Ana Castillo’s Watercolor Women/Opaque Men (Curbstone) is the story of the Chicano people from a Chicana, Ella (“She”), whose family memory takes in the Mexican Revolution and whose own life moves from a migrant worker childhood to adulthood as an artist/mother/citizen. For sheer poetic dive, grab ahold of this book-length poem, where rippling tercets spell out a wicked narrative of a wild woman who loves all and forgives none. Fierce and grand, simple and melodic, this is a book that tells all stories only once, as if life were myth, as if animals speak and sing. A grand statement of possibility in these dark times.
From a e to ae aeeeee is how long it takes for a word under slow waves to dissolve to pure sound. This is the domain of Adrian Castro, el poeta salsero, whose slow into maturity is his second book Wise Fish (Coffee House), which was just glowingly reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. Mirabile dictu! Composed solely in Spanish-english-spanglish-cubano-taino-creole y la lengua del orisha. Castro lays out a groove deep as an ocean trench, and you flow with the go –- oracular orality, the rhythmic core of it, the sensuous lilt. Poems speak in clave, you do things inspite, and if you wonder has-this-story-been-told (the story returns)…. Who has the courage to listen to the clank of imagination? That new flag –- is it mango o guanabana? Use the dorsal fin of the wise fish to comb the language free of snarls, tangles and knots. Now you got it, poetry’s music. With Adrian Castro there is always the music. Open book, hear music.
Eye Against Eye (New Directions) is Forrest Gander’s deep rocking voyage from the shoals of the eyelash to the arc of the globe. Nobody starts more interior to reach out further through the guts of human suffering and passion to commune with the heavens. Gander’s attention to language seems both metaphysically dense and effortless, but he’s never anything but a friend standing next to you, telling it straight and story, seeing things the same time you do. His long poem about witnessing/participating in a mugging in San Francisco is something new, a personal narrative that slips artistry into love. Landscapes by Sally Mann open things out, too.
Remember Ken Saro-Wiwa! the Nigerian poet and political/environmental activist, the Pure Poet Figure: while the whole world was watching, he was executed by the Nigerian government in 1995. A new anthology, Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa demands we remember. Edited by British slam poets Nii Ayikwei Parkes and Kadija Sesay with a foreword by Saro-Wiwa’s son, Ken Wiwa, published in England by Flipped Eye, this book is chockfull of poems that reveal the many facets of the martyr’s life of action, both political and literary. Mutabaruka, Sharan Strange, Chris Abani, Jayne Cortez, Kwame Dawes, Amiri Baraka, and a totally great performance poem by Kamau Braithwaite. Linton Kwesi Johnson writes:
“an is di same ole cain an able sindrome
far more hainshent dan di fall of Rome
but in di new world hawdah a atrocity
is a brand new langwidge a barbarity.”
There are also poems in Catalan, Scots, Creole, Castilian paying tribute to Khana, Saro-Wiwa’s Mother Tongue: all are endangered languages. Remember Ken Saro-Wiwa!
Ange Mlinko’s Starred Wire (Coffee House Press) was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. I was the judge. But John Ashbery blurbed it, so I ain’t alone. It’s a heady heady brew –- O’Hara conversation, Ashbery sophistication, Koch hilarity, Schuyler shapeliness, Guest adventures, Notley grain, Mayer utopia, Padgett whimsy, Oulipo oofs –- I’d go on, on & on till the break of dawn, say, but part of the Mlinko wonder is that she doesn’t –- there’s no retelling. She revs, she’s gone, the world map is redrawn, that’s about the size of it for each poem. IF U CN RD THS U CN GT A GD JB it used to say on the subway, some ee cummings gloss foreshadowing the Poetry in Motion standstills. And now, here’s Ange. She’ll advise you what to do, to do it: “Shellac the lilac.” Which I take: Make your own book of this offering. Make a book of the flower. Or, better yet, just make art everywhere all the time! Or, come on now, make the blossom last forever. IF U CN RD TH U R GD PT.
