Anne Boyer, Money City Sick As Fuck (Materials, 2019)—Not late to the dance, but this chapbook, already in its second printing, made me initially wary of including Boyer in these quick takes on relatively unknown writers, a status that can hardly apply to her (even before her editorship at The New Yorker). In the spirits of the late Sean Bonney and Kent Johnson—and in the ongoing spirits of poets like Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, and Justin Katko—Boyer is uncompromising in her fierce articulations (and denunciations) of compromised progressive culture and politics. Like Johnson, her specific target is the poet enmeshed within the nets of capital (“No one buys poems / but so many ways / to buy poets”). Boyer does not exempt herself from criticism (“My job’s / inflicting / centuries on girls // 4ever throwing up”). Excerpted from a hundred poems written over the course of a “long day in the summer of 2013 which originally appeared as they were being written at moneycitysicktumblr.com,” Money City Sick As Fuck is a series of formally traditional poems (drop-down couplets and tercets) that straddle insurrectionary desperation (“The hero we need is the largest gang ever”) and historical ambivalence, inasmuch as patriarchy remains an apparent constant (“When the avant-garde cleared out / I was allowed / the blunt force / of full-figured virtue / laid out on the bed”). This incendiary call to arms is as infectious (because sincere) as it is doubtlessly necessary, but Boyer also recognizes that those who answer (discounting the enthusiasm of the armchair revolutionary) will likely be those who will not have heard the call.
*
Buck Downs, Greedy Man: Selected Poems (Subpress 2023)—The legendary postcard poet has been around long enough to be wary of the po’ biz and its own miniature studio systems (“…the boy wonder / is a regis / tered trademark”). And as a veteran of so many “scenes,” he also knows that the star-making machinery has not exhausted the possibilities for poetry. Here are the usual nods to warhorses like “The Red Wheelbarrow” (repurposed as “The Red Toyota”) and monuments like Frank O’Hara (“I do this I do that”). Still, inasmuch as “free pleasure / our branded expression” dissolves “like stitches / beneath her kiss,” the fact of living, the fact that Downs is willing to risk mysticism when he invokes psychological imprinting (“…my content / had been happening / to me / since before / I learned to read”), bolsters every urge to utterance even if, perhaps especially because, “…if I never spoke again / I would be speaking to you.” P.S. I also recommend checking out Kyla Houbolt’s Tuned from Subpress.
*
Tinker Greene, Look What Happens (self-published, 2023)—Dedicated to the memory of Greene’s brother (1943-2002), this chapbook, subtitled “chunks of something,” is a reminder (if one needed reminding) that traditional poetic forms that depend on substitution, recapitulation and variation (from the ghazal and palindrome to the sestina and villanelle) are the matrices for many nonce and experimental modes of poetry. “Harvested” (Greene’s word) from his notebooks and the writings of others, Look What Happens is a directive for the reader, a demonstration of the way that the same phrases, no matter how ordinary or surreal, acquire different meanings in different contexts. Thus, under the pressure of method (“We affirm you method”—Greene cites Arthur Rimbaud’s famous declaration), the surreal can become ordinary and vice versa. The analogy, to not only the visual arts (e.g., Van Gogh’s The Starry Night) but also the musical ones, becomes obvious: “a scattering of stars a flurry of marks / notes that together form a chord.”
*
Brenda Iijima & Annie Won, Once When A Building Block (Horse Less Press, 2014)—This conceptual chapbook, featuring scientific charts, formulas, descriptions and histories of the various chemicals that are part of the atmosphere, is another ecopoetics critique. Best read/viewed in conjunction with Iijima’s many other books of ecopoetics (Remembering Animals, Inanimate, Animate, If Metamorphic, etc.) and Won’s so I can sleep (Nous-Zot Press), published by the late Marthe Reed.
*
Douglas Kearney, Sho (Wave Books, 2021)—The title of Kearney’s latest collection of poems is an uncanny omen of Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope. Kearney’s linguistic pyrotechnics and repurposing of rap and gospel lyrics and motifs, to say nothing of the literary (Baraka) and cinematic (Django Unchained) allusions, mirror Peele’s overt allusions to, and repurposing of, almost every classic Hollowood fantasy and sci-fi franchise, from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars. Kearney’s verbal dexterity, like Peele’s cinematic kaleidoscope, though dense (and mind-boggling), remains accessible. In short, Sho is Kearney’s best book thus far. Here, his theatrical tendencies and typographical histrionics, à la Frank Bidart, are laser-focused at the level of the line and word; syntactical reversals (“Crisco shut up in them until we cook it out them, them out it”) and alliterative rhyme (“the ones in blue / show em what you said to do to zeroes in brown”) are just two examples of the strategies he deploys throughout the book. Kearney’s rigorous formalism—he relies primarily on syllabics and assonance to organize and propel his strophes and stanzas—is evident on every page, as is his wit and humor. It’s not always that I laugh aloud when reading poems, but Kearney’s register is broad enough to go seamlessly from bathos to pathos, often within the same poem.
*
Dalia Neis, The Swarm (The Elephants, 2022)—Set within the amorphous region of the Carpathian Mountains, especially in Hungary, prior to the outbreak of the Bosnia War in the 1990s, this memoir/fiction/poetry collection, centered around a film project, reads like a combination or blending of the cultural tensions in Wang Ping’s The Last Communist Virgin, especially “Maverick,” its magical realist conclusion, and the queer cinematic narratives of Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider-Woman. As Neis writes at the beginning of “The Bath Philosophers: Secular Visions,” “If you are looking for childhood reminiscences and familial narratives, you won’t find them here. This is a leap into deep space.” Exploring polymorphous and polyamorous sexual desire and competition, political machinations amid cultural and social upheavals, The Swarm is indeed a leap into the unknown hovering just below—e.g., in the baths—and above—its refusal to separate politics from philosophy—the known.
*
Liliana Ponce, Fudekara, trans. Michael Martin Shea (Cardboard House Press, 2022)—The title is a Japanese neologism (roughly, “from brush”), the author is an Argentine writer and scholar of Japanese literature and writing, and the book, we are told, was written in its entirety during a class in Chinese ideograph calligraphy. As Shea implies in the Translator’s Note, this diaristic chapbook of fourteen poems reflect Ponce’s attempts to write herself out of her native language, out of her culture, and, idealistically, out of herself: “I chase an impossible room, to grant the spoken to another ear, another rule.” Ultimately, these meditative prose poems aspire to the condition of the unthought, a script entirely free of alphabetic and hieroglyphic languages (“I was liberating reason to the feeling of the improper, to the unspoken word.”). Even so, Ponce concedes that “Never will I free myself from these moorings.” As one might imagine, it is, finally, the struggle itself, a dance free of gravity and gravitas, that animates these quiet ruminations on the impossible.
*
Jordan Scott, Dawn (Tinfish, 2012)—Two fold-out sheets of thick paper comprise the two chaplets of Dawn, Scott’s meditations on the naturalization of phenomena (that is, the invention of nature and, concomitantly, culture) via the insertion of “borders,” which, as he notes, can be anything, a slip of the hand holding a pen, or a surgical knife. In alternating sections of paragraphs and stanzas arranged in four columns on each page—like a spreadsheet of words—Scott’s phenomenological investigations lead to the body as the ur-site of the construction of “inside” and “outside,” though he quickly acknowledges the conundrums of double and reversible functions—every inside is also an outside and vice versa. This recognition is formally realized in the fold-out itself, each page a front and back; moreover, each fold-out chaplet is insertable inside the other. Still, each fold-out has a front—with the title—and a back. One of the two chaplets is backed with a quote from Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony”—a description of a bed and canopy—while the other features a chart on “interrogative suggestibility.” Together both reinforce Scott’s insistence on the coercive force of language as a tool for apprehending—like a suspect—and comprehending—like a police detail surrounding a suspect—the world according to nature/culture, body/not-body, divisions. Published over a decade ago, Dawn anticipates Scott’s 2013 collaboration with Stephen Collis, Decomp, and—thematically—Craig Dworkin’s much more sardonic The Pine-Woods Notebook (2019).
*
Jonathan Skinner, Great North Wood (Field Books, 2023)—Skinner, who lives in rural England, distributed this chaplet at the 2023 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment convention in Portland Oregon. In the spirit of Ronald Johnson (the eponymous title poem begins “check / kek / chick-chick-chick-chick”), this anti-Wordsworthian pastoral (“signatures at dawn / offer no human key / to mutual survival…”) is a snapshot of Skinner’s ongoing exploration of the intrinsic tension, if not contradiction, in human attempts to comprehend the natural environment. For while “the woods are vocal / with no single refrain,” Skinner still avers that we hear “one story repeated.”
*
Ardengo Soffici, Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms, intro. Marjorie Perloff, trans. Olivia E. Sears (World Poetry Books, 2022)—Soffici’s significance lies less in his own Tuscan/Florentine-inflected experimentations in Symbolist-cum-Futurist poetry than in his role as a cosmopolitan docent who introduced French avant-garde writing and painting to a generation of disaffected Italian artists hungry for cultural (and national) rejuvenation. Soffici’s biography is fascinating, if all too familiar (from Catholic aesthetic innovator to traditional aesthete and Fascist), but this English translation of Soffici’s early book of proto-Futurist poems (his magazine, Lacerba, published Futurist texts despite his relentless criticism of Marinetti’s Futurist program) offers a glimpse into the varied and contradictory impulses propelling the painter and poet. As Olivia Sears points out, Soffici first published the more aesthetically adventuresome Lyric Chemisms before Simultaneities but, perhaps in order to portray his development along culturally “progressive” lines, reversed the order in subsequent editions of the book. Thus, in this edition, we move from the expressive, Apollinaire-like surrealism of Simultaneities to the Futurist abandonment of normative grammar, syntax and typography in Lyric Chemisms. The titles tell their respective stories: simultaneity is Soffici’s attempt to reproduce and yoke together the aesthetic strategies underpinning French Symbolist writing and Cubist painting; in like manner, yoking together lyric and chemistry signals Soffici’s refusal to completely abandon the past for the new demanded by the Futurists. Sears notes that after the war, in which he participated, Soffici, like so many veterans of the avant-garde, became disillusioned with modernity, joining the Fascists (if only half-heartedly) and, acting as his own Thomas Hutchinson per Emily Dickinson, bowdlerized his experimental poetry, inserting punctuation, imposing stanzaic forms, and reducing typographical images to mere illustrations. Thanks to Sears and World Poetry Books, we now have a reproduction of an edition of the manuscript in English. However their different aesthetic lineages, Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms both celebrate the new, the modern, the machine, but Soffici is never able to completely eradicate that traditional vehicle of lyric expression, the person. Even in a typical Futurist poem like “Airplane” where the lines “I grip the joystick with a fist of air / Press the throttle with a shoe of sky / Frrrrrr frrrrrr frrrrrr I drown in ultramarine” seems to herald Baraka’s airplane growls during his reading of “Black Art,” Soffici, looking back, notes that “I navigate the whole of my homeland and try to forget / the body that’s always with us.” And while poems like “Dawn Train” and “Typography” from Lyric Chemisms show Soffici at his most Futuristic, his criticism of Futurism (he once called it an import of “American charlatanism”) was probably based more on aesthetic—rather than political or cultural—grounds. Yet, because Futurism was the first avant-garde movement of the 20th century, and one that seemed to catapult Italy to the forefront of the new age, Soffici felt compelled to support it, however briefly (his alliance of convenience with Marinetti lasted a little over a year). Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms is a record of that fragile alliance and its inevitable dissolution.
*
Aaren Yandrich, Except Me, On Which Seldom I Am Gazing (Slack Buddha Press, 2008)—The lyric sincerity of this chapbook written during wartime (but when is it not wartime?) is freshened by Yandrich’s whimsey. The “erratum” note reads, “Line two of ‘A Bid Here’ reads: / “except me, on whom seldom I am gazing. I give”/ It should read: “except me, on whom seldom I am gazing. I give.” Of course, the joke is the “incorrect” relative pronoun “which” in the title stands uncorrected while the correct use of “whom” is part of the erratum. I suppose the humor extends to the three poems titled "A Head and Like,” or “Two Poems For Films Of The Same Titles.” Or maybe not.
Tyrone Williams is the David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018), washpark (with Pat Clifford) (Delete Press, 2021) and stilettos in a rifle range (Wayne State University Press, 2022). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving have edited an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). His website is https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/
*
Buck Downs, Greedy Man: Selected Poems (Subpress 2023)—The legendary postcard poet has been around long enough to be wary of the po’ biz and its own miniature studio systems (“…the boy wonder / is a regis / tered trademark”). And as a veteran of so many “scenes,” he also knows that the star-making machinery has not exhausted the possibilities for poetry. Here are the usual nods to warhorses like “The Red Wheelbarrow” (repurposed as “The Red Toyota”) and monuments like Frank O’Hara (“I do this I do that”). Still, inasmuch as “free pleasure / our branded expression” dissolves “like stitches / beneath her kiss,” the fact of living, the fact that Downs is willing to risk mysticism when he invokes psychological imprinting (“…my content / had been happening / to me / since before / I learned to read”), bolsters every urge to utterance even if, perhaps especially because, “…if I never spoke again / I would be speaking to you.” P.S. I also recommend checking out Kyla Houbolt’s Tuned from Subpress.
*
Tinker Greene, Look What Happens (self-published, 2023)—Dedicated to the memory of Greene’s brother (1943-2002), this chapbook, subtitled “chunks of something,” is a reminder (if one needed reminding) that traditional poetic forms that depend on substitution, recapitulation and variation (from the ghazal and palindrome to the sestina and villanelle) are the matrices for many nonce and experimental modes of poetry. “Harvested” (Greene’s word) from his notebooks and the writings of others, Look What Happens is a directive for the reader, a demonstration of the way that the same phrases, no matter how ordinary or surreal, acquire different meanings in different contexts. Thus, under the pressure of method (“We affirm you method”—Greene cites Arthur Rimbaud’s famous declaration), the surreal can become ordinary and vice versa. The analogy, to not only the visual arts (e.g., Van Gogh’s The Starry Night) but also the musical ones, becomes obvious: “a scattering of stars a flurry of marks / notes that together form a chord.”
*
Brenda Iijima & Annie Won, Once When A Building Block (Horse Less Press, 2014)—This conceptual chapbook, featuring scientific charts, formulas, descriptions and histories of the various chemicals that are part of the atmosphere, is another ecopoetics critique. Best read/viewed in conjunction with Iijima’s many other books of ecopoetics (Remembering Animals, Inanimate, Animate, If Metamorphic, etc.) and Won’s so I can sleep (Nous-Zot Press), published by the late Marthe Reed.
*
Douglas Kearney, Sho (Wave Books, 2021)—The title of Kearney’s latest collection of poems is an uncanny omen of Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope. Kearney’s linguistic pyrotechnics and repurposing of rap and gospel lyrics and motifs, to say nothing of the literary (Baraka) and cinematic (Django Unchained) allusions, mirror Peele’s overt allusions to, and repurposing of, almost every classic Hollowood fantasy and sci-fi franchise, from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars. Kearney’s verbal dexterity, like Peele’s cinematic kaleidoscope, though dense (and mind-boggling), remains accessible. In short, Sho is Kearney’s best book thus far. Here, his theatrical tendencies and typographical histrionics, à la Frank Bidart, are laser-focused at the level of the line and word; syntactical reversals (“Crisco shut up in them until we cook it out them, them out it”) and alliterative rhyme (“the ones in blue / show em what you said to do to zeroes in brown”) are just two examples of the strategies he deploys throughout the book. Kearney’s rigorous formalism—he relies primarily on syllabics and assonance to organize and propel his strophes and stanzas—is evident on every page, as is his wit and humor. It’s not always that I laugh aloud when reading poems, but Kearney’s register is broad enough to go seamlessly from bathos to pathos, often within the same poem.
*
Dalia Neis, The Swarm (The Elephants, 2022)—Set within the amorphous region of the Carpathian Mountains, especially in Hungary, prior to the outbreak of the Bosnia War in the 1990s, this memoir/fiction/poetry collection, centered around a film project, reads like a combination or blending of the cultural tensions in Wang Ping’s The Last Communist Virgin, especially “Maverick,” its magical realist conclusion, and the queer cinematic narratives of Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider-Woman. As Neis writes at the beginning of “The Bath Philosophers: Secular Visions,” “If you are looking for childhood reminiscences and familial narratives, you won’t find them here. This is a leap into deep space.” Exploring polymorphous and polyamorous sexual desire and competition, political machinations amid cultural and social upheavals, The Swarm is indeed a leap into the unknown hovering just below—e.g., in the baths—and above—its refusal to separate politics from philosophy—the known.
*
Liliana Ponce, Fudekara, trans. Michael Martin Shea (Cardboard House Press, 2022)—The title is a Japanese neologism (roughly, “from brush”), the author is an Argentine writer and scholar of Japanese literature and writing, and the book, we are told, was written in its entirety during a class in Chinese ideograph calligraphy. As Shea implies in the Translator’s Note, this diaristic chapbook of fourteen poems reflect Ponce’s attempts to write herself out of her native language, out of her culture, and, idealistically, out of herself: “I chase an impossible room, to grant the spoken to another ear, another rule.” Ultimately, these meditative prose poems aspire to the condition of the unthought, a script entirely free of alphabetic and hieroglyphic languages (“I was liberating reason to the feeling of the improper, to the unspoken word.”). Even so, Ponce concedes that “Never will I free myself from these moorings.” As one might imagine, it is, finally, the struggle itself, a dance free of gravity and gravitas, that animates these quiet ruminations on the impossible.
*
Jordan Scott, Dawn (Tinfish, 2012)—Two fold-out sheets of thick paper comprise the two chaplets of Dawn, Scott’s meditations on the naturalization of phenomena (that is, the invention of nature and, concomitantly, culture) via the insertion of “borders,” which, as he notes, can be anything, a slip of the hand holding a pen, or a surgical knife. In alternating sections of paragraphs and stanzas arranged in four columns on each page—like a spreadsheet of words—Scott’s phenomenological investigations lead to the body as the ur-site of the construction of “inside” and “outside,” though he quickly acknowledges the conundrums of double and reversible functions—every inside is also an outside and vice versa. This recognition is formally realized in the fold-out itself, each page a front and back; moreover, each fold-out chaplet is insertable inside the other. Still, each fold-out has a front—with the title—and a back. One of the two chaplets is backed with a quote from Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony”—a description of a bed and canopy—while the other features a chart on “interrogative suggestibility.” Together both reinforce Scott’s insistence on the coercive force of language as a tool for apprehending—like a suspect—and comprehending—like a police detail surrounding a suspect—the world according to nature/culture, body/not-body, divisions. Published over a decade ago, Dawn anticipates Scott’s 2013 collaboration with Stephen Collis, Decomp, and—thematically—Craig Dworkin’s much more sardonic The Pine-Woods Notebook (2019).
*
Jonathan Skinner, Great North Wood (Field Books, 2023)—Skinner, who lives in rural England, distributed this chaplet at the 2023 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment convention in Portland Oregon. In the spirit of Ronald Johnson (the eponymous title poem begins “check / kek / chick-chick-chick-chick”), this anti-Wordsworthian pastoral (“signatures at dawn / offer no human key / to mutual survival…”) is a snapshot of Skinner’s ongoing exploration of the intrinsic tension, if not contradiction, in human attempts to comprehend the natural environment. For while “the woods are vocal / with no single refrain,” Skinner still avers that we hear “one story repeated.”
*
Ardengo Soffici, Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms, intro. Marjorie Perloff, trans. Olivia E. Sears (World Poetry Books, 2022)—Soffici’s significance lies less in his own Tuscan/Florentine-inflected experimentations in Symbolist-cum-Futurist poetry than in his role as a cosmopolitan docent who introduced French avant-garde writing and painting to a generation of disaffected Italian artists hungry for cultural (and national) rejuvenation. Soffici’s biography is fascinating, if all too familiar (from Catholic aesthetic innovator to traditional aesthete and Fascist), but this English translation of Soffici’s early book of proto-Futurist poems (his magazine, Lacerba, published Futurist texts despite his relentless criticism of Marinetti’s Futurist program) offers a glimpse into the varied and contradictory impulses propelling the painter and poet. As Olivia Sears points out, Soffici first published the more aesthetically adventuresome Lyric Chemisms before Simultaneities but, perhaps in order to portray his development along culturally “progressive” lines, reversed the order in subsequent editions of the book. Thus, in this edition, we move from the expressive, Apollinaire-like surrealism of Simultaneities to the Futurist abandonment of normative grammar, syntax and typography in Lyric Chemisms. The titles tell their respective stories: simultaneity is Soffici’s attempt to reproduce and yoke together the aesthetic strategies underpinning French Symbolist writing and Cubist painting; in like manner, yoking together lyric and chemistry signals Soffici’s refusal to completely abandon the past for the new demanded by the Futurists. Sears notes that after the war, in which he participated, Soffici, like so many veterans of the avant-garde, became disillusioned with modernity, joining the Fascists (if only half-heartedly) and, acting as his own Thomas Hutchinson per Emily Dickinson, bowdlerized his experimental poetry, inserting punctuation, imposing stanzaic forms, and reducing typographical images to mere illustrations. Thanks to Sears and World Poetry Books, we now have a reproduction of an edition of the manuscript in English. However their different aesthetic lineages, Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms both celebrate the new, the modern, the machine, but Soffici is never able to completely eradicate that traditional vehicle of lyric expression, the person. Even in a typical Futurist poem like “Airplane” where the lines “I grip the joystick with a fist of air / Press the throttle with a shoe of sky / Frrrrrr frrrrrr frrrrrr I drown in ultramarine” seems to herald Baraka’s airplane growls during his reading of “Black Art,” Soffici, looking back, notes that “I navigate the whole of my homeland and try to forget / the body that’s always with us.” And while poems like “Dawn Train” and “Typography” from Lyric Chemisms show Soffici at his most Futuristic, his criticism of Futurism (he once called it an import of “American charlatanism”) was probably based more on aesthetic—rather than political or cultural—grounds. Yet, because Futurism was the first avant-garde movement of the 20th century, and one that seemed to catapult Italy to the forefront of the new age, Soffici felt compelled to support it, however briefly (his alliance of convenience with Marinetti lasted a little over a year). Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms is a record of that fragile alliance and its inevitable dissolution.
*
Aaren Yandrich, Except Me, On Which Seldom I Am Gazing (Slack Buddha Press, 2008)—The lyric sincerity of this chapbook written during wartime (but when is it not wartime?) is freshened by Yandrich’s whimsey. The “erratum” note reads, “Line two of ‘A Bid Here’ reads: / “except me, on whom seldom I am gazing. I give”/ It should read: “except me, on whom seldom I am gazing. I give.” Of course, the joke is the “incorrect” relative pronoun “which” in the title stands uncorrected while the correct use of “whom” is part of the erratum. I suppose the humor extends to the three poems titled "A Head and Like,” or “Two Poems For Films Of The Same Titles.” Or maybe not.
Tyrone Williams is the David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018), washpark (with Pat Clifford) (Delete Press, 2021) and stilettos in a rifle range (Wayne State University Press, 2022). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving have edited an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). His website is https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/