Su Zi's Review of "As Meaningful As Any Other " by Donna Snyder

   In our terrifying times of overt misogyny now, a view of women’s history can serve us well. There are artifacts aplenty, and each is a symbol of a way of life and a world view. Beyond batik and blarney are rituals that are tied to self-sustenance and self-agency. Every culture that has women has women’s ways, sometimes hidden in hairdo, but nonetheless a ritual of feminine celebration.

   Poetry has a well-established place in women’s history, and the ongoing efforts to suppress and marginalize women’s voices is endless evidence. Thus, offered to us as a new release is Donna Snyder’s As Meaningful As Any Other (Gutter Snob 2022), a perfect bound volume in trade size; an illustrated volume, with a number of images by Tezozomoc. The book is structured in sections, and each section has an image as a frontispiece, with one being repeated on the cover. The images themselves are digital art, saturated and warm toned, that employ a collage of a human woman and symbols such as antlers, roots, and our planet. The sections of the work are also titled symbolically, using roots, auguries, flight, awakening and crossroads. Snyder has taken fragments from other of her work and uses these as an introduction to each section, such as a fragment entitled “woman smiles” that opens the second section “auguries”:

   Woman smiles, her face starred, exotic birds tattooed around her mouth, beneath her eyes, around her nose […] (11) that squares off the reader with this vision of the Divine Feminine.

   The poems here are perhaps also prayers, with both overt and subtle symbolism.  The last section of this text, “Crossroads”, includes the poem “ Her blood, a faded ribbon” that whispers of the moment when menstruation ceases, “ Her blood faded/ only a ribbon covered with dust”(46), a moment notable in women’s lives but rarely overtly celebrated. If the poems here are rituals, then the rituals themselves often involve visiting art museums and reading other poets as well. However, there’s also mention of acts of intimacy, such as “this little rhyme that filled my head upon awakening” with the lovely line “my lips awash in the taste of your unbathed back” (32). This is writing that is as much an account of a life as a collection of correspondence, there’s a tone of a woman telling her confident of the desert and the desert city’s denizens.

   Written in a hybrid of free verse and prose, these pieces seem to echo from the lineage from which they draw. The book’s last piece, “Fool’s Moon” opens with the line “The Fool’s Moon leads ineluctably to darkness” (53) which goes on the include a dancing ritual of:

   Moon paints snakes on her face. Copper bells ring. She dances, peculiarly festooned, as if time really exists […]

While the Fool’s Moon is now a minimally celebrated event, occurring every 28 years, ritualized dancing is still very much entrenched in both women’s and the wider, western culture. And while some readers may be mystified at the symbolism employed by Snyder, the symbols are common to certain types of tarot cards. There’s a sense of a tarot reading in this work, the sections and the admonitions, prayers and reminders that prompt each piece. The draw that would encompass the evidence given here speaks to the full moon and meteor shower that read this work since its arrival as a book. While this may amuse, it would be wise for booksellers of tarot too to include this volume in their inventory. And while a tarot draw, or a tarot-style poem draw might maybe remind us of our celestial seasons, there are those who are comforted by history, by this quiet and ancient wisdom.

GAS Interview with Donna Snyder

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Poet: Jefferson Carter

 

    Jefferson Carter has poems in such journals as Barrow Street, Cream City Review, Rattle, and New Poets of the American West.  His eleventh collection, Birkenstock Blues, was released by Presa Press (Rockford, MI) in 2019 and may be ordered through his website: jeffersoncarterverse.com

    Carter has lived in Tucson, AZ, since 1953 and taught composition and poetry writing full-time for 30 years at Pima Community College.  Currently, he’s a passionate supporter of Sky Island Alliance, a regionally-based environmental organization.

LIFE PARTNER

 

For convenience, I & my life partner

(the woman formerly known as my wife)
have numbered our arguments.  Number 3, 

you’re so negative.  Number 8, you’re 

naive.  Number 11, another beer already?  

Number 13, you don’t listen to me.
But I do.  I just don’t agree.  Now

my life partner’s on the couch, watching

Live P.D.  She’s pleased with the police,

so kind to the miscreants & trailer trash

they apprehend.  Of course, they’re

kind!  They’re on camera!  Without 

looking at me, she holds up three fingers.

My life partner wants to make a deal:
she’ll stop storing our broken pepper mill
upright in the spice rack, pepper everywhere 

like coarse soot, she’ll store the mill

on its side if I stop switching off the light 

over the dining-room table whenever

she’s in another room.  Why?  Why
does she need that light on all day?
She raises both fists & opens each one

twice. Number 20, you don’t love me.

GAS Featured Poet: John Dorsey

 

John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017),Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Afterlife Karaoke (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2021) and Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022).. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

These poems, along with several hundred others, are part of a larger erasure collection entitled Pocatello Wildflower, which examines the words of a group of Idaho writers who worked primarily from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, including the late Bruce Embree, who really got the ball rolling in my head and heart, with a few still working today. It is my great hope that folks will be interested in the original writers work, in addition to my own. These pieces in particular were taken from the work of Kim Stafford. Pocatello Wildflower will be available in 2023 from Crisis Chronicles Press.

Red Cloud Heart

a wild death

a lonesome girl’s

trembling hands

a strange little country

flying forever

wind gathering a prairie

of mercy in her hair.

The Fields Die

paradise folded her hands

into pure wild song

crickets

holy umbilical music

the quilt

my mother pieced

into shadows.

A Fierce Young Breath

a frozen hour trembles

ghosts bark

lost in our beds

dog listeners

a dark vigil

delivers the frost.

The Sea of Goats

the tangled river

a long wood carved mountain

the small thigh of a bear

she begins to weave skin

& wander the crags

through thickets

swimming weighted streams

of hunger

through the meadow.

My Father a Bird

sweetness without old bees.

GAS Featured Poet: Robert Beveridge

 

Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Of Rust and Glass, The Museum of Americana, and Quill and Parchment, among others.

Twenty-One
“Women your age have decided/wars and the beat/of poems”
--William Carlos Williams, “Suzy”

No one would ever mistake
you for one of those waif-
like models, those relics
to be found on televisions
and strip club stages,
the “everyman's fantasy”
every man is content
to leave with the remote
or at the door

Lebanese with a left
turn at Ireland, short, strong,
solid. A subterranean passageway
that is also a foundation.
You move and buildings tumble.

It is in your arms, tight
around me, and deep
in the pools of your eyes,
the slight squint that comes
along with every smile.
It resonates
in your voice, high
as a jockey's, and just
as athletic.
It is in your paintings
and your scars.

*            *            *

I draw you as the Acropolis
upon the half-shell, the birth
of redheaded Venus as done,
say, by Rubens. No knee-length
tresses to cover you, naked
and wet from a dance in a thunderstorm,
a trickle of seafoam
against the inside of your thigh.

Those who gathered to watch
stroke you with fans made
from the petals of calla lilies,
your curves brushed, aglow
in white, red, purple.

*            *            *

The old saw states
the scars
are the beauty marks
of a life lived,
the badges of honor
from distant wars.

A network thick as cables
come together below
and between your breasts.

What doctors may have taken
is replaced now
with the deep gunmetal grey
of your eyes.
I cannot but kiss your scars
and call you beautiful.

A Raw Ride: review of Marty Cain's The Wound Is (Not) Real—by Su Zi

 

                  

     The reader approaches a text, and there’s a relationship between them, a conversation between the voice of the text and the potential for resonance with the reader; however, not all texts are specifically representative of the author, personally. In the case of a memoir, the reader enters the text, and that relationship, with the notion that it is also the author’s life in the text, is somehow personal, if vicarious. Of late, readers have sometimes been given the sort of warning that’s seen in cinema; notifications of disturbing content. In Marty Cain’s The Wound Is (Not) Real: A Memoir (Trembling Pillow 2022), the content warning also includes “Readers with photosensitive epilepsy should be aware that some of the linked videos (accessed through the QR codes) contain flashing lights”.  Since not many texts contain QR codes, the reader is also alerted to the potential for a non-traditional format for the work overall. While the book proclaims itself a memoir, this is not a prose-only chronology, nor is the work overtly prose, as some pieces are stream-of-consciousness, some are narrative prose, others are narrative poems, including a piece titled “Narrative Poem” (81).

      The work itself starts with a prologue that establishes the voice of the text as a Sibling Of A Disabled Person, but the structural arc of this prologue involves memory overall, makes overt allusion to Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” as an architecture for fragments that introduce character and setting. The prologue ends with a QR code. Thus, the reader is alerted to graphic elements in the text: the use of upper case, Selby-like run on sentencing, bold face, spatial elements and sometimes purely graphic use of the pound and asterisk keys. To their credit, the publisher includes these elements, but whether the use of a single old English font letter for the start of pieces is the editor’s or author’s decision as a helpful reading marker only adds to the subtle aesthetics of this work.

     Such a work as this is as much meditation as memoir, memory filtered through the experiences of life. Lest the reader too readily dismiss the text as merely some post-punk hybrid, “Wordsworth Poem” begins with three paragraphs in a type of high-wire standard critical thought that then becomes a swan dive into memory. The transition here, debating Wordsworth’s 

choice of poetic form, makes the observation “And form is a feeling/ // And form is a garment/ //

And in my mind, I return to the clothes” (23), peeks into the core structure of this work: each piece’s structure is chosen to clothe the thesis, the work is dressed in prose or QR codes, each episode has a Look.

     These devices seem intended to a accentuate the physical deeds done in this work. In “Kids of The Black Hole, Part II”, which is presented as prose stanzas, the first stanza includes “He’s done it before. He’s hatch-marked his arms and shown me the scars” (35), one of the text’s many references to self-harm. The piece continues with “We’d kissed before. He’s asked me to blow him. I’s said no. I turned off the light. I don’t think I spoke”, but then continues as a meditation between trauma and art “It feels good and it hurts”. It is here that the repetitive use of wound in this work overall is given the thesis of “The wound is not real / // This, too, is perhaps a common sentiment for victims of abuse” (37). What the reader experiences is a clearly curated collection of violent memories at a rather gentle remove.

    As a literary work, Cain’s book is energetic. The work has a distinctive auditory quality that makes it true to its contemporary copyright. And while the book overtly self-identifies as memoir, “This is still my confessional poem” (36) also seems traditionally apt. The reader in search of inspo-porn memoir will find few soft feelings here.  The dozen or so small press zines that published these pieces prior to their collection here speaks to our current culture yen for such exposures of intimate darkness. It is then for each reader to depart the work in confrontation with their own landscape, be their experience one of horror or of catharsis. 

 

    Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Poet: Michael Lee Johnson

 

Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era. Today he is a poet in the greater Chicagoland area, IL. He has 259 YouTube poetry videos. Michael Lee Johnson is an internationally published poet in 44 countries, several published poetry books, nominated for 4 Pushcart Prize awards, and 5 Best of the Net nominations. He is editor-in-chief of 3 poetry anthologies, all available on Amazon, and has several poetry books and chapbooks. He has over 443 published poems. Michael is the administrator of 6 Facebook Poetry groups. Member Illinois State Poetry Society.

Exiled Poet

 

Exiled eye

 

now 10 years here, I turn

rain into thunder,

 

days switch,

my back-pain muskmelon

into loneliness

 

Naked

In the nakedness of life

 

moves this male shadow

worn-out dark clothes,

 

ill-fitted in distress,

he bends down

prays for the dawn.

 

 

Poetry Man

 

Death still comes in the shadow of grief,

hides beneath this blanket of time,

in the heat, in the cold.

 

Hold my hand on this journey

you won’t be the first, but

 

you may be the last.

 

GAS Featured Poet: Mike McLaren

 

Mike McLaren makes his living as a writer, poet, and musician. He knows the lyrical is the only vocation with honor. In 1991 he published a collection of original Arthurian Legend stories with Hobby House Press, and in that same year a writing textbook for Colorado State University. He lives with his wife and two Chihuahuas along the Colorado Front Range, and when there are no words to work with, Mike and his wife spend their weekends biking the Continental Divide ― with the two tiny dogs being pulled along in their own bike trailer.

Always Here

How deep does the mountain
extend into the Earth?
How far beyond the valley
will the river flow?
 
From the crest of a ridge,
I breathe in mist
that fingers its way
through tall fir and cedar,
I look at my feet.
 
Walking down the slope
my hair drips
with a Pacific Northwest downpour;
trickles go down my neck,
into my shirt.
 
Thick forest, rising streams,
a path traveled not nearly enough,
birds whistle, day wanes—
I look at my feet.
 
How far did I travel
to get here?
Why did I want
to go there?

Musical Movement

The baton raises, quivers
just for an eternity,
then a guiding hand
slides it into the music
with rhythmic pulses and long thrusts
that lead the notes through a blend
of deep and lifting harmonies.
Notes fall together,
in and out of one another,
arching across slurs and andantes,
dancing through triplets,
touching measure upon measure
until the music can no longer be held
and is released to the silence
felt only by the musicians.