Poems from Rome, Sarajevo, Heidelberg. Poems from Attica, Soledad, and of course, her beloved Willow. New book from Janine Pomy Vega means you get it straight between the eyes, where the dream is, where the skull is, where the opening makes for a tomorrow. The Green Piano (Black Sparrow) celebrates the companionship of poets (Jack Hirschman puts in a couple of cameo appearances, Yannis Ritsos, Fee Dawson RIP). The whole idea of the title is an opening of the instrument, the organic instrument, by the artists propelling music towards the stars, providing the sounds people dance to. Janine is a fiercely political poet, an indefatigueable poet teaching in prisons and in the fields with migrant workers. And she is a poet who knows how to compose “Doing Nothing.” Buy the book. And be sure to hear her read when she’s in your town.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, bombs away! His epic Americus, Book 1 (New Directions) explodes a history of poem shards, a time-traveling shriek of a manuscreed (as he terms it). A heady mix of Cantos-style culture leaps and Paterson-like text-sampling, Americus pins the nation on a map, investigates with a constantly moving eye, and is bursting with scrapple and grapple. Good footnotes allow you to go further. Ferlinghetti’s links put Google to shame.
When the interior holds while the physical leaps and flings, you’re in the extraordinary realm of Honor Moore. Her new book, Red Shoes (Norton), dares dream incest along with the most proper of wakefulness, handles full-tilt sexuality with a transcendental brush. She’ll open up with a sestina, “New Shoes,” but by the time the title poem appears, the very last poem, the form is gone, shoes are red, all is memory. Extraordinary.
How great is it to have a big new book of poems by David Meltzer to join last year’s Beat Thing, uproarious tilting with Beat Iconocrophy via essay and poem. Thanks again to Michael Rothenberg who’s done the same kind of service for Philip Whalen –- ah! To have David’s Copy (Penguin) in your hands is to have the answers to the conundra in Beat Thing: folks, the “Movement” if there ever was one is up to you, but the poems are here for you to have, hold, and, as Meltzer says, de- and remythologize the thing. It’s jazz kabbalah, it’s image direct, it’s smoking and it’s fire that builds. Bout time.
Heal (Between the Pages of These Folks We Seek a Panacea), edited by Gladys E. Perez-Bashier, known, as a poet, as Poppy, is for anyone looking for the New New, an adventure into Truth and believes, as Perez-Bashier does, that Poetry is Where Things Begin. All forms of literature, all manner of people, represented. This is the self-publishing dynamic that built US poetics, still in service, deserving your support: Keith Roach, David Acevedo (first published appearance, I believe, of thelazyfleecebeast), Diana “Gitesha” Hernandez-Correa, Frank Simone, Angelo Verga, Barry Wallenstein (and, disclaimer, Bob Holman).
Gays have always been in the forefront of US poetry: Whitman, Stein, Hughes, Ginsberg. But it’s at this curious hinge of 21st century NOW that poetry itself has found its way into the ear of public consciousness, so that we are finally hearing Whitman’s varied carols tambourining. Orality is reemerging in poetry, so it’s natural that gays are writing and performing some terrific poems. Emanuel Xavier takes the blend he created from the performing poetry scene with the drag balls and queer houses in New York and nationalizes it with Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry (Suspect Thoughts Press). It’s been difficult to find the work of these stars on the page anywhere, and here we’ve got them, spinning on dialectics political, gendrified, aesthetic! And stars they are: Cheryl-Boyce Taylor, Regie Cabico, Staceyann Chin, Celena Glenn, Daphne Gottlieb, Maurice Jamal, Shane Luytens, Marty McConnell, Mavis Montez, Alix Olson, Shalija Patel, Horehound Stillpoint, Emanuel Xavier. (Disclaimer: foreword by Bob Holman).
~Bob Holman
