LITTLE REVIEWS of a few books of poetry published 1998-2002 Brian Kim Stefans Introduction The “little reviews” that I have been posting to various listservs over the past three years have usually been first drafts -- or rather, “long” drafts -- of anonymous reviews that I wrote for pay for print publications. Usually, an editor would require that I write a 250-350 word review and I would hand in something much longer -- a burden on the editors, of course, and so I owe a great debt to them for permitting me to continue this practice, and also for permission to “republish” the reviews on my web site. My aims are fairly modest: to provide a readable introduction to new books of poetry that are most likely not going to get much attention elsewhere (these are usually “experimental” works but occasionally not), to offer an opinion here or there as to their quality as writing, and to create a sense of a “living culture” for these books to exist in -- all aims that make this type of writing much closer to journalism than anything that could be mistaken for theory, or even “Criticism” with a capital c. (My more ambitious, if occasionally more turgid, critical writing can be found on the misc. writing link above.) I’ve written, at this point, about 120 of these reviews, but many of them won’t appear on the site as I don’t think they’re worth revising, or the books that they dealt with don’t interest me any more. However, I plan to include little reviews which were never rough drafts for print publications and are exclusive to this site. The first one of these, of the book poetics@, a collection of writings from the Buffalo Poetics Listserv, appears below. These new reviews might be more considered, a little longer, than the little reviews written for other publica- tions (but they’re still “little”). If I possessed a sense of responsibility equivalent to the scope of the project that I am pre- tending to embark on here, I would go back and reread every book I’ve reviewed before posting the review to this site, but I don’t want to do that. I’ve looked over several of these again, sometimes with great pleasure, and have made little adjustments here or there, but for the sake of getting some sort of word out on these books, of contributing (I hope) to a cli- mate of useful opinion (i.e. the kind that might get us more interested in the “world” of po- etry and not frustrated with its oft-noted insularity), I’m going to be a bit of slacker and just shovel them into HTML and ftp away. I hope other people do this kind of thing as well (you can read a similar venture by Steve Evans, called the “Notes to Poetry,” in the e-books section of this site). I never thought it was necessary to be shy on the internet -- if the internet can do anything for “poetry” it might be to provide a place where people could take productive stands on issues relating to aesthetics without being entirely ignored. Sometimes, it seems people struggle very hard to be ignored on the internet -- writing meanly, too much, too irreverently, etc. -- so that one simply has no choice but to delete. But seeing as one is bound to have at least some audience -- one teenager in Canada, two lady cabdrivers in Adelaide, an entire freshman seminar at U Penn, the “future” should we decide to have one, etc. -- one might as well try to write well. I’ll save the grander theoretical gestures to myself. Most of these books have been published since 1998, so this is the output of a short time in history. Maybe seeing them sitting in the same family photograph might present a unique, enlightening, perhaps unsettling, new view of what’s happening in poetry today. Or maybe not. Whatever the case, the “little reviews” arras.net12/23/03 2 should dramatically increase traffic to my site, which the web geek side of me likes very much. -- BKS 7/19/02 Note: The reviews and introduction above are from a discontinued section of arras.net which I’ve decided to take down and fold into a single .pdf file. I’ve taken out all of the linebreaks in the poetry quoted, replacing them with a “/” (including a “//” for double- spaces) and have returned the reviews to their original single-paragraph format. 12/23/03 arras.net12/23/03 3 The Pretext Rae Armantrout Green Integer, 2001 1-892295-3 Armantrout is one of the quieter, more reliable writers associated with “language” writing, and is usually considered the “lyrical” one in a group often associated with longer, process- oriented works (“new sentence” writing or the works of Hejinian) or, when writing “lyrics,” with a subversion of the genre (Bernstein, Perelman, Howe). Her 1998 autobiographical work, True, demonstrated that she could write a compelling, if not virtuostic, prose, and that her greatest strength as a writer is not stylistic pyrotechnics, grandiose theoretical syntheses, or encyclopedic references but – like William Carlos Williams, to whom she owes a debt in the curious torquing of her sentences – an original and quirky turn of mind. As her brief introduction to The Pretext suggests, Armantrout likes to work by juxtaposition – “[The poem’s] interesting to the extent that the divisions and fitting together arise spontaneously, without pretext” – and the best poems in this collection are resonant coincidings of short bursts of insight, chance meetings that disclose the meanings inherent in all situations as they exist beyond the deceptive assurances of everyday reason: “I miss circumstance / already – / the way a single word / could mean / necessary, relative, / provisional / and a bird flies past / leaving / the sense that one / has waved one’s hand.” [69] The careful slowness of her lineation – which rarely rises above the tone of a nearly bureaucratic stating of facts despite the often deft use of off-rhyme – recalls George Oppen, and some of the pregnant silences of this work are not necessarily aimed at metaphysical revelry (as in, say, Louise Gluck or writers of the “ellipticist” tendency) but toward an ethical dimension to being: “How do I look? / meaning what / could I pass for / when every eye’s / a guard” [58] she writes in “My Associates,” and later: “Time’s tic: / to pitch forward / then catch ‘itself’ / again. // ‘We’re’ bombing Iraq again. // If I turn on the news, / someone will say, ‘We / mean busi- ness.’” [67] She describes exquisitely the elusive interactions of time and thought, suggesting a quasi-Buddhist code of behavior: “Still / one should be patient / with the present / as if with a child. // To follow its prattle – / glitter on water – / indulgently / is only polite.” [25] Armantrout’s idiom, and her philosophical predisposition, is one of nearly monkish spare- ness – if she were more despairing and hysterical, she could be a character in one of Beckett’s novels – and sometimes her writing seems to be about the huge distance she feels from her own perceptions – her surroundings, her thoughts of what to do next – a distance that may be tied to her sense of herself as a middle-class, more-or-less comfortable Califor- nian: “In my country / facts are dead children. // When I say ‘dissociation,’ / I may have said ‘real-time action.’ [...] // Words / can be repeated. // The Distractible Sparrow, / The Smallest District. / The Strictest Definition. // Astronomers know / a signal’s / not an an- swer.” [88] But for all of that, there is a recognizable human at the center of these poems, one who often comes through with an understated humor, “swinging his arms high / like a drum major, / ghost-of-a-prayer / kind of thing.” [57] Fans of Armantrout’s work might be disappointed that this sequence is not more allusive, more grandiose, something to point to as the pinnacle of a reasonably long writing career, but it’s clear that her dedication to poetry does not lie in an ego-bedazzled goal to create dramatic gestures across the literary horizon, but rather the desire to get it right in writing – “Identity is a form / of prayer.” [58] – even if in modest bursts. arras.net12/23/03 4 As Umbrellas Follow Rain John Ashbery Qua Books, 2002 0-9708763-0-0 “Red Skelton asked me if I had a book coming out. He seemed drowned / in lists of trivia and itching-powder dreams – / you know, the kind that make you wake up / and then sort of fall back asleep again. / His brother was cleaning up after the elephants” [...] [34] While unambitious for the Nobel-shortlisted author of the pomo answer to The Prelude, each of these 30 short lyrics displays the quite, attentive mastery that has become Ashbery’s trade- mark since his collection April Galleons, when he seemed to put away his avant-garde party suit permanently and adopted the “French zen” persona he credited his old friend, Frank O’Hara, for founding. One poem has him ruminating nostalgically on the now-extinct “pan- cake clock” – “It had tiny Roman numerals embedded in its rim” – while another, “Random Jottings of an Old Man,” starts as a Suess-like spectacle of evicting an unwanted poetry- jotting houseguest who could or could not be the author himself and evolves into a wistful, Proustian revelry of sounds and senses: “The pianola never recovered from the loss.” [8] “Runway,” the poem quoted above, is one of the more slapstick of the book, but ends on a note that effectively mingles the ancient metaphor of the sea voyage with some Dada non- sequiturs that, if anything, make you feel a little more comfortable in your own two-sizes off skin: “Soon we were leaving home /forever, to be pitched about on storm-tossed seas, / fla- grant to be back amid multiple directions.