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.

GAS Featured Poet: Henry Stanton

 Henry Stanton is a painter and a writer of poetry and fiction living in Old Ellicott City Maryland, though he is really only a conduit for the many remarkable and beautiful revelations offered to him by his loved ones, by strangers, by the sentient and otherwise.    His paintings, poems and fiction have appeared widely in print and online journals internationally – most recently in Gnashing Teeth, High Shelf Press, Paper and Ink Zine, and Rust Belt Review.  He has two books of poetry published by Holy & Intoxicated Press, The Man Who Turned Stuff Off (2019) and Pain Rubble (2020).  His third book of poems, Moonbird, was also published in 2020 by Cathexis Northwest Press.  His poetry was selected as winner of the A3 Review Poetry Prize  and was shortlisted for the Eyewear 9th Fortnight Prize for Poetry.  His fiction received an Honorable Mention for the Salt & Syntax Fiction Contest and was selected as a finalist for the Pen 2 Paper Annual Writing Contest.  Henry Stanton is a regular illustrator for Black Petal Press and Yellow Mama Press.  He is also a regular reviewer for GAS: Poetry, Art and Music and publisher/editor for UnCollected Press/The Raw Art Review.  A selection of paintings, poetry and fiction can be found at  www.brightportfal.com. 

Irises

Looking into the speckled blue throat of this iris

could a mind do this

can a thought finely turned

open like this

for two glorious weeks

and be shimmering blue beauty hanging in memory

this beautiful throat has opened 

and says nothing so quietly it can be heard

it is a bottomless throat

i have heard it called an artichoke

an onion

i have called it other things myself

and now the iris is singing

and i am as silent as it sings 

and can hear petals shiver the air

Names

I want to hear your heart 

so I push my head up under your shirt and listen

the other night after heaving and sobbing

you said

my heart hurts again

I gather up all the innocents in my arms at these times

and now you laugh with your brother over the phone

it washes away all the upset I feel

I am both joy and sorrow wearing your robe

outside the wind cries

the names

carrying them away.

(For Jennifer)

George Saunders' LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, reviewed by Henry Stanton

There are many ugly and beautiful things in Lincoln In the Bardo.  The beauty is unequivocally breathtaking.  The following clip sings (as do many segments) and is more poetry than prose (come to think of it, what IS the difference):

"Though the things of the world were strong with me still. Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; a friendly match-share beneath some collision-tilted streetlight; a frozen clock, bird-visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug; toweling off one’s clinging shirt post–June rain. Pearls, rags, buttons, rug-tuft, beer-froth. Someone’s kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease.”

The structure of the book, short bursts of captivating prose, though not an original form, is artfully contrived.  Characterization is complex and curious and revelatory.  The book is absurd and hysterically funny.  George Saunders is a virtuoso writer.  I love his work.

But the ugly in the book is difficult to consume, is intentionally perverse of course, but is as tough to sustain in review as a Bosch painting.  After a while, it’s just too gross to look through.  (Though maybe I am deceiving myself – I read through the book in one glorious rush).  Perhaps, it’s just too gross to consider the detail in retrospect.  Such revulsion must be typical of confronting hell, and I guess also of The Bardo, though what can we really know of these obscure and anachronistic locations.    People are stuck and the objects that reveal their paralysis are distended and bloated to the point of the grotesque.   Please, I have no interest in seeing your preternaturally engorged penis that is more a growth or a goiter than the alluring staff of life.   Keep it in your pants!  And, that god-awful judgement scene.  Is this Saunders putting on his red conical cap and lighting the reading sinners among us aflame?   Is George indulging in his own prurient auto-da-fe?   Maybe not, maybe its just part of The Reverend Early Thomas’ own Bardo-Kinesis, but I, for one, am really tired of these relentless, tiresome, merciless judgement scenes – exhausted by them.  I have read The Inferno and Portrait of the Artist about 10 times each.  I don’t need to terrify the little boy in me anymore.

I suppose I am being too literal - The Bardo is more of a metaphorical treatment of our own shortcomings and misgivings here on earth.  Really?  Can’t it be about what happens next?  Don’t we all crave some clarity.  Shouldn’t we be allowed a clear glimpse of heaven.  Or maybe just the in-between and the promise it dangles in front of us.  

I confess.  I really want to go to heaven.  And, I want it to be personal.  I want all the good people and pets that I have lived with (and through) to appear in my sacred space with me.  I want to look on the faces of vast mountain ranges; to walk through the pampas in the body of a beautiful girl brushing the heads of grasses with my palms; I want to run away with gazelles and after with cheetah; I want to read poems; to sing; to play an instrument fluently.  Need I go on.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I loved and still love this book.  I have a fluid, intimate rating system that places and replaces reads in my top 10.  It is kind of a Bardo of its own.   Ulysses has stayed there for about 40 years; The Road is in there; and so now is Lincoln In the Bardo.  LIB is about #3 or so.  But, I do abhor the Saunder’s vision of The Bardo.  The notion of planting myself there makes me shiver and convulse.  In contrast, as a counterpoint, I am overwhelmed by the gorgeousness, the purity, the outright truth of the book’s masterful culmination – which is a possession, of Lincoln, and suggests that perhaps interventions of the cathartic and redeeming kind can occur and can guide us or coerce us closer to heaven.  Heaven here on earth.  Heaven on the far side of Bardo.  Whichever.  If Lincoln In the Bardo perpetuates that motion.  Then I am all in.

Author Bio:  George Saunders is the author of eight books, including the story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013 he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and was included in Time’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.