{"id":70150,"date":"2021-04-13T01:07:18","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T05:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=70150"},"modified":"2021-04-13T23:19:30","modified_gmt":"2021-04-14T03:19:30","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2021\/04\/13\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-16\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Poetry Month, Tom Bowden has provided a collection of reviews from recent small press poetry books. As usual, the titles are linked to our affiliate pages on Bookshop.org — please feel free to contact Book Beat<\/a> where these books are either in stock now or can be ordered directly. <\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Ellis Island<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Georges Perec (Harry Mathews, trans.)
\nNew Directions
\nAbout three-quarters through Perec\u2019s graceful and intriguing poetic essay on Ellis Island, I started asking myself, \u201cWhat\u2019s Ellis Island to Perec?\u201d He never emigrated to the U.S. as had so many other Europeans, including Frenchmen like himself.<\/p>\n

Ellis Island is the script to a documentary Perec wrote in 1978 in collaboration with director Robert Bobo (whose own great-grandfather, with trachoma, was turned back at Ellis Island), filmed long before the buildings and grounds of the island had been restored as a National Park tour site, and long after they had been scavenged for scrap metal.<\/p>\n

Perec was a great one for lists, and they are here: the questions asked of emigrants during the 25 years the island served as the gateway to the continent; the tests and observations emigrants had to pass; the number rejected from America, and the number who committed suicide on the island; the seats, desks, and walls used; and so forth.<\/p>\n

Of course, in trying to sus out Perec\u2019s relationship to Ellis Island, I was looking at him the wrong way, as a Frenchman, not as a Jew, whose parents\u2014not mentioned by Perec (father killed by a German, mother dead in Auschwitz)\u2014orphaned him by age 9. \u201cTo me Ellis Island . . . \/ . . . in my mind is linked \/ in a most confused and intimate way \/ with the fact of being a Jew.\u201d<\/p>\n

like near and distant cousins of mine
\nI might have been born
\nin Haifa, Baltimore or Vancouver
\nI might have been Argentinean, Australian, English or
\nSwedish,
\nbut in the almost unlimited range of
\npossibilities,
\nI could not be born in the country of my ancestors,
\nin Lubartow or Warsaw,
\nor grow up there, in the continuity of tradition,
\nlanguage, and community.
\nThose who could not be born elsewhere often came here instead.
\nM\u00f3nica de la Torre\u2019s afterward provides excellent context for this essay within the history of U.S. immigration policies, up to the present day.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Voices & Other Poems<\/strong><\/a>
\nBy Rainer Maria Rilke (Kristofor Minta, trans.)
\nSublunary Editions
\nA selection of Rilke\u2019s poems by translator Kristofor Minta, those that \u201cseem[ ] to care less about managing our perception than [they do] about piercing to the heart of things.\u201d Poems, in other words, about the down-and-out, such as these lines from \u201cThe Song of the Widow\u201d:<\/p>\n

Fate wants back not only the happiness,
\nit wants the howls and the anguish,
\nthen picks up the ruins for cheap.<\/p>\n

Fate was there, and for next to nothing,
\ngot every expression on my face,
\ndown to the mood.
\nIt was a daily selloff
\nand when I was empty, it gave me up
\nand left me standing open.<\/p>\n

Mintas translations are lissome; the themes and descriptions sound as if Rilke were writing just yesterday.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Geometry of Shadows<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Giorgio de Chirico (Stefania Heim, trans.)
\nA Public Space Books
\nCollecting all the poetry de Chirico wrote in Italian, this bi-lingual edition shows his ability to also say in words what he shows in paintings, with equal sense of odd precision and aptness. In \u201cEpode\u201d he writes,
\nOne day I too will be a man of marble
\nWidowed husband on the Etruscan sarcophagus.
\nThat day, maternal cities, squeeze me
\nIn your great embrace
\nOf stone.<\/p>\n

I suppose some of these pieces could be read as ekphrastic poems for paintings that don\u2019t exist: That is, they often read the way di Chrico painted; they can be imagined through the lens of his paintings\u2019 vocabulary. Here is the entirety of \u201cSunday\u201d:<\/p>\n

It is Sunday, it is morning, it is winter.
\nYesterday I finished my painting.
\nBut the heart is very sad.
\nI see people going to church.
\nSomeone has gone to hunt,
\nsomeone to fish, but the rain
\nfalls, soft soft, and sweetly
\nmurmurs that all is vain.<\/p>\n

I think this passage exemplifies the general quality of Stefania Heim\u2019s translation. She\u2019s also written a brief introductory essay on the place of di Chirico\u2019s Italian poetry among his works.<\/p>\n

“With a word, de Chirico made languages collide . . . In translation, I have tried to honor these textures, to stay hovering just a bit between… Metaphor, juxtaposition, unsettling connections, meaning evoked in the missing connective tissue between somehow familiar objects\u2014these are a poet\u2019s tools. De Chirico cultivated this association. He addresses the two \u201cgoddesses:\u201d \u201ctrue Poetry\u201d and \u201ctrue Painting.\u201d With allusion, symbols, and mythmaking, he connects his work to the great striving of the ages.” –Stefania Heim from her revised online introduction to de Chirico’s poetry, in ASYMPTOTE<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

LEFT: GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, THE SOOTHSAYER\u2019S RECOMPENSE, 1913 RIGHT: DE CHERICO IN 1936, PHOTOGRAPHED BY CARL VAN VECHTEN<\/p><\/div>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Acrobat<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Nandana Dev Sen, trans.)
\nArchipelago Books<\/p>\n

Poetry on the experiences of womanhood over a lifetime; more specifically, as a Bengali-speaking woman in India. Sen, who lived from 1938-2019, was an award-winning writer whose works ranged from academic essays to books for children.<\/p>\n

Her poetry too shows a wide range of capability\u2014from angry renunciation of womanhood to erotic prelude\u2014on facing pages! In \u201cRenunciation\u201d we hear<\/p>\n

Mother, take back my dreams, my memories. . .
\nEverything you gave me, take it all.
\nA mother\u2019s love, the fondness of a friend,
\nVictory, wonder.
\nI\u2019ll unwrap my pouch and easily throw away
\nThe blood-soaked placenta. . .<\/p>\n

Then, only a few lines later on the next page in \u201cGreen Salad for My Husband,\u201d we\u2019re told<\/p>\n

I have a shock of green ideas upon my head
\nEver so green
\nEver so raw
\nUnwashed
\nGarden-fresh
\nWith pesticides seeping through<\/p>\n

A fine salad for my gourmet husband.<\/p>\n

And the middle view is represented, too, in \u201cPuppet\u201d:<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t decide, was it a mistake? Or is it better this way?
\nTwice now, pretending to be a goddess,
\nI\u2019ve created humans out of my desire.
\nFunnily, though, that\u2019s where the fake goddess act ends.
\nAfter that, you revert to being a woman, as before. . .<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Exhausted on the Cross<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Najwan Darwish (Kareem James abu-Zeid, trans.)
\nNYRB Poets<\/p>\n

In the morning, I\u2019ll go down to the square
\nand sit among you
\nand wait.
\nHave I ever been,
\nmy whole life
\nanything but a worker, waiting?
\nI\u2019m Egyptian, too.
\nI look out of this pit and see my grandmother Cleopatra
\nhanding Africa over
\nto Mark Antony. . .
\nThen I go back staring at the mud.
\nI\u2019m Egyptian, too.
\n\u2014from \u201cA Worker, Waiting (to the Egyptian day laborers in Jordan)\u201d<\/p>\n

A Palestinian born in Jerusalem in 1978, Darwish\u2019s poems describe Pan-Arab experiences in terms of both their shared humanity with the rest of the world and as specifically Arab experiences\u2014the twists that make the experiences uniquely theirs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were born into exile,\u201d he writes in \u201cTo Lament a Mountain,\u201d \u201cbut we still think we\u2019re mountains\u2014 \/ mountains unmoved by the wind.\u201d And those unmoved mountains are fond of recalling the voice of Warda, an Algerian-born singer of Egyptian songs:<\/p>\n

Her voice has the look of a man condemned,
\nwho walks to the gallows willingly
\nbut is not hanged.
\nInstead they tell him, \u201cGo now.
\nYour punishment is love.\u201d
\n\u2014from \u201cImagine Someone\u201d<\/p>\n

Imagine those melodies as poems.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>God Is a Bitch Too<\/strong><\/a>
\nBy Mar\u00eda Paz Guerrero (Camilo Rold\u00e1n, trans.)
\nUgly Duckling Press \/ Se\u00f1al #13<\/p>\n

god eats ham
\nand it\u2019s going to give him cancer
\ngod likes sausage
\nhe\u2019s addicted to buttery pastries
\n. . .
\ngod is 53 years old
\nwrinkled
\ngod is menopausal
\nis outraged
\nhates his bloated body
\ngod is now a broad-backed fridge
\ngod has lost his curves
\ngod is temporal and tie attacks his figure god goes out dancing
\nwith his new body
\nand his faded face
\ntakes a seat at a table in the salsa club
\nbecause god is also<\/p>\n

Latin American<\/p>\n

An exploration of cultural un-confidence by a Columbian poet. Like Walt Whitman, Mar\u00eda Paz Guerrero\u2019s god contains multitudes; yet, whereas Whitman\u2019s multitudes indicate plenitude, Paz Guerrero\u2019s indicate lack: \u201cwe have one axis two axes lack and guilt.\u201d The poem describes a plentitude of lack but leaves the guilt implied, a guilt which amounts to uncertainty whether the cultural limitations of one\u2019s nation\u2014limitations imposed by personal economy and national proximity to the world stage\u2014allow the aspiring third-world intellectual claim peer-status with the \u201creally prodigious kids\u201d who \u201cspeak three languages and study double majors.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most significant lacks concern of cultural historical knowledge and the ability to measure up to one\u2019s peers in the United States, for fear of being seen as hopelessly na\u00efve and unschooled. (An unfortunate fear, given that Paz Guerrero was educated at the New Sorbonne University in Paris and now serves as a professor of creative writing at Universidad Central in Bogot\u00e1. Of course, achievement does not necessarily equal confidence.<\/p>\n

god lives at near material poverty-level but regularly buys books out of a felt duty to a world-wide community of writers who communicate with each other across geographic and chronological distances, a god, who, on the margins of this universe, elbows her way in.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Spring Cleaning<\/strong>
\nBy Marshall Bood
\nUgly Duckling Presse<\/a>
\nA chapbook of five poems, the longest (\u201cNeighbourhood Cleanup\u201d) taking up 21 of the book\u2019s 29 pages, Spring Cleaning is immersed in the lives of the impoverished, unmedicated and addicted:<\/p>\n

two teenagers smoking
\non the stoop
\nof the house declared
\nUnsanitary and Unfit
\nfor Occupation . . .<\/p>\n

a one-armed homeless man
\nholds dirty jeans up
\nstyrofoam cup clenched
\nin his mouth
\nwaiting<\/p>\n

everyone drawn
\nto the lights
\nof 7-11 . . .
\nmoths or near-
\ndeath experiences<\/p>\n

The title poem offers the one suggestion found in the book of hope and the need for self-respect\u2014a tough love of the self. Prefacing the following poems reflecting on loss, it begins, \u201cStraightened the books \/ Dreams pushed aside again \/ No-one to discipline me; \/ I discipline myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The Matrix\u2014Poems: 1960-1970<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy N. H. Pritchard
\nPrimary Information \/ Ugly Duckling Presse<\/p>\n

Originally published by Doubleday in 1970, The Matrix quickly slipped away from attention despite its visual and linguistic vangardism that remains as relevant and challenging today. Mixing the elements of concrete poetry with the mantra to \u201cmake it new,\u201d Pritchard\u2019s often poetry forces readers to slow down to re-create and re-enact the act of imposing meaning on imagination:<\/p>\n

enco ache d di stance
\nstr etches o ftim e
\nu nre ad able
\nf ort hem isten velop es
\nwh ere
\nb eeps b eat
\ndark
\nemer gence
\nofg host lyfi gure
\ninhe avy c oat edol d
\nk n ow in g
\nnot hing<\/p>\n

Pritchard forces the reader to consider the material of poetry\u2014the words and paper it\u2019s on, the negative and positive spaces\u2014in conjunction with the semantics of word and vision and how we understand taking apart and reassembling human sensual and intellectual affirmation.<\/p>\n