Coming Soon…

Reviews of Hayden Carruth, Brothers, I Loved You All; Donna Gelagotis Lee, On the Altar of Greece; Francine Serle, Every Bird is One Bird; and Elizabeth Oakes, The Luminescence of All Things Emily.

Miracle Fruit – Nezhukumatathil

Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. Miracle Fruit. Dorset VT: Tupelo Press, 2003.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil begins her prize-winning book with an ars poetica of sorts, gathering memory and emotion into a collective legend akin to that bean called “miracle fruit.” In the opening poem, “One Bite” she tells the reader how it will happen: “One bite / and for hours all you eat is sweet.”

This candy coated phenomenon is no myth. Miracle fruit is a small cherry-colored bean from tropical west Africa, that once chewed, deadens the tongue to all flavors except sweet. (For the botanical facts, click here.) In New York and San Francisco, enterprising folks host miracle fruit parties, hawking the brief experience of complete gustatory pleasure. They sell individual fruits to diners who then eat from big bowls of lemon wedges, drink from bottles of vinegar and Tabasco sauce, chew Brussel sprouts and other distasteful food, and all the while, taste candy, taste sweetness.

Right away, the reader is lured into the memories of Nezhukumatathil: the lost traditions of the Filipino mother; the exotic wildness of the Indian father. Right away, the reader is caught in her feast of words, this smorgasboord of two countries; its rolling saints, adored elephants, the Tagalong swear words, the Philipine Hell Pig.

But we don’t mind the coarse images because the words are so sweet. Nezhukumatathil ladens our mental tongues with the miracle fruit of language, that stock of mother tongue, those remnants of the once-single song. The miracle does its cloying job and no phrase is annoying, nothing is distasteful. Even the single ingredients become worthy of her praise: the colophon at the end of a book and notes on fonts, cheese curds and the Peruvian potatoes with elaborate names, the smiling alligator sharing its secret, the longest prime number.

So Miracle Fruit proves its worth. All it needs is purveyor and appetite, “the quick, light stroke / of the artist’s thumb,” and “the amazed staring back at the amazed.”

Manifestoes of Surrealism – Breton

Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Seaver, Richard and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: Univ of Michigan Press, 1972.

When Breton lay claim to a new perception he called surrealist, it was as much a reactive turn as it was eccentric.

The first Manifesto of Surrealism, dated 1924, came a few years after another rebellious shift in poetic principles from that small cadre of Imagistes. The elements of Imagism and Surrealism share only a single similarity, and that is the freedom, and for the Surrealists, the compunction to write about anything. But while the Imagists were concentrating their attention on clear images, Breton and his Surrealists were playing in that twisty tunnel of automatic writing where murky images took precedence. For the Surrealists, the synchronous was the source of that freedom, along with an absolute aversion to all that was established, held sacrosanct, iconic and disciplined.

Breton’s first Manifesto is effusive. His principles and his process become one and only a relaxed and receptive mind – a sort of hypnotic listening – will be able to cull his Surrealist tenets from the mass of lines. But Surrealism accepts contradiction. In this it mimics Emerson’s dicta that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” The inconsistency here is that the Manifesto must also be studied to be understood.

Rereading leads to a few points that underlie the Surrealist hope. “The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself,” a declaration that Breton assigns to the influence of Freud and as a reaction against the “reign of logic.” Breton hails the dream state, calls the waking state an “interference,” and admits that multiple realities exist, each of which is equal to another.

Andre Breton

“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.” This surreality for Breton, is the source of poetic imagination.

The 1924 Manifesto includes Breton’s definition of surrealism (“psychic automatism”), his listing of surrealists in his midst, an example of a surrealist composition (first and last draft) and a surrealist poem made out of headlines. Breton concludes his first Manifesto in an assertive and almost hopeful manner. He verges into the still-uncovered realm of chaos, a derivative of synchronicity, when he states: “Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations.”

Soluble Fish, also dated 1924, is the next component in the surrealist manifestoes, an illustration of automatic and absurd writing, pickled with dialogue and juicy with description and random associations.  I admit that I could not complete Soluble Fish in its entirety, and wonder if it is necessary.

The Second Manifesto of Surrealism, dated 1930, is full of vituperative language and accusations, a strident breakdown in which Breton demeans his accusers and those former comrades whom he denounces as “traitors.” It is difficult to read without context. Even with context, it remains a an angry verbal assault, and a refusal to amend or admit any compromise.

Still, the anger acts as a lightning rod for focus and Breton utters some fascinating and sharp thoughts on that elusive state of mind he named surreal.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point.

Here Breton the Surrealist sounds like Breton the Buddha, transcending all inconsistency in a taoist path toward total unity. And yet, that’s not correct. For Breton encourages a “tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage,…” What he espouses is violent, revolutionary. There is no passive-active receptivity here. Very few people, asserts Breton, “are of a caliber to meet with the Surrealists’ exacting standards,” and those who failed are treated with contempt.

Andre Breton, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky in Mexico

It is this revolutionary flavor that drives the Second Manifesto, in which Breton launches his fiery denunciation of that “most mediocre sort” of mind representing  individuals of the French communist party. These were the men who questioned the acceptability of Surrealist philosophy alongside Marxist doctrine. While purporting to be a manifesto of surrealism, the bulk of the essay is rebuttal and rebuke. In it, Breton personalizes his disappointments – the fallen and failed compatriots of surrealism, the superficial and facile “revolutionaries” of the International.

He also continues to explore Surrealism, a sort of multilevel exposition that joins the alchemists and Freud, that avoids the proleteriat as a market, and that demands the “recreation of a state that can only be fairly compared to that of madness.”

Some of his most engaging ideas are found in the profuse notes at the bottom of the page. For example, Breton admits the surrealist activity of automatic writing is perceived as a parlour game. Nonetheless, the results of these collaborative efforts produce “striking relationships.”  Through the phenomenom that Breton calls pooling,  “remarkable anaolgies appear,” and indeed, he insists that these joint games are the “most extraordinary meeting grounds.”

The Manifestoes of Surrealism contains several other chapters, reproductions of lectures given by Breton, petitions and position papers on surrealism and politics, surrealism and art, traveling through a few decades and coming to a stop with On Surrealism and Its Living Works, dated 1953. But the grist of Breton’s hope and the swath of surrealist principles and denunciations are contained in those first two manifestoes. Those tracts are reactive, reflective, evocative, sort of a raging effort of an individual to define the inelucatable. No wonder inconsistencies and misinterpretations resulted. As a missionary, Breton is passionate. As a messenger, he disdains compassion. One either “gets it” or not.

A Book of Surrealist Games

A Book of Surrealist Games

A Book of Surrealist Games. Comp. Alastair Brotchie. Boston & London: Shambhala, 1995.

The Surrealists upended complacency and boredom, undermined academic strictures and wrenched bourgeois thought process into happy chaos. This little book is crammed full of the games, stratagems and playfulness that was at the center of the original surrealist cadre: Andre Breton, Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Peret and many others.

A Book of Surrealist Games assembles word games, visual techniques and experiments of the original late 1930s, provides directions for playing or compiling, and examples including original texts and plentiful photographs. At the back of the book is a legend, and a final surprise, the Little Surrealist Dictionary: A Game of Re-Definitions.

Next time your coffee club is in a lull, pull out this little book and play away. Warning: it might become addictive. Surrealist vision may replace your own. Your poem-censors may experience discomfort.

Book of My Nights – Lee

Lee, Li-Young. Book of My Nights. Rochester: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2001.

Lee has said that Book of My Nights was written during his insomniac hours, and the results bear the singular reflections of isolated contemplation. The lines have beauty; there are twists, metaphorical jumps, and the persistent image of father, mother, brother.

Yet reflections penned when the moon is out (or not) do not always transfer successfully to the reader. Beautiful lines do not always cohere into sound poems, accessible poetry, readerly sharing. What emerges instead is a tone of obsession and depression. In  ”One Heart,” for example, there’s a weightiness attached to the imagery of birds and flying, an antipodal interpretation that this reader wanted to negate. Lee reverses the logic of speech in multiple poems, injects gnomic questions. Poems become untranslatable dreamscapes, automatic writing, codes without legends. Even so or because of this, the collection has a mesmeric strength: one keeps reading to divine meaning.

Back from the Far Field – Quetchenbach

Quetchenach, Bernard W. Back From the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century. Charlottesville and London: Univ Press of Virginia, 2000.

The author surveys the poetics of five male writers: Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, analyzing their particular perspective on nature as expressed in their poetry and prose. Best read by a reader who is already familiar with each writer’s opus. Quetchenbach reveals similarities and differences among the four, casting all but Jeffers in the Contemporary school, and focusing on the writer’s unique intention and point of view with rare examples of the individual writing.

Quetchenbach’s primary purpose is to qualify each writer with a particular purpose and then substantiate his argument. Bly “speaks on behalf of Romantic traditions of poetry, psychology, and philosophy,” while Snyder “more self consciously identifies with a constituency of wild nature and indigenous peoples,” in a manner labeled “depth ecology.” With Berry, “local memory provides a way in which the relationship between community and land can be regulated and kept healthy and harmonious.”

Quetchenbach’s essay, “From Jeffers to Roethke,” is one of the clearest and most concise explanations of the transition between Modern and Contemporary aesthetics in poetry, and his examination of the two poets is the finest essay of the collection.

This Unnatural History – McVay

McVay, Gwen. This Unnatural History. San Antonio, TX: Pecan Grove Press Chapbook Series, 1997. The several poems in this chapbook work together as a series of observations, colored by spectacular, sparse diction and idiosyncratic characterization. The poems have a flavor of captured moment and the results of free association. To successfully read, one must allow for this momentary grasp of the seen and its author’s own interpretation that follows.

Collected Poems – Roethke

Theodore Roethke

Roethke, Theodore. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. NY: Anchor Books, 1975.

Accentual verse, singsong rhymes, things, images, the abstract, family, flowers, peace. War, devoted love, angst of the day laborer, alliteration, internal rhyme, weeds and moss, manure, childhood memories, ejaculation, exclamation. A quarter-century of Roethke poems carries empathy, compassion, a gritty, loamy love of the minute elements of nature, the “whistle of money,” declarations, oppositions, internal interrogations. These are poems that rush out of the uncensored deep, that find parallels in the strangest places, the stuff of dreams; one, long paean to innocence, one slide away from absurdity.

The Venus Hottentot – Alexander

Alexander, Elizabeth. The Venus Hottentot. First. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

The Venus Hottentot, Elizabeth Alexander's first book.

What is most pronounced about this collection of 29 poems is the collage technique and the reliance on musicality. Music appears as a frame and a device, with odes to blues and jazz greats, written in a truncated rhythm approaching the pattern of these two harmonics. The collage style appears frequently, allowing the poems to encompass an expanse of material. Alexander’s first book is a collage in itself, celebrating the individuality and genius of persons of color, starting with the “Venus Hottentot” and concentrating on visual and musical artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the iconoclastic writer and intellectual, Albert Murray and moving forward to Nelson Mandela. Historical references crowd the book but the poet does include a few first person poems, almost as asides in a quiet voice that claims rare emotional depth.

That Water, Those Rocks – Haake

Haake, Katharine. That Water, Those Rocks. Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press, 2002.

In this refreshing book of vignettes, Haake combines memoir with history of place, the imaginary with the personal remembrance, possibility with actuality. Northern California’s dams act as the conceit to define the “infrastructure” of a culture while also symbolizing what is dammed up (the “knot” of language), what is submerged (towns, natives, generations, wildlife) and what has been forcibly removed (the rape of the land, the rape of a child, memory, speech). Haake’s success is due as much to her lyricism as to the unique manner in which she writes a tale full of meanderings, transitions and final cohesiveness.