gsm acid-free, ethically resourced paper

120 EURO Limited series of 10

Buy the Print on Demand paperback HERE.

Ren Powell is a writer and teaching artist. She is a native Californian – now a Norwegian citizen settled on the west coast of Norway.  Shas been a member of The Norwegian Author’s Union since 2005 and has published six full-length collections of poetry and more than two dozen books of translations with traditional publishing houses. Her sixth poetry collection The Elephants Have Been Singing All Along was published in 2017 by Wigestrand forlag. Her poetry collections have been purchased by the Norwegian Arts Council for national library distribution, and her poems have been translated and published in eight languages.

THIS IS NOT A STUNT by Cath Nichols, reviewed by Ren Powell

 

In the afterward of Cath Nichols’s collection This is Not a Stunt, the poet writes about her concern that the poems are not “sufficiently poem-y”, meaning that they are too descriptive and leave little room for the reader to insert their own life experience into the poems. But I don’t believe there was anything to fear. 

This is Not a Stunt, published by Valley Press was published in 2017, but is new to me. It also seemed like a good choice for my June reading, as central to the book is a series of poems about a transgender experience (that of the poet/speaker’s partner). The topics of disability and aging are also broached in the collection, which begins and ends with poems about sleep/dreams. 

Make no mistake, this collection is not a misery memoir in verse, or poems tinged with pity or self-pity. They are relatable, while still offering the potential for cis-gendered or able-bodied readers to gain new insights into the human condition. In a poem discussing Nathan’s request for surgery:

[…] Explaining why
such surgery would be wrong the doctor said

It would be like cutting of the legs of a cripple.

The last line is repeated and referenced in subsequent poems. And discussing possible reasons for cutting off legs in the poem “Life Support”: 

[…] Post-removal the patient 

might not run but they might become more agile.
Some become so heavy in their bodies they attempt

self-removal.

These poems are specific, but certainly touch on recognizable emotions that allow us to empathize without appropriating. A line the poet herself has managed to walk well.

Although Nichols is concerned about the poem-y-ness of the collection, her one formal verse – a pantoum entitled “Reading Would Save Me” – is beautifully written, singing so smoothly, I almost missed the pattern of the repetitions. The first stanza of which reads: 

I thought something would change, but it didn’t.
I thought reading would save me. It hasn’t.
I expected to grow up. I have grown inward.
There are circles and chasing and somebody’s tail. 

The poems about relationship difficulties, about physical disabilities, the poet’s own personal narrative, and her partner’s narrative seem in some ways disparate. For example, there is a poem that quotes a Facebook meme that circulated years ago among academics that was a posted notice with red circles around spelling mistakes, and then a comment making fun of the person with the red pen: a kind of reflection infinitely bouncing between mirrors and pointing fingers. In my mind, this was the most prosaic of the poems. And only made sense to me as a part of the collection on a second read, where I saw it not in dialogue with the other poems, but as a kind of meta commentary. 

The collection didn’t offer me a straightforward, cohesive series of poems. But then… what life is cohesive? As the poet herself mentions in the afterward, there is a challenge in telling a story that can rest comfortably in Keat’s “negative capability”, because we naturally desire clarity. She writes, “A poem may become slippery, and I am fine with that, but if it becomes too unmoored from meaning then I defeat my own purposes.”

These poems cannot be read as a kind of biography in verse. For example, the character of Nathan is referred to as “he” uniformly throughout – leaving the reader to wonder when a transition – if a transition takes place. In my case, this left me feeling somewhat uncomfortable, questioning the relationship of my own prurient curiosity with a genuine desire to become better informed on a very sensitive aspect of our culture. 

That said, I also believe that sitting with what is uncomfortable is probably one of the most valuable things we can do as a reader.

There are also a few poems entirely free of specific narrative but are tied to the subject matter, to nature, and to a conscious, internalized sense beauty in a way that is (dare I say) edifying.

From the final poem “Chiaroscuro”: 

March marigolds hold out their cups
shout, Look at me! Look at me, 

don’t I do yellow exceptionally well? 

Cath Nichols introduces herself in The Poetry Archive:

I've been a queer journalist in Manchester, a poetry events organiser in Liverpool, a life model, and a waitress, amongst other things. I taught creative writing at Leeds University for ten years. I've been chronically ill since 2017 after a genetic predisposition was triggered. This is Not a Stunt (Valley Press, 2017) is my second poetry collection and celebrates the humour and mundanity of disability and trans identities.

LEFT HAND DHARMA by Belinda Subraman, reviewed by Heidi Blakeslee

Published by Unlikely Books.

Available on Amazon.

This book of poetry is different from any other I’ve ever read.  For one thing, it spans nearly four decades with poems from the early ‘80s through today.  There are collections of poems from long ago that read like they were written yesterday.  The blazing arrow that binds them all together is Belinda’s no-bullshit in your face truth.  You can tell that she found her poetry voice early and stuck with it.  

By far the two most fascinating subjects in here for me were her poems about working as a hospice nurse and a nurse on a psych ward.  “Late night at the psyche ward” from her collection Lummox Press Red Book Series #37 (2001) and “Notes of a human warehouse engineer” from Liquid Paper Press (1998,) are two collections that are not to be missed.  “Notes of a human warehouse engineer” won first prize in the 1998 Nerve Cowboy Chapbook Contest.  It’s easy to see why.  Subraman curates vivid moments from her time there, expertly helping the reader understand the jarring and sometimes hectic atmosphere. 

As a peer support specialist who has seen the inside of a psych ward and a crisis unit, I can say that it was interesting to see things from the perspective of a nurse.  Belinda speaks of seeing people at their very worst and treating them with dignity, respect, and kindness.  She is honest about the challenges of nursing work, teasing out difficult truths from her early morning hours there.  She takes us to the very limits of her own patience with aplomb.  She captures the often thankless moments of dealing with patients who are in psychosis, in the grips of dementia, in the throes of mania or schizophrenia.  She talks about coming to terms with the limits of her own sanity in some of these situations and what comes out is a very humanizing view of mental health care and end of life care.  

Many of her poems about the hypocrisy of religion, sprinkled liberally throughout the book, also really touched me.  I applaud her bravery in writing about such difficult subjects openly and honestly, without fear of reproachment. 

 Some of the poetry, not on these subjects, is beat-like in nature.  It is trippy in the best way, deeply philosophical, esoteric, and always blisteringly true.  The beginning of the book offers an informative, in-depth introduction by the author.  

There are countless reasons why picking up a copy of Left Hand Dharma is rewarding.  Go forth, intrepid readers, and discover this gem for yourself.

From Late Night in the Psyche Ward

Peter is back after only eight days.

He was caught directing traffic, naked,

claiming to be Charlie Manson and Hitler.

He’s sunburned, scratched up.

His feet are cracked and cut

from walking barefoot.

His voice is garbled, sounds like he’s barking

with a mouth full of gravel.

But he continues dropping lists at the desk.

Some lists tell us who he is: “a homosexual and a lesbian

and Zar governor of the Andromeda Strain…”

Some tell us diseases he wants cured: “Soviet’s tongue,

Heineken’s Turmoil, defecation rot…”

Other lists tell us who he wants

at his “ordination breakfast”

where “wurlitzer coffee” is to be served.

He wants Clinton, Popeye, Queen of England,

Daffy Duck, Mortimer Snerd, King Tut…

In the past he’s told me

he sold dope to Jerry Garcia,

shot up with Grace Slick.

Said he likes “combo shotgun”

and rattled off a list of drugs.

He showed me “tracks” on his arm.

But I didn’t see much, two or three red dots.

And I just got his toxicology screen results.

Negative for all drugs.

His problem is his brain.

Schizophrenic for 50 years.

He’s basically harmless.

Claims to be God-fearing

and—God.

Belinda Subraman has been writing poetry since the 6th grade and publishing since college.  She had a ten year run editing and publishing Gypsy Literary Magazine 1984-1994. She edited books by Vergin' Press, among them: Henry Miller and My Big Sur Days by Judson Crews. She also published Sanctuary Tape Series (1983-90) which was a mastered compilation of audio poetry and original music from around the world. 

Belinda is a mixed media artist as well as a poet and publisher of GAS: Poetry, Art & Music video show and journal. Her art has been featured in Beyond Words, Epoch, Flora Fiction, Unlikely Stories, Eclectica, North of Oxford, Raw Art Review, El Paso News and Red Fez.  She sells prints of her work in her Mystical House Etsy shop.