Subtle Thieves

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Ron McFarland opens Subtle Thieves with poems of ekphrasis, embellishments upon famous paintings. William Carlos Williams similarly filled out his 1962 Pictures from Brueghel and won a Pulitzer. Subtle Thieves adopts longer lines, though, and (in the mode of so many contemporary poets, e.g., Albert Goldbarth) a discursive manner and tone.

McFarland is a writer like no one but himself, though: erudite, wry, and self-deprecating. Besides three previous full-length books of poetry, he has also authored The World of David Wagoner (U of Idaho P, 1997) and critical studies of Alexie and Hemingway.

Subtle Thieves recalls Blake’s saying, “Without contraries is no progression.” The book jokingly yokes Kandinsky and Grandma Moses, Keats and baseball, John Donne and baseball, scansion and baseball, the gendered West and the New West, Wordsworth and Weyerhaeuser, grapes and gems, Amish culture and punk, shotguns and interior décor.

Two of the strongest poems open and close the book: “A Visit to the Art Museum” and “To Extinguish Fire.” Both portray the poet as contemplating aging, tossing a football to a grandkid in the first piece, mulling retirement in the second. In intervening poems the speaker resists the aging process, works to thwart it, positioning himself as a bon vivant and a wag. There are many strong poems in this book. Maybe for that reason I wish it were shorter, tighter, more concentrated, more like a malbec than a merlot.

Luscious sonics layer Subtle Thieves. The speaker finds “the spent / balls and blunt lead cones of death” (15) in a Civil War battlefield, “a stiff-legged hick / like Chester” (46) striding the sidewalk. He hears “the brisk tick / of the sprinklers” (53) haunting suburbia, and “that buck-naked / splendid little sack of spuds” (63) in a grandson. Gender often influences poetic sound effects, as Richard Hugo proved. McFarland has embraced the Rocky Mountain West and shares some of his predecessor’s word-music and concerns.

Before reading this book, I never considered a sentimental and metrical kinship between Hugo and Sherman Alexie. But McFarland’s work confirms the emotional linkage between these two cross-generational Northwest masters. We hear Hugo in “You hope this paper was not yours” (26) and “If you think you’ve lived somewhere / like this, you’re wrong” (66). We hear Alexie behind characters “angry for being old, or angry / for what their mothers did to them, / or their fathers, or life” (62). We hear both poets in lines like “their heads and wallets / downtown, their hearts wading trout streams” (21). McFarland also acknowledges the massive head of Hemingway, his unshakeable impact, especially for males. Also and less obviously, “The Hard Decade” is a memorable lyric that Harold Bloom might say rewrites William Carlos Williams’ great homage to his mentally handicapped young nursemaid “To Elsie.”

In its allusions and its erudition, Subtle Thieves pitches to those who know and enjoy the Northwest and especially the Rockies, their pop culture and material culture, their masculine pastimes and poetic traditions.

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Paul Lindholdt grew up on Puget Sound but now lives in Spokane. A professor of English at Eastern Washington University, he teaches literature and environmental studies. He has won awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Society of Professional Journalists, and most recently from the Washington Center for the Book for his ecological memoir In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau (University of Iowa Press, 2011).

Over the last few years Poetry Northwest has established a tradition of publishing theme based issues. Last spring saw The Science Issue. The year before saw The Carolyn Kizer Issue. Influences, politics, and music were the focus of other themes. Our current issue is The Photography Issue. It’s our largest one ever, clocking in at over 70 pages, and features poems and photos juxtaposed against each other in a way that emphasizes an aspect shared between the two art forms: the act of creating a good poem or a good photo is essentially, to borrow a phrase from Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, “sculpting in time.” They distill singular moments into small sustained emotional eternities that impact readers and viewers over and over again. Their perfectly balanced elements strike upon something that simply wouldn’t exist if everything wasn’t placed just so.

Poetry Northwest + Instagramers Seattle + We Are Juxt

Poetry Northwest approached Instagramers Seattle and We Are Juxt to see how people would respond to poems visually and are working together for the rest of the year on a simple contest: monthly we post a poem and you have thirty days to respond to it visually. At the end of the month we pick our favorite snapshot and the winner receives a year long subscription to Poetry Northwest. 

June 2013: A Field of Light = #fieldoflight
Under, under the sheaves,
Under the blackened leaves,
Behind the green viscid trellis,
In the deep grass at the edge of field,
Along the low ground dry only in August, -
Was it dust I was kissing?
A sigh came far.
Alone, I kissed the skin of a stone;
Marrow-soft, danced in the sand.

Those lines come from Theodore Roethke’s poem “A Field of Light,” our June mobile photography challenge. What does it look like to you? We want to see it.

Challenge Rules

From June 3 – June 30 we challenge you to respond to “A Field of LIght” (http://voetica.com/poem.php?ID=492) how ever you see fit. Any element of the poem is up for interpretation. Here are the particulars:

Instagram: #fieldoflight

How it Works:

1.Post a photo to Instagram with #fieldoflight

2. Poetry Northwest (@poetrynw), Instagramers Seattle, & We Are Juxt will pick the winner who will receive a year long subscription (2 issues) to Poetry Northwest.

3. Submit as often as you want.

4. Photos must be posted to Instagram to #fieldoflight in order to be considered.

5. Photos must be posted between June 3 and June 30, 2013. Any photos posted after the close of the challenge will not be considered.

6. Poetry Northwest, Instagramers Seattle, & We Are Juxt reserve the right to remove any photo deemed inappropriate for any reason.

Nate Klug

Sarah Lindsay is the recipient of the Carolyn Kizer Prize for poems appearing in the Spring & Summer 2012 issue of Poetry Northwest.

The Theodore Roethke Prize and the Carolyn Kizer Prize are awarded to recognize the best work published in Poetry Northwest each year. There is no application process; only poems published in the magazine are eligible for consideration.  For a list of past winners of these and other prizes, visit here.

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We would also like to extend our congratulations to Timothy Donnelly and–again!–Sarah Lindsay, each a winner of a Pushcart Prize for poems published in the Spring & Summer 2012 issue of Poetry Northwest.
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photo from an original by aurelio.asiain via photopin cc

Christine Deavel’s Woodnote (Bear Star Press, 2011) is a remarkable book—a book about, among other things, the legacy of books. In vision, and as a physical object, it is a mindful handful: a big square picture window of a book, drawing together many styles. In five sections we encounter an acute, discerning lyricism (“Hidden / as a toy balloon in the sky is / and is not”), personal essay (“But to walk through it, to walk through the snow as it falls, is to walk through another’s memory, even if it is only the land’s”), excerpts of historical records (“The cessions are as follows: / … The December end of the portage place. / Also the overlapping voice of all the lakes”), and, importantly, selections from the diaries of a relative (“A gloomy day :: a delightful day :: A heavy frost but nice day”) who died the year the poet was born.

The cumulative effect of these styles is astounding. Piece by piece, in palimpsest, an image emerges, both vibrant and spectral, of a vanished place, a changing way of life. “Northern rural Indiana” and its ancient forests and native tribes loom behind the daily toil of early 20^th century farm life and the speaker’s own childhood memories—yielding, not without ambivalence and telltale struggle (“I squirm to write this”), a self-perpetuating loop of communal revelation, the whole greater than its many moving parts. Woodnote gives us a poet working at every level of the text—precursor & creator, reader &  reviser, editor & archivist—encompassing a veritable ecology of the written word as it records and informs daily life, and pushes into the realms of art. In struggling with her sources, her “desire to make,” Deavel manages to redefine and enlarge our sense of self—“you keep to be kept / watch to know watching”—and reassert the value of even the most humble words to carve out even a changeable place in the ravages of time. The book itself, coherent, collected, emerges as our best defense.

Last fall, Wave Books produced a marvelous three day festival of translation at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Two books featured at that festival are well worth seeking out: Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Micrograms, and Ernst Meister’s In Time’s Rift. Unlike Deavel’s polyphonic sorting through legacies of print, each of these books deals exclusively in lyrical concision, the clarifying image or short-lined stanza poised against a sense of the infinite and the white space of the page. Both poets (Andrade is from Ecuador; Meister from Germany) lived and wrote in the early to mid 20^th century, though neither engages directly with history or a specific sense of place. In Andrade’s case, brief “micrograms” (a word he coined to describe his pictographic form) and translations of haiku crystalize a sense of wonder. For Ernst Meister, the background noise is terror—our brief mortality swallowed up by the unknowable recesses of a universe which has no need of us.

Here’s Andrade’s “Macaw,” for instance, in its entirety: “The tropics patch together / golds and fires to make for him / a coat of flags.” Or “Alphabet”: “Bird are / God’s handwriting.” Andrade is a poet of swift, iconic materializations, which the translators (Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta) capture with lightning ease. Things of this world—snails, pears, oysters, blowflies, crickets—acquire an aura of equanimity that admits of a greater design. Another kind of palimpsest emerges in this book: Spanish to English, Japanese to Spanish, the language of metaphor subsuming mortality. Micrograms is a compact book with the macrocosm in its sights.

For Ersnt Meister, our mortality cannot be subsumed, only confronted: “To be dead, what / a life, really, / at one with the worm’s / monotony…”. His lyrics (translations by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick) read like existential ripcords, brief incantations aching to confirm our existence against the encroaching void. They read like Heidegger’s Being and Time distilled into shot glasses—dasein with its nose to the ground: “Nothingness wants / to conceal itself / in what is dead. / In this it is / quite real.” That fourth line-break is sly, and indicative both of Ernst’s method and the translators’ transparent care. As memento mori, these poems are chastening, but never downbeat. Time may get the better of us, but language, like care itself, is still a refuge of sorts: “I look at a window, / a square of sky. // You, dear, are still / my dwelling.”

In recent years, Wave has a made a point of publishing unadorned books which focus attention on the words alone. These two collections, each rippling with implication, exemplify the merits of that spare design. Indeed, for these incisive poems and their mirroring source languages, the physical book (another kind of being in time) deepens their affective range.

Is there a more fearful book than the anthology—that doorstop destined never to be read in its entirety, only leafed through, sampled intermittently? Well, The Open Door (University of Chicago Press, edited by Don Share and Christian Wiman) may change all that forever. In short, The Open Door is thrilling, an engaging read from cover to cover—simply as a book of poems, and also as an illuminating tour of the last 100 years of poetry in English. Culling from the century-deep annals of Poetry magazine, the editors have given us, with an ear not for complacent monumentality, but alive to the grace notes of serendipity and eclectic inclusion, a collection of poems that call to each other, in cunning and uncanny ways, across the decades.

From the opening pages, in which Pound’s famous indictum, In a Station of the Metro (printed in its original form, with spacing) gives way immediately to Kay Ryan’s “Sharks’ Teeth” (“Everything contains some / silence.”), our attention is drawn to the ways in which key elements of poetry (the image, in this case) play out in different styles. Likewise, the hard-nosed colloquial irony of August Kleinzahler’s “The Hereafter” looks back on the erudite arch-irony of Eliot’s emergent Prufrock. And so on. Commentary drawn from letters and essays, interspersed throughout, accentuates the feeling of being in a high-stakes conversation as ideas about art and audience ricochet around the mead hall. Imagine Ange Mlinko on a panel with Ezra Pound, etc. The colloquy ends, poetically, with Yeats’s meditation on connecting art to audience and place (“The Fisherman”) and editorially with Monroe’s own notes on audience in a democratic age. All told, this is a book that emphasizes the pleasures of reading while providing an expansive view of poetry’s readership, even as it reminds us how, in an age of proliferating text, a good editor can make all the difference.

—Kevin Craft

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Rebecca Hoogs’ Self-Storage is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Join her–with Kevin Craft, Rachel Kessler, Sierra Nelson, and Jason Whitmarsh–at Hugo House in Seattle on Thursday, May 30, 2013 for a celebration and reading.

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Autobiography of Silence

I was the swinging door giving thanks. I admitted
your garbage was mine. I was a plastic poinsettia
in July. I auditioned for the role of an almost empty auditorium.
I was the pane of glass troubled by a rock.
I was the hands the man clasped behind his back to
approximate contemplation. Here I am
as a Japanese woman and mountain.
Both of us in profile. I am my sister’s brother.
Both girls on a bench with flowers
fat and skinny, stemmy and heavy-headed.
If one is not careful one will fall through
the floor rotted away from the rain.
If one is not careful one will fall through
a bad memory. The Moscow restaurant
where the old couple wasn’t talking;
he was smoking and looking past her; she was
looking down, wishing something to look at
would be invented. I was the unlit twin sconces
above them. Also the desk with the head on it.
And the pillow’s savage nap. My sister’s brother’s wife
with a pouf of wedding springing
from her forehead like a Greek  god.
I divorced the interior from the exterior. I wore
a headscarf to hold my dreams neatly together.
I was your wallpaper and always autumn,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, circa 1983.
Bored couples sat on the feet of my columns
in the Vatican. I was that pink stuffed panda.
The desk in the sea at Crete.
Seven daffodils and two Russian pensioners.
It seems that I was the dance hall always waiting
and sadly it seems the bigger the corsage
the less I was asked. I spoke roses,
but no one came.

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Rebecca Hoogs is the author of Self-Storage (2013), and a chapbook, Grenade (2005). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, The Journal, POOL, The Florida Review, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Artist Trust of Washington State. She received her M.F.A. in Poetry and an M.A. in English from the University of Washington. She is the Director of Education Programs and curator for the Poetry Series for Seattle Arts & Lectures and is a Co-Director of the summer Creative Writing in Rome program for the University of Washington.

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Additional work from Rebecca Hoogs appears in the Fall & Winter 2012-2013 print issue of Poetry Northwest (v7.n2).
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photo credit: jcb1976 via photopin cc

By Alexis Vergalla, Poetry Northwest

I want to start with a disclaimer: I like Louise Glück’s poetry.  I cannot work in a garden beside someone and not think of her lines from the poem “The Garden in The Wild Iris”: “Look at her, touching his cheek / to make a truce, her fingers / cool with spring rain; / in thin grass, bursts of purple crocus– // even here, even at the beginning of love, / her hand leaving his face makes / an image of departure”.  Glück is intimate and distant; she exposes her narrator with brutal force and yet withholds.  She has an impressive volume of work, and Poems 1962- 2012 contains each book—eleven in total.

I read in Glück’s essay “Education of the Poet” that she remembers, verbatim, most of what she’s written.  Perhaps this is possible because much of what she writes circles around the same themes.  I don’t think this is unique in an oeuvre, and I don’t see this as a failing of the poet. But like friends who begin a road trip in high spirits and return home tired of each others’ repeated stories and discovered habits, I think I like Glück best in single book servings. I’m very glad to have her entire works at my fingertips, but it was a poor idea on my part to run at it cover to cover.  The themes become overbearing, full of familial sorrow, and I felt dazed and overwhelmed at the end. As an example of her repetition, I’ll cite several poems from the final book, A Village Life. “The First Snow” concludes with the lines “Because the mother’s sick to death of her life / and needs silence,” while slightly later the poem “Bats” concludes: “death / terrifies us all into silence.”  On the very next page the poem “Abundance” concludes: “No sound except the roar of the wheat.”  I enjoy each poem individually, but together they pile into a conclusion of silence and a hurried turning of the page.

Poems 1962 – 2012 is an important reference book, and I think diving in and out of the volume allowed poems like “Celestial Music”, from Ararat, to worm their way into my head and emerge later in a dream-state, where I spoke to angels and woke in tears.  A good poem should have that power, and so many of Glück’s poems do. There are countless lines I can cite and wonderful arcs to follow within each book.  I’d be curious to see what the sum total of the book would feel like if it were organized differently—alphabetically perhaps, like Dean Young’s collected works. A jostling and new juxtaposition might have given the poems the breathing room they require.  Luckily, as readers, we can create our own time and space and allow Glück’s words to glow as they so want to.

“The Illusion of Depth and the Four-chambered Heart”–Gala Bent

Poetry Northwest staff writer Nari Kirk interviewed Ms. Bent via email during February and March 2013.

NK: I’ve read other conversations of yours in which you’ve expressed admiration for the Northwest’s forests, the plant life that’s constantly in flux, the stony fixtures that provide counterpoint to the transitory. In your work, particularly last year’s, I see textures and shapes that remind me of the many days I’ve spent in the Olympic Mountains and Columbia Gorge. Tell me how you infuse your love for the outdoors in your art.

GB: Being outside is a necessity that, for me, registers almost as a nutrient—psychologically, physically, spiritually. Without it, I languish! For that reason, when I am conceiving a conceptual focus for my drawings or paintings or other projects, I often find I’m drawn to investigate why the “wilderness” is so important for me. Many artists have tried to capture something of the character of water, wind, rock and plant, so I have good company. In my current view, I try to express both my ecstatic love for all things wild, as well as a certain tension as a city-dweller who must travel to get there. I realize there’s something fictional about the land until you’re actually standing on it. Even then, you’re a packet of preconceptions, and the process of peeling back layers of sight becomes a mental project. I find this frustrating and really interesting.

NK: Many poets investigate wilderness too—Denise Levertov, for instance, whom you quote on your blog. The poem you reference, “Sojourns in the Parallel World,” explores the transformative power of nature, and I like to believe that art holds this power as well. What do you think should be the role of visual art in the human experience? Say a person gazes at a painting and submits herself, fully opens herself, to what the painting can do within her. What might happen? Or in this scenario is our gazer too passive?

GB: The Levertov poem expresses something for me that helps define what I am often after. While I don’t see a distinct line between nature and culture, I do experience a distinction between the “civilized,” human-dominant environment and the wilder spaces where other players are more active. The conclusion to the Levertov poem is significant: Like a tourist bringing back a memento, a piece of art can be a remnant of that experience, even if it can never be fully communicated. In any case, I’m an enormous fan of any art experience that shifts my sense of self-importance and exposes me to a much larger world. The work of newly-discovered artists like Ajay Kurian and long-time favorites like Wolfgang Laib, Ann Hamilton, and Kiki Smith are an inspiration to me in that way. I also think of a poem “The Lives of the Artist” by Kary Wayson, excerpted in the Fall 2012/Winter 2013 Poetry Northwest, that I had the pleasure of hearing her read in person. I love her description of trying to write a poem based on taking a walk, and I love, too, her confession of how difficult it was. The result feels like a very convincing picture of the urban brain as it wanders over and between bits of road and grass, moving between autobiography and observation and wordplay even as she moves past houses under sky and tree.

NK: I like what you said about art challenging our notions of self-importance. Poems do that—they pay deep, sometimes excruciating, attention to other-ness. But they have to do it not just through words but also through form, and in that sense, they’re a visual art. For example, the unit of the line can, in its discrete form, call attention to surprising juxtapositions of sounds and images. How does a print or etching (or any non-verbal visual art) reflect or complement this function of poetry by reimagining, reorganizing, or complicating the familiar?

GB: Just like any of the arts, drawing and painting can act as signifiers for thought and experience that people have in common. Poetry often makes me hear language afresh. The same words that I might use in everyday speech gain a vibrancy and potency in the hands of a great wordsmith that takes me by surprise. At my best, I hope that my drawings can do that. They point at recognizable things—rocks and hair and architecture—and they’re made with recognizable materials—pencils, paper, paint, pixels—but my goal is to remix them into something revelatory. That doesn’t always happen, of course. But what a rush when it does!

NK: As fantastic as it can be, art really is composed of the familiar, though as eager learners we like to make it more complicated. This reminds me of a comedic Venn diagram I’ve seen where one circle represents “What the Author Meant” and the other represents “What Your English Teacher Thinks the Author Meant”; these circles barely overlap. Below them is the hypothetical literary sentence, “The curtains were blue.” As the joke goes, an English teacher would argue that the blue curtains symbolize a character’s inner turmoil; however, the author simply meant, “The curtains were fucking blue.” As an English instructor who’s been guilty of hyper-analysis, I had a good laugh, but I also wondered if that distinction might be true. People who see your art probably want to know what it means. They probably ask you a lot about its significance. Do you find that they read more into your art than you did when creating it? Is there a point at which analysis—as helpful as it is—dismantles the spirit of art or obscures it to the extent that it loses its truth?

GB: That joke is funny. What I face is twofold: First, I am always trying to explain my own work to myself. Even if I have specific intentions, the process of working visually seems to come with constant surprises, and part of the joy of work that isn’t fiercely pragmatic is its ability to contain logical leaps and unexpected implications. Working in a series, I slowly uncover new possibilities and realize what I’m thinking of. Second, when I explain my art to others or am asked questions about specific meanings, I tend to either oversimplify or pour on the whole complicated conundrum. The truth is, when I’m working I think about a whole interwoven host of things, and that can sometimes be difficult to translate into an elevator speech.

NK: Talking about one’s work, especially the why of it, can be tough. So let’s talk about the how. In your work I notice a fascination with geometry, perhaps a few nods to cubism (pardon the “-ism”—any “-ism” is dangerous, I know), a movement interested in dissembling then reassembling reality. Talk to me about how you render the third dimension and then shock it, play with it.

GB: Your point about nodding to cubism is valid, even if it is also by way of other sources as diverse as graffiti murals or paper architecture (architectural plans that are seldom, if ever, built). In my obsessive doodling life, geometric planes begin to pop and fold out of flat patterns, and that has the addictive effect of giving the surface of the paper a life of its own. One of my pieces from last year, “The Illusion of Depth and the Four-chambered Heart,” has a psychological theme as well as an aesthetic one. There’s a tension present when trying to project a dimensional world into, or out of, a flat surface, while being acutely aware of last century art’s obsession with flatness itself. I find myself wondering why I am always mixing the approaches of implied optics (perspective drawing and other tricks to imply depth) versus more direct tactics (surface, gesture, and material to draw attention to the object itself). In our visual day-to-day, we measure and read the world based on a wide variety of diagrams, so it makes sense to me that they should exist in the same painting. I found myself comparing this set of tensions to the way that we know ourselves and one another through an elastic and expansive set of information types.

NK: I love the phrase “my obsessive doodling life.” A writing professor I know carries around a notebook in his shirt pocket; anytime he hears a snippet of dialogue or observes an image he wanted to recall, he’ll jot it down, even if on the move. While the word doodling may carry whimsical connotations, it still seems to be an act of witness, a way to remember not just external events but internal ones as well—what we care about enough to put in physical form before memory or desire mutates any further. How do you indulge your obsession?

GB: By keeping endless sketchbooks, but also by drawing on anything in reach (Heidegger’s ready-to-hand model, perhaps?). I think this process is crucial, at least to my way of working, since in those undirected interstitial periods some of the best new ideas are born. I often think about a description the writer Kathleen Norris shared about keeping a journal of phrases and shreds of ideas. She thought of it as putting seeds in the ground and then waiting, sometimes for years, until they might sprout and grow into finished work. When I go back over my old sketchbooks, I see this sprouting phenomenon at work.

NK: Sketching sounds like a vital component of your artistic process. Speaking of process, I recently read this great book about writing, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop. The author, Stephen Koch, devotes an entire chapter to “The Writing Life,” in which he references the writing habits of accomplished authors ranging from Chekhov to Susan Sontag. What I gathered is that the artist’s life is a confluence of order and disarray—discipline and practice merge with nonsense and blind roving, and somehow, in the end, something worthwhile is produced. How does your artistic life work with or against this rather watery definition?

GB: It sounds just right. I couldn’t describe it more accurately than that! It’s always comforting to read about someone else’s process and realize that the winding path of inquiry and work and thinking and critiquing and scrapping and doodling and finishing and starting again is common. Rather watery. Rather true.

Find more work from Gala Bent here: http://www.galabent.com/

Almost Invisible
Mark Strand
Knopf, 2012

By Justin Boening, Associate Editor for Poetry Northwest

2012 was a remarkable year for poetry. From Eduardo C. Corral’s outstanding debut, Slow Lightning, to Jorie Graham’s finest effort in years, Place, there was much that dazzled, provoked, and inspired. When pressed to make a choice, however, as to which 2012 collection could be called my absolute favorite, I landed firmly on a book of poems not even considered a book of poems by its author: Almost Invisible. Mark Strand’s most recent collection of short prose pieces (as he calls them) has all the trappings of his previous attire—the infamously repetitive diction, the drippy nostalgia, and, of course, that hallmark debonair fatalism. But these poems are far from being placid guff. The poems of Almost Invisible are nimble and tonally varied, smart and introspective—the epitome of Strand’s best late-period work.

In an episode of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, Vijay Seshadri says of Strand:

“…to some extent all of Strand’s poems are about the situation of the artist. He sort of sees the situation of the artist as being co-extensive with the situation of the human being or the situation of consciousness itself…”

Never has this aspect of Strand’s project been more apparent or persuasive. Through a series of parables, Strand again and again depicts the complacency of an apathetic people who have lead the world into an rut of spiritual stagnation—no doubt a figure applicable to each of Strand’s selves (the artist, the human being, and his own consciousness). One poem, “You Can Always Get There from Here,” ends:

“There were once many buildings, but now there are few and each of them needed repair. In the park where he played as a child, dust-filled shafts of sunlight struck the tawny leaves of trees and withered hedges. Empty trash bags littered the grass. The air was heavy. He sat on one of the benches and explained to a woman next to him that he’d been away a long time, then asked her what season had he come back to. She replied that it was the only one left, the one they all had agreed on.”

Here, the buildings, as everything else, need repair. The leaves are tawny, and hedges withered. Of the four seasons that keep track of time only one remains, as if time has stopped or as if the passage of time has become irrelevant. These are the parts of Mark Strand’s world, just as they have been since the beginning, unchanged. But this world is not simply the world he’s inherited; not this time, these are the beleaguered conditions “(we) all had agreed on.”

Longtime readers of Strand will especially enjoy Almost Invisible for the way it humorously converses with past poems, such as in “The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter,” which seems to talk back to both “The Mailman,” a poem from Reasons for Moving, and “Elegy for My Father,” which appears in The Story of Our Lives. They’ll also enjoy the way these poems continue to build on the frivolity and dark comedy that has been present in his work since Dark Harbor. New readers will respond, just as they always have, to Strand’s impeccable timing, the paradoxical, and the haunting manner in which the poems enact “slowly things (slipping) away.” If you missed this book, then run, don’t walk. This is a chance to experience a poet at his most flexible and, oftentimes, his most moving.

Bender: New and Selected Poems

By Carrie A. Purcell, Poetry Northwest Volunteer Coordinator

Dean Young’s most recent collection Bender (Copper Canyon 2012) is aptly titled. In this somewhat lengthy collection (it does cover his previous twelve books) Young’s command of discord and resolution are on full display, and the scattershot can make one feel the late-night room spin. Young is after the full force of the world’s oddities; he writes in “Frotage,”  “How goofy and horrible is life. Just look into the faces of lovers as they near their drastic destinations…Just look at them handling the vase priced beyond the rational beneath the sign stating the store’s breakage policy, and what is the rational but a thing we must always break.”

Young gleefully “breaks the rational” in Bender.  His narrative voices are by turns drunk, acerbic, wistful, ridiculous, tender. They speak with authority, however, even if only over the non-sequential details of their biographies: “It seemed … all would be familiar as the beloved’s name heard in a crowd, my jacket unwashed but absolved, patched by a woman who joined the Peace Corps and lost all her hair to a disease that mostly afflicts chickens” (“Note Enclosed With My Old Jean Jacket”).  Young discombobulates by offering one familiar shouldering aside another until we give up and decide to roll along wherever he goes.

While most selected editions proceed chronologically, Young decided to take a page out of Auden’s book and order these poems alphabetically.  The result is a fascinating enjambment of images that allows the reader a glimpse not into the poet’s progression, but rather his process of reordering, giving flesh to then disrobing, or poking at the various icons he finds meaningful.  Heavy hitters include: clouds, hearts, paperclips, fire, bivalves, insects (especially crickets), sex, the sea, poetry, and the self.  Finding an image from one poem inside or titling another further along, but knowing that they may have been written thirty years apart is one absurdity Young uses to keep the collection fresh.  For example, he writes in “Inverness Gray:” “Bend a paper clip back and forth, it breaks, the molecules can only take so much.…bodies slamming bodies, bent and bent until only a few traits remain.” Eighteen pages later we read in “Lucifer,” “Forever and forever the unbalanced, the beautiful bodies bent back like paper clips, the discharged blandishing cardboard signs by the exits.”

Of course Young’s heart condition informs the collection, but the mortality he presents absurdly waits for us like the end of “Dog Toy.”

he goes
on a talk show with …
a woman who had exhausted all
conventional treatment but when
all hope seemed gone,
she just started concentrating
and drinking a lot of water
until she was completely healed
and able to move paper clips without
even touching them.  What are you
waiting for?  You’ve already
been given your free gift.

At Bender’s end, readers find a fresh awakening to our hilarious, perilous lives.