Dorothea Lasky’s Awe

by Tim Lockridge

 Dorothea Lasky’s Awe is a beautiful work, both in presentation (I have yet to see something published by Wave that doesn’t feel and look great) and content. Still, this is a book that had to win me over: For every great poem title in here (“Whatever You Paid For That Sweater, It Was Worth It,” “The Mouth Of The Universe Is Screaming Now In Agony,” and, my personal favorite, “After The Apocalypse There Is Only The Apocalypse”) there are a number of titles that leave me feeling entirely too ambivalent (“Monsters,” “Love Poem,” “Your Heart,” “The Journey,” “The Lonely River”… I could go on). I’m a title guy, and, in terms of my expectations, a poem titled “Poem For My Best Friend” will have to work much harder than, say, “The Fire That Burns The Bird.”

And while these thoughts on titles initially read like an aside, they actually speak to a core component of Awe and what might be its greatest strength: Lasky’s book-length struggle with genuine sentiment, with quiet-but-still-startling-images, and with the calming sense of stillness she places between the two. In “Toast To My Best Friend Or Why Friendship Is The Best Kind Of Love,” Lasky opens with four plainspoken lines:

“Laura, Laura I am sad for you
But more than you I am sad for me
And when I make a toast to you
I make a toast to me, my friend”         

And winds the poem through a straightforward ode… until we reach the last five lines:

“In friendship we are one together and in friendship
I am all soul. No that’s wrong, too.
What is a soul all aflame?
If it’s a bird in the snow
Then that’s what I am.”          

There’s something appealing and classic and refreshingly honest in these final lines. Considering the contemporary poetic climate, Lasky’s “I am all soul” admission is a gutsy maneuver, and she shields it with an immediate rejection before twisting and building it into a rather beautiful image and a more complex realization. It’s a calculated move, but it’s also incredibly fresh in its honesty and self-awareness. Laura, the aforementioned friend, appears throughout the book (as do several other names), and, at times, Awe feels like something secret, like a text intended only for friends. Still, Lasky’s startling use of image pushes Awe past the book-of-poems-about-my-friends mold and into territory that’s as bold as it is revealing.

I should also note that Awe is a quiet book. Much like Joshua Beckman’s work, Lasky’s poems, even those driven by longer lines or those offering little in terms of visual white space, generate a specific and powerful sense of calm. “The Mouth Of The Universe Is Screaming In Agony” illustrates Lasky at her best:

“If Travis meets Monica but does not like Monica
then what’s the use? There is no use in love
without purpose. There is a bluebird in
the purple evening sky. He is not the blackbird,
bleeding jagged red and the trees are blue.”          

In opening this poem she shows a strong grasp of craft: The first sentence generates a swift sense of movement, which she immediately undercuts with the short realization (and a great line-break) of “There is no use in love / without purpose.” Again, Lasky works with vague but still honest sentiments, pushing them toward imagery and resonance. She slows the poem and simultaneously pushes the general toward the specific—and the unspeakable.

Awe is a startling collection, a book willing to offer the reader a quiet intensity and a hushed honesty. Lasky, pushing aside the hip tendencies of our literary moment, writes from the place where poetry started: A genuine need to communicate emotion, to speak to our most human tendencies. And closing the book, pushing past its final page, I could only think one thing: We could use more poetry like this.

Available from Wave Books: http://www.wavepoetry.com/ 

Shelby Lynne Needs More Attention Starting Now

by Weston Cutter

I don’t know how many concerts I’ve been to. 50? 70? Something like that, probably (proper concerts, I mean: not, like, seeing friends play in a garage or happening by some choir in the mall on the day before some holiday). One of the best moments ever: at the Fine Line Music Cafe in Minneapolis, probably 2000 (maybe 1999, though I think it was 2000), after maybe an hour of a mostly on set (mostly on meaning: there were a few flubs, sure, but by and large—despite lots of, if I remember, JDaniels or JBeam—the set was incendiary), Shelby Lynne tore J. Lennon’s “Mother” to absolute fucking shreds. I shit you not: shreds. You know the song? How Lennon gets all high and it sorta works (and works better if you’re really into Lennon and can forgive his sorta-flat note because the moment’s clearly more about emotional emphasis than musical exactitude)? Yeah: Lynne fucking killed it. She hit the highest notes, wailed like a fucking demon. Tore shit up. It was spooky how awesomely she owned that song.

I was seeing S. Lynne in 2000 because a girlfriend had told me about this CD of hers called I Am Shelby Lynne and from second #1 of that disc I was sold. You’ve heard this disc (nod along even if you haven’t, and then go buy it)? Hilariously great. As “country” as L. Lovett’s masterful I Love Everybody or Ensenada, S. Lynne won a Grammy for “Best New Artist” in 2001. Remember? Remember?

No? Yeah, you’re not alone: Lynne’s the queen of being overlooked. Somehow. Over and over again, it’d seem.

If you read the NYTimes, you maybe read the profile in the magazine from the 13 January issue, or at least maybe saw it. And it’s staggering, right? Go look at the article: the woman’s gorgeous, she’s got a great voice, she’s got a Grammy…she should be, without argument, one of the top female singers working.

(that she’s not, I suppose, is obvious from much of the above).

So what’s the dice on this Shelby Lynne? What’s the deal? Maybe more specifically: what the fuck is the matter with all us listeners who aren’t buying her stuff more fervently and demanding that all our loved ones do the same? Is the “country” market so dominated, at the moment, with fake twangy pop musicians that someone like Lynne—someone with pipes and a growl and presence and attitude—is just f’ed? And, if that’s true: do we all jump ship? Admit that “country” is no longer a decent enough net (because it’s left out, variously, Richard Buckner or Gillian Welch or name your favorite head-smackingly stupid omission) and just start buying stuff regardless of genre or category?

 

Thankfully, all those questions are beyond answering. And none of them really matter, anyway. What matters is that Shelby Lynne’s got a new disc out called Just a Little Lovin’ and it’s a CD of ten tracks, nine of which are covers of songs most commonly associated with Dusty Springfield. It’s been released, of course, by Lost Highway, the label which, for who knows the reason, seems to be doing almost missionary-type work re: putting out good albums by artists who deserve it (they put out the last Golden Smog disc, the last Lucinda Williams disc, the last Willie Nelson)(not that any of those three (or the rest of Lost Highway’s catalog) need, like, pity or charity, but the label seems real bent on establishing itself as a “house” in the old style of labels, like the Stax of old).

If there’s a shitty part to Shelby Lynne, it’s a very small part and it’s very much more of a compliment than criticism: the shitty part is that Shelby Lynne sounds like she could make just about anything sound good. If the woman put out a whole CD of jingles from 1970-1980 television commercials for soap, I’m sure I’d be convinced, after her crooning, to buy Palmolive—or I’d at least find myself singing bits of the commercial while I kept up using my regular no-name organic stuff.

It’s that sort of tough fact that informs best and most this new CD. Just a Little Lovin’ is a deft, soft CD, laid back in all sorts of sexy, Sunday-afternoon ways. The CD sounds, in fact, like the soundtrack to the best possible Sunday afternoon—spent with or just after time in the arms of a lover, spent on a comfortable sofa, maybe with some tea nearbye. (The funniest fact in the press materials that were sent with the disc was the declaration that the CD was something far afield from the world of Pro Tools and digital tweaking and etc, and that statement almost doesn’t need to be made: the whole disc sounds, in the best possible way, organic and airy and created, not put-together.)

Opening with the title track, Lynne and the great musicians backing her stroll casually into a song that D. Springfield didn’t, in fact, keep very casual. Go back and listen to how Dusty in Memphis opens: strings. And when Dusty gets to those choruses? The whole color of the song changes—from the slink of strings and the soft of the verses to something bordering on drama—soaring strings, Dusty’s own soaring voice, a shift of dynamic and emphasis.

Lynne and Co, on the other hand, keep the song like a quiet, tame thing—keep the song entirely on something like a loungy frequency. Do you remember the first time you heard the Indigo Girls’ cover of “Romeo and Juliet” by the Dire Straits? How she (it was just one of the I. Girls, and I can’t remember which one) turned what had been this almost flat (in a good way, but still) song—a song with few moments of standout drama or tonal shifting—into this gutsy, pleading, trembling thing? (For what it’s worth, I like both bands’ version of the song just about equally).

It’s sort of that in reverse: Lynne takes some of Dusty’s stuff and tugs the peaks and valleys from it, makes it—not sanitized, not safe, but just texturally very, very different. I can’t emphasize enough that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing: it’s the aural equivalent of painting with several different shades of green or brown instead of using an entire spectrum of color.

Which is a sort of way of saying it’s an intimate record, which it undoubtedly is. In the same way that it’s hard not to read an author’s life into the novel she or he writes, it’d be hard not to read into this lush, hushed album the facts behind Lynne’s history and background. This is a woman who has, for years, been recording great music and getting nothing like the sort of attention she deserves for it. Heard with that in mind, it’s hard not to hear the album as something of a beckoning, a whispered come here to the listener, to potential fans, to whomever. I fully submit that that’s not a fair way to hear it—and the album stands on its own without any pretend pathos behind the songs being sung—but still.

 

So what happens when a musician with remarkable talent and skill uses a different set of talent and skill on a new album? That’s what seems at stake here, really. On her absolute best album I Am Shelby Lynne, there’s dynamic galore—brash, wailing tracks segue into moody, imploring songs and vice versa, and the album’s all the stronger for the shifting.

And, of course, it’s unfair to judge Just a Little Lovin’ according to the same rubric: wanting loudness from a quiet disc is like getting upset that a banana doesn’t taste like a hamburger. Given that, it’s a beautiful, intimate, brooding disc, and though I’m frustrated that Shelby Lynne’s not getting a million dollars a year for using her outrageously great vocals in wild, dynamic ways, it’d be hard to argue that this disc isn’t one of the prettiest, best made collections that’s likely to appear in 2008—in any three-year span, really.

That’s it, maybe: it’s so fucking pretty. For all the atmospheric mastery of live-to-tape studio work, it’s a CD that, in the best ways, will appeal to people who like Norah Jones (which, in fairness: I am totally one of those people)(if you think Norah Jones is bad just because she’s popular, scour the net for the tracks she’s done live with M. Ward for evidence of your lunacy). Does it take a while to get used to such prettiness? Maybe. It will take some people some extra time. Is the time worth spending? Oh good god yes. 

Two of one kind, one each of others

by Weston Cutter

 

(Absolutely due to laziness, I’m reviewing four books together, and I’m not doing full in-depth stuff for each not because of any lack on the part of any of the books, but because of the laziness. Each of these books are fantastic: all were (and should be) read and enjoyed slowly by the reviewer, very much moreso than the terse, quickly written reviews might otherwise imply.)

 

Joe Wenderoth’s No Real Light.

 

1. Wave books=gorgeous. Also: great writing.

2. It came out last year. I know. Whatever. It’s not like you can only buy a book the year it comes out.

3. Wenderoth is the best—and one of very few—poets who is, far as I can tell, almost unsaying stuff. I’ve spent hours with this book and I don’t really know how to get more clearly at what it feels like what he’s doing. It’s a poetry of incredible quiet, of very true, hopeful-in-spite-of (meaning: maybe overtly sad or whatever but never without some shine) moments. In all sorts of really significant ways, Wenderoth’s work could/should be some heavy duty tonic for what otherwise passes for poetry.

 

Tod Wodicka’s All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well.

I’m not usually a fan of the you’ll-love-the-book-despite-the-character books: I like liking stuff, and I’m pretty fond of good and happy things, and so having to get over a character’s personality in order to enjoy a book isn’t typically what I’d consider A Good Time. T. Wodicka: thank you for getting me past this struggle.

The book’s centered around Burt, a Medieval re-enactor, but through Burt and his splintered family and real shaky relationship with the present, the story becomes an evocative tale (if slightly scary at times) of what it means to try to live within time, of who “owns” history, of how we all avoid or embrace or choose-your-verb our past (the scary part of the tale is the fact that Burt, so wrapped up in reenactment, spends bunches of his time reading books, which of course is not the best thing in the world to do, but of course you’re realizing that fact as you’re sitting there, feet on the red ottoman, reading a goddamned book). It’s also, at its heart, a real basic family drama—basic in the sense that families are always, in some way or another, fractured and crazy, and maybe family itself isn’t a noun but a verb and it means “putting shards together that may or may not have ever fit together in the first place.”

(review up by J. Maslin at NYTimes here) 

(and Kalfus’ NYTimes Sunday review (read: take-down) here) 

 

Richard Zoglin’s Comedy at the Edge.

 

Good but not great, Zoglin’s book does a thorough job of painting pictures and telling tales about the standup comedy scene of the 70’s (with detours into the 60’s and into the early-80’s, but mostly about the 70’s). With whole chapters on Lenny Bruce, Carlin, Pryor, and Steve Martin (and some others, but those were the chapters that were best)(also the chapter that, weirdly, coupled A. Kaufman and R. Williams. Not that they shouldn’t be joined, but certainly those two had enough influence to each get their own chapter, right? More than, say, Albert Brooks, right?), the book reads much more as an interesting, detail-filled romp through the fun days of excess and hilarity in LA and NYC.

That said, the book works far, far better as an hilarious compendium for the excesses and successes of a certain time period and certain comics than it does as some causality-implying tome about how standup changed lots of things. We know that Letterman and Leno and Conan and Stewart and Colbert are doing fundamentally different comedy than the comedy that was done by Carson et. al, but telling how comics changed things is, in USA Today pie-chart terms, a small slice of the story. That said: I could be totally wrong. I was 0 years old when most of the stuff in the book actually transpired, so maybe this is one of those you’re-too-young-to-get-it arguments. If so: I’m a moron.

Still, for all that, regardless: get the damned book. Read it. The first five chapters alone are worth the investment of time and money.

 

George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books.

 

Oh my god this guy’s incredible. I’ve heard all of thing zero about George Steiner in my entire life, and what’s totally possible, after having read this book, is that I’ve heard nothing about him ever because I’m just not smart enough to even be aware of someone this smart.

I can’t get into this book here. There are two way, way better reviews (here and here) that you should read—this book just trips me and I start stammering. It’s so much wonderfulness, though: a (it’s got to be certifiable, even if it hasn’t been certified) genius writes a book about the seven books he never wrote but wishes he could have, somehow also talking about (which is just tremendously resonant, for someone who has books he’d like to write) how wanting to but not writing a book creates a sort of “active shadow” (his words)—like a generative absence. It’s just fucking spellbinding. It’s not even the end of January and this might be the smartest book possible in 2008.

Krivak’s Beautiful Book

by Weston Cutter

In the copy I’ve got here of Andrew Krivak’s just heartrendingly beautiful A Long Retreat, toward the bottom of page 71 is a sentence I’ve thought of at least once a day since I read the book back in the beginning of December: “There was no ideal morning or ideal night, no certain task or way to pray that captured this life.” I’m not at all trying to say that the line encapsulates the book, though it does a fair job of highlighting the central questions involved. In writing it here, I want to show two huge, huge things:

1. Krivak’s a beautiful writer, and the beauty’s as much in the prose as it is in the clarity and generosity of the thoughts behind the words, and

2. Krivak’s written what may or may not seem a necessary book, but I’d argue that he, in fact, has—a book that’s necessary for anyone who considers life as a felt experience, as something sacred and rife with confusion and mystery and hope (and, of course, yes, full of horrible crazy shit as well)—and lines like the one above—lines that are almost heroically brave in their honesty (if it doesn’t seem brave to write something like that, or if it seems like that sort of line’s obvious and foregone, I’d encourage you to consider whether or not you really, deep down, don’t believe that there’s an ideal day and night somewhere, waiting to be lived (especially for those of us in darker stretches: isn’t it the whole notion of an ideal night and day, some set of hours that’s far easier than the ones we’re living through, that feels like reward, the dangling carrot at the end of the stick?)) are the strongest reasons for this book’s vital necessity.

You get it right there at the start: Krivak was a Jesuit priest, was eight years in before he felt a different pull and left the order. For those of you not in on all things Catholic, Jesuits are the smart, fun Catholics, the guys who’ll buy you a beer and talk good books and (usually) not get all huffy and fuddy-duddy about the sorts of things that so often get Catholic undergarments in a bunch. That said: the Jesuits, maybe because they’re the order that’s most focused on education, typically engender a deep questioning on the part of all those who believe, and (obviously) way moreso for those who take vows to become part of the order. So, put yourself there: imagine being a Jesuit priest (this is easier if you’re a dude, I know), and imagine that every time you’ve got doubts about your faith or your calling, you’re encouraged to pay attention to the doubt, to the wondering. You’re encouraged to listen to your doubts. (Jesuits don’t have a monopoly on this sort of thinking, of course, but it’s seemingly more okay: remember how weird people were when Mother Theresa’s notebooks were recently released, and how astonished people were when they found out she doubted, like, ever? Yeah: that’d be automatic for a Jesuit. That’s par.)

Anyway: Krivak. After writing the above paragraph, I should probably emphasize: Krivak’s book, despite being a spiritual memoir of tough faith and earnest questioning, is a great source of info re: Jesuits, and sort by extension, a great source of info regarding what used to be called (and still could be: I’m slow) living a life of a “calling.”

(I’m sorry: this review seems to keep getting away from me. I want to write sentences about how Krivak’s book is a wonderful addition to any literature regarding lives of calling, and how, just in reading books like that, the reader can experience this sort of generative encouragement or refueling in his or her own life—which is exactly what happened for me (and it’s not because I dig the Jesuits and go to their churches: it’s because I’m alive and I have questions and doubts and this book’s honesty about those issues makes me stronger—or, at least, makes me feel stronger). This is not some clever meta-device: I’m really trying, and I’m really failing).

Just read the book. If there’s any trace of fairness in the world of book news and reviews, you’ll hear plenty about this book when it comes out in March. If you don’t hear plenty about this book in March, it’s because the world is insane and full of people who don’t read good books, and you should absolutely consider it your duty to, book by book, change the world. No joke.

Tom Perrotta’s Abstinence Teacher

by Tim Lockridge

In a recent issue of The Believer, Nick Hornby writes about The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta’s new novel, in regards to its depiction of our particular American moment. Hornby asserts (and I’m remembering/paraphrasing here, as I don’t have the article before me… and okay, okay, I’ll admit it, I don’t have a Believer subscription and regularly read the magazine over a cup of coffee at my local bookstore… and yes, this makes me a bad person, because The Believer is an incredible magazine and we should all subscribe… but back to Hornby’s assertion) that too many authors concern themselves with timelessness, with a desire to strip away contemporary cultural allusions for fear of dating their work. And work that adopts a timeless posture, he argues, is often drab, and we need more timely work, more work willing to step up and say something about the bizarre America we’ve become.

And Hornby is one-hundred percent correct, and The Abstinence Teacher is about as culturally relevant and revealing as you can ask a book to be. The narrative follows two characters in two mostly separate plot arcs: Ruth is a recently divorced sex-ed teacher entrenched in a curriculum change and challenging the pro-abstinence group propelling it; Tim is a recently remarried recovering addict, a born-again Christian caught in The Tabernacle, Stonewood Heights’ newest strip-mall store turned Evangelical church.

And it’s worth noting that both characters initially seem “too easy:” Ruth is the jaded baby-boomer that dismissively rejects organized religion in theory and practice, while Tim is the recovering addict searching for something to fill a void. As the book progresses, however, and as Perrotta begins to build the characters, it becomes apparent that these aren’t cliches or caricatures, these are real people and real elements of our contemporary America. Perrotta effectively distills a nice chunk of the contemporary cultural rift into a compelling narrative and starts asking questions: What is compromised in an America fueled by fear and insecurity? And how does this climate divide our friends and families and choices? And what happens when these polarized worlds inevitably cross paths?

Much like Little Children, The Abstinence Teacher finds Perrotta writing adult characters entrenched in troubling personal and cultural matter. And in this departure from his earlier (and still excellent) work, Perrotta creates perfectly broken people, characters with tremendous wounds and no solutions beyond waking up again tomorrow. (Is this the world the modernists warned of?) Ruth and Tim feel tremendously real, like people whose grocery cart you’ve crossed in the supermarket. And it’s easy to dismiss many of the book’s characters as too simple or slightly cliched, but such a dismissal misses one of The Abstinence Teacher’s central conceits: our America is slowly becoming a place of assimilation, a place where individuality, or individual thought, was long ago bought and franchised, where our public school curriculum is entangled with arbitrary moral standards, and where fundamentalist churches sit next to (and look like) factory outlets.

Still, the book’s title ultimately becomes something of a head-fake: While sex-ed curriculum offers an inciting incident, The Abstinence Teacher takes larger aim, zeroing-in on an America where Mike Huckabee campaigns on promises to erase Amnesty and equates homosexuality with bestiality. And this is, and always has been, Perrotta’s specific gift, to point toward the absurdity around us, and still, even amongst the hatred and the indoctrination and the questionable actions, still manage to find something inherently human and humane in the mess. Perrotta isn’t the kind of writer that’ll blow you away with his lyrical chops: he’s telling a story, and you’re either on board or you aren’t. But in terms of pure narrative, in terms of capturing people entrenched in this bizarre present-tense, Perrotta’s Abstinence Teacher is one of the best.