Sparrow has a big thick one out from Soft Skull, America: A Prophecy (printed in Canada!). I want you to buy this book so you can thank me forever. You will laugh until the soup burbles, and you may not have had any soup. Sparrow is a saint, he is St. Comedy Satire Hilarity Haha, and he is poet first-rate and US citizen first class even if he writes in French, or tries to, but not in this book. What am I trying to say? Here are some Op Ed Pieces from the NY Times, some translations from the New Yorker and a description of his joyous jousts with that magazine (yes, they published him). Proverbs (“Animals can’t see cellophane”). Sex with Cher. Sparrow’s Bad Poetry Seminar (which originated here on About.com Poetry). In applying for an NEA Grant, he must decide if he will include his poem, “Cum Fort”: “Out of my cum I build a fort. / Now I stand on the parapet, watching for enemies.” To find out the answer, you must read the book.
When it comes to poetry –- and believe me, it takes a lot to come to poetry! –- obsession knows no bonds, bounds, nor excesses. Case in point: This Richard Loranger. A poet the minute he appeared on stage in (nothing but) duct tape (Duck Tape?). The time he dragged around every cigarette butt he’d smoked since he had stopped smoking weeks ago, resulting in the performance “In Corpus Flagrante,” a clanking, blithering totem poem. Or, his Blink poems, words artfully cavorting across a huge mural, to be read in any or no direction: Blink and it’s a whole new poem. Or Loranger’s own amazing new poetic form, The Day Was Warm and Blue, poems which always contain those six words –- go ahead, try the form, see what a great poet you really can be. So now, of course! we have poems for teeth, where every one of his gets its own poem, in one of the most extraordinary and virtuosic poetic feats since Francis Ponge took on Soap (1942-67). Ponge on poets: “They know how to hide, to dissimulate their usefulness.” Wrong. Richard Loranger, Poet of Ecstasy in Everyday Drag! Salute You, We Do! For your every breath is a foray into the Unknown! And as the extraordinary poems in this one-of-a-kind venture by a one-of-a-kind poet unwind, the Reader’s Mind gets a much-needed deep flossing, unhidden and totally useful. Richard Loranger is another word for Blessing, and this book is more evidence of that fact.
I really like Jan Heller-Levi’s new book, title a neologism: Skyspeak, go ahead, let it speak for itself. She likes the long hard lines and the abrupt shifts –- a consciousness with flow that stutters at heart beats and wind waves across arm hairs. She connects the dots that keep creating new forms –- check her poems from “The Handbook of Inconsolable Forms,” how the not-quite-title poem “Skywatch” plays off the whole idea of orality and text poetry. But it’s Heller’s humanity that ultimately won’t let you loose, words as direct as bullets, as kisses.
The sheer joy and vavoom in David Lehman’s When A Woman Loves A Man comes close as poems can to Manhattan sidewalk cacophony under the tender care of the shimmering skyscrapers. As Lehman says, “I am what iamb!” He transports Plato to Greenwich Village. When he riffs on Mayakovsky’s “Brooklyn Bridge” he can’t help but have Calvin Coolidge jump, not shout, for joy. And on 12/19/02 this ultimate New Yorker declares “that life had resumed, ordinary bitching life had come back.” With Lehman, life is the poem that writes itself.
“If one were to refer to me as an Arab-American writer that would be fine so long as they understood that I could also be referred to as a Palestinian, American, French, and Latina.” This is the world view you read in Nathalie Handal’s The Lives of Rain that seems to contain not just the Palestinian Diaspora, but the global human migratory paths of pain. Cultures collide, dignity becomes bread, respect equals language. And the body, in these terrific poems, breaks over and over as each individual steps past the horrors into a world of possibility.
