Dorthea Lasky=Cause for Wonder + Wondering

by Weston Cutter

I want to like Dorothea Lasky so, so much. I do. I got her Black Life (from the ever-awesome Wave Books) around the same time I recently got Maureen McLane’s World Enough, and both were books I desperately, desperately wanted to enjoy (I read each probably seven times, it was like dating, like really, really wanting to find someone winning and attractive and great and willing yrself to two months of dinners). It’s been a poetry-heavy month, is what I’m trying to say, and it hasn’t been bad, not at all: Lasky’s clearly good, and compelling, and since I’m midwestern and Catholic my default when I don’t respond to stuff that seemingly everyone else responds to, I assume the trouble’s with me. So, maybe in this review I should allow for my own biases first (the goal: to be as generous to Lasky and her second book, Black Life, as possible). Maybe this’ll work.

Please note that these details are not, individually, causes for me to dislike stuff (and further note that I don’t dislike Lasky’s Black Life, not even close). All together, they cause me problems.

First, Lasky goes nearly without punctuation (at least end-line stuff). She’s got long lines (at times) anyway, but what’s weird is how few of them ever finish—a majority of the poems in this book don’t even feature a period, don’t punctuationally ‘end.’ This isn’t necessarily a problem (hello, W.S. Merwin), but it poses challenges for me, anyway, because…

Second, Lasky’s stuff is entirely personal, entirely of herself. These are confessional poems, of a sort. Not a single poem in here doesn’t feature an “I,” and the “I” in the poems is, often explicitly, Dorothea Lasky (the first lines from “It’s a Lonely World”: “It’s a lonely world / Hi everybody / It’s Dorothea, Dorothea Lasky / I have done something very wrong and / I am so very sorry about it”). Again: this isn’t, by itself, a problem or anything (hi there, Olena Kalytiak Davis, some of whose poetry seems, in Black Life, to be hanging hauntingly around [specifically in Lasky's "I Am a Wild Band" which seems to this reader to be some distant cousin of OKD's "Six Apologies, Lord"]), but with the punctuationlessness of the poems, with their meandering qualities, their grasp-for-whatever-comes sense, the default, at least for this reader, is that these poems feel more akin to unedited diary entries than poems.

But that’s not enough, of course: there are moments of just incredible, transfixing beauty in here. Here’s how “I Am a Wild Band” ends:

Save me save me I have broken

But I do not know what for

Except to give you pleasure

I don’t know what else what for

So you can sleep, my little babies

In the white cold night

O the night, in me in me

I hold the night within me

O it hurts as it breaks inside of me

The poem’s power has everything to do with the fact that the speaker, the Wild Band, is first break within some other, and soon thereafter the other is breaking into her/the speaker, and, in the end, it’s actually the night that’s breaking (and it’s a hell of a lot more fun to read the thing than that explanation lets on).

Worth noting, too: Lasky’s an absolute Ending Pro. Seriously, her poems finish so mighty it’s breathtaking—not just that there are fine, gorgeous lines, but that these lines gather accretive force and push the poem in new directions, onto new tracks and paths. “Poem to My Ex-Husband” begins

Dear husband, I tried to write you an e-mail

But I didn’t have the right address

My husband, I love you so much

Will you be mine forever

I know you are married now

Does that matter

and ends

Your words are my words

I say them and they say you

All that I can never make in the movement

Of my voice and arm

And crowned in lights

I place in your moving mouth next to a red drill

And together we go to someplace like a beach

Where they give us things we need, like life

Her stuff opens outward, an embouchure into some bigger intstrument. Plus, even for the entirely I-based writing in the book, Lasky’s looking for meaning and power in everything. Her works wrestling for something worth holding onto, something capital-I Important, capital-T True. For instance, there’s “I Hate Irony” a two-pager in which she writes

If you have ever been truly scared there is no irony in your voice when you scream

And too

Love is not either

I was in love once and all I could think of was joy

Not drinking, nor sex, or spaghetti

Not witty things to say or martinis

That bubble down the stairs with gracious olives

I didn’t think of my large gray turtleneck folding over my abdomen

As I was touched so quietly by the stars

This poem, “I Hate Irony,” has been the wrench for me this whole time with this book. Because here’s what it may or not be pointing out: that I’m ill-equipped to handle poetry that’s direct, that tries no tricks, that attempts to honestly, openly, in small and large ways, approach and lay hands on that which makes us feel. Also, go back to that line in “Poem to My Ex-Husband”: she writes “Does that matter” not with a question, not with charge, but flatly, like “the food’s getting cold” or “don’t forget the batteries,” and, in this way, the reader gets that the poem is fundamentally trying to tease out what does matter. Nothing is certain.

The way she’s trying to get at stuff is fundamentally redemptive, structurally unplayful—so direct that you don’t even realize you’re getting frustrated not because of the work itself, but because you’re waiting for the wink that typically attends work this direct (some sly nudge to let the reader know, ha ha, everything’s not really this stuffy, not really this heavy). Lasky’s poetry is heavy: there’s lots of death, there’s lots of true trying to connect, there’s God, and she’s trying to find ways to make things honestly, un-dressed-up-ly, matter. I don’t want to sound silly and overdone: I’m not wild about Lasky’s stuff, not the way I was knocked-down by some other stuff the first time I found it, but I’m 100% fascinated by her work (and McLane’s, too, whose book I reviewed for the Rumpus), and I will be reading her regularly from here on. I recommend the same.

(A last note: this interview with her is all sorts of illuminating, not least for the way she talks about hip hop working to exert a certain power over the reader. Her poetry makes a ton, a ton more sense with that little divot of info on my mental fairway.)

Almost Unsettlingly Good

by Weston Cutter

            Wave Books puts out some of the prettiest and most interesting and best poetry around, and the only real complaint any reader could level against the outfit’s that they publish too few books (for the glut of poetry presently in existence all over the place, a study of the percentage of that poetry that’s actually good/interesting would, I’d guess, be scary and sad to read). In the last few years Wave’s put out an anthology of political poems, Dorothea Lasky’s Awe, and Joe Wenderoth’s No Real Light (that last one still retains such power it’s literally shocking to read and reread: it not just holds up but gets thicker, more important and good as time passes, less like good wine than a great mountain). And now, today, Wave’s publishing Poemland by Chelsey Minnis.

            What kills me is that Minnis’s already published two books, both from Fence Books (another dynamite place that publishes poetry), and so I was sort of sad to realize I could’ve had more Minnis in my life for the past eight years. I’m an idiot, though, and so consider this less a review than a public service announcement: read Minnis! Read her now! Buy Poemland!

            And why should you read her? Why buy the book? Page 2:

 

If you are not weak than I will feel like I have had enough

of you…

 

But if you are weak…

 

Then this is a poem because it squeezes you…

 

It is a shimmer like flushing sequins down a toilet…

 

            Hang with the poem for a second, let it loop back through you: what CMinnis does in four lines makes a move toward establishing what poetry is/does, what weakness or strength might do, and the underlying beauty/transience/meaninglessness of things (I hate that last point, too, but it’s there). I don’t know what’s cooler: that she does this work so quickly, in four lines, or that she does it with these driven-off thoughts, these elliptical catches that burst and leave tracers like munitions or something in your brain’s view. It’s weird: the poem’s weird, the results are weird, how it does what it does is weird, how it implicates the reader and poet so quickly (I’ve never met CMinnis, and yet she’s warning me about my own weakness) is totally weird, and yet the poem fundamentally works, fundamentally gets across something precise and direct and gasp-inducing.

            The form’s consistent throughout Poemland. Here’s page 79:

 

Sometimes I try to please someone that I hate…

 

So that I can enjoy a range of satisfactions…

 

 

You should always be doing a service for others…

 

Even in poetry…

            The book as a whole, it’s theme or project or whatever? It’s almost impossible to pin down, yet each poem in the book could act, pretty well, as all-encapsulating-bits of the whole: there is, in the poem on page 79 (none of the poems have titles), like there was in the poem on page 2, the sort of odd either/or range of idea/possibility (the reader’s weakness in the first instance, kindness to enemies now); there is also the recognizably cognizant aspect (many, many poems in Poemland deal explicitly with writing poetry, with the poem as thing-itself, and I’d bitch here about that fact [poems about writing strike me largely as silly or navel-gazers or both] but the truth is CMinnis is doing something [far as I can see] pretty new with the poem-about-poetry schtick: in writing over and over about poetry, she’s actually telling us what she’s doing as she’s doing it, and so the experience is, yes, somewhat mediated [by this authorial voice], but the experience is also sort of doubled: the effect feels like what it’d be to maybe stand next to a wizard as s/he made spells, to stand there and listen to the little admonitions or additions on the wizard’s part as the spell was made).

            So maybe that’s something that’s got to be acknowledged or touched on, too: who is this, this speaker in Poemland (unless I’m totally misreading it, the voice is consistent throughout the book)? I don’t know. Here’s page 66:

 

My selfless vengeance will never be appreciated!

 

I’ll chop your head off!

 

And I’ll carry it around by the hair…

 

And you just sit there smiling and playing the piano with your

prosthetic hooks…

 

            The fact that the whole book’s made of simple, fragmentary phrases (not unlike, maybe, a pared-down and less narrative Mary Robison, whose new one we’ll be posting a review of real, real soon) ends up muddying/complicating notions of whoever this speaker might be. I don’t think, though, that the speaker’s identity much Matters: what Matters, for sure, is that this speaker is trying oddly, desperately, throughout a book of terse, bright utterances to align thought and act, to align sense-of-world with world itself. Also to try to do Real Good (which gets complicated, the effort does, because the speaker wants to be known/seen doing Real Good). This is, in short, a book much like the inside of a smart and interested and interesting person’s head, though that’s not a tenth of it: it’s the inside of a smart/interested/interesting and also gutsy and quick-witted writer’s head. I don’t know if there’s a joke about the book’s title or anything, about Poemland, but it takes not too much imagination to consider that the book’s some missive sent from poemland, sent note-in-bottle and across some reach. Maybe that sounds cheesy. The book is anything but. The book is great and fun and interesting and enriching as hell. Buy it. Carry it around, show it to strangers: it’s a book to start things with.

(for the record: Wave, like McSweeney’s and Fence and a few other places, offers a book subscription deal—for $60, you can get all the books Wave’ll put out this year. More details about that are here. Also, there’s a really bad-ass looking hardcover of C. Minnis’s Poemland [the entire book's printed on the book jacket! plus inside too!], and you can check that you here.)

Yes, Wave, Yes.

by Weston Cutter

 

Let’s begin with two quotes from the Dave Eggers/David Foster Wallace interview from The Believer, November 2003:

 

“Political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying”

 

and

 

“It is when one feels most strong, most personally, that it’s most tempting to speak up…But it’s also when it’s the least productive, or at any rate it seems that way…plenty of writers and journalists [are] “speaking out” and writing pieces about oligarchy and neofascism and mendacity and appalling short-sighted-ness in definitions of “national security” and “national interest,” etc., and very few of these writers seem to me to be generating helpful or powerful pieces, or really even being persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already share the writer’s views.”

 

First, let’s bracket that that was all written in 2003, which was before Katrina, before the Surge(s?), before Rumsfeld stepped down and nine attorneys were fired because of party loyalty and Gonzalez and Abu Ghraib and Black Sites and illegal rendition and and and…you get the idea. Meaning only that even for those of us who love and applaud Wallace’s call for a higher-minded political discourse, perhaps the ground beneath our feet has shifted enough politically (what percentage of republicans have distanced themselves from Bush since 2006?) so that what may have, 5 years ago, seemed like “speaking out” about oligarchy, neofascism, mendacity and the like now may seem much more like just Stating The Obvious. (For what it’s worth, as more disclaimer: I think Wallace is still totally dead-on about political writing not being shrill and merely pitched to one or another side’s supporters, but seriously? The last couple years of Sy Hersch pieces? Goodling breaking the law while working for the fucking attorney general? White House aides needing to be ordered by a fucking judge to go to hearings with Congress? The front page of the NYTimes seems to me far more damning than anything the gasbags from either side shout.)

Okay, so: Wave Books has just released State of the Union, which is a collection of 50 political poems, and I’m wondering if I even have to mention what stripe most of the poets within would paint themselves, politically. (Idle Q: are there republican poets? Does it hurt, psychically, to be one?). Graywolf, earlier this year, came out with William Stafford’s Another World Instead, a collection of the poetry he wrote during his years working (basically as something like a forest ranger, except monitored and forced to live in a certain place) for the US military as a conscientious objector, and one of the fascinating things that Stafford’s stuff made me wonder is: at what point do we have a responsibility to speak up/out?

At Wave Books, Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder have decided that they’ve found their point, here and now in 2008, and the result is this just brutally good collection. Even if there were nothing but shitty, drum-beating, anti-present-administration poems within, the collection would be worth the purchase price just for finally, finally, offering something into a void which has been gaping since, well, I’m guessing the 70’s and Vietnam and the rest. To raise a voice at this point—through poetry no less!—seems a pretty brazen and wonderfully audacious thing to do.

Thankfully, the book’s not chock-full of shitty poems. From greats like Joe Wenderoth and Matthea Harvey and Michael Palmer and James Tate to (to me) relative underknowns (whoever you are, both Matthias Svalina and Travis Nichols: well done), at least 80% of the poetry in here is, in fact, not at all weighted down by crazed name-calling and shrieking. I can’t think of a form that’s not represented (though given that it’s Wave (who if it hasn’t already been noted should be included in the greats, right up there with Graywolf and New Directions and Sarabande, the small presses that pump the real blood), it’s far more tilted toward experimental than formal), and the poems can be as direct as admonishments to living, breathing members of the administration to considered moments of stillness while sitting in a car.

One of the reasons, at least for writers I know, that politically-minded art seems so terrifying is that bad art can just be bad art, that’s fine, but bad political art is way worse. A plain old agenda-less poem would seem to have no goal other than to be a poem; once an agenda’s introduced, things get (to understate it wildly) dicey as hell: bad art is tolerable, but bad propaganda is, for me anyway, hard to stomach. And it feels small to even say this but, yes, there’s a handful of poems within which have moments that are, um, unfun. “It is you, the vice / president of our country, / who is despicable, / with your artificial heart / your rictus face / and your friends / mean and evil”. Even if I agree with the anger/sorrow of those lines; even if I agree with the argument the poem’s setting out (Cheney and co. should be endangered species and their demise will make the world a better place); even if all of that stuff, those lines seem, to me, pretty tough to deal with.

That Dylan song, “Masters of War”? I dig Dylan, and so I dig the song, but the end always makes me sad, the “I hope that you die” part. And maybe this is just bullshitty bleeding-heartedness on my part, but isn’t wishing death on those with whom you disagree the exact same thing that made you disagree with the person to begin with? Perhaps I lack the guts or something, I don’t know.

That’s mostly academic and rhetorical anyway. The point is: this book is great, and it’s necessary, and if it ignites just a fraction more courage in those of us who get enervated by speaking up/out/together on stuff like this then we’re all better off for it. And please, please, don’t get scared off by the agenda poems: there are moments of just humbling beauty in here, lines like “We were a generous people and kept our hearts open.” and “what is not lost / is paradise”. Please, please: buy the book. Tell your friends. And if it’s not obvious: fucking vote, people.

(Just realized: the book’s not out till September. I bet you could order it from Wave and they’d send it early. Just a guess.)

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/