In Julie Sheehan’s Orient Point (Norton) we have the natural impulse of Amy Clampitt, the unveering gaze of Marie Ponsot. Julie Sheehan is a surrealist in the kitchen, a documentarian of dreams. She is everyday fearless, an unassuming beauty. Orient Point, that’s Long Island, right? Right. And yet. Here are poems that fade slowly as sunset, only to rekindle, catch light, refract, catch fire. It’s a family saga, right? Right. And yet. I dig Julie’s poems deeply, their jazz and burn.
From Amos’n’Andy to Comme des Garcons, Patricia Spears Jones hauls the world into the delightful Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha). Patricia is artist as poet -- she applies various finishes, she is aware of looking, there is a critic working with the form. This makes for a book of wonderful surprises and a shimmer surface. Speaking of which, Sandra Payne’s htmlizations of Patricia’s and others’ poems is a must-see site. Click on the third panel to experience “Shimmer,” on the fifth to learn “How He Knows Me.” More sensuous than pornographic. But it’s close!
Robert Creeley’s final book is On Earth (California). Where else? Creeley at once the most grounded, and, somehow, most ethereal of poets, says it simply and oft in rhyme, the playfulness of age, whoever would have thought? Concludes with the brilliant meditation, “Reflections on Whitman in Age,” including an illuminating Section of Duncan’s The Opening of the Field, followed by this comment: “I could go on quoting. Age wants no one to leave.” Certainly not the Figure of Outward. To savor. Farewell, Friend.
Grave of Light, the big hot Alice Notley New and Selected 1970-2005 (Wesleyan), is a must-have-read-keep. Generous and demanding, Notley mines her trove with intellect and whim, keeping to a chronological spine, spinning in particles of her sequences, keeping things aboil. At her talk for the Study Abroad on the Bowery Visiting Writers Series at CUNY recently, she told some of her lost short stories, her earliest writing, and the ghosts behind those stories. This important book also tells the stories, and rereading is the way to hearing the voices and climbing with them into a radiant vehicle.
The joke, of course, is that Jack Wiler thinks his life is not fun so he invites the reader to have fun, Fun Being Me (CavanKerry). The fun is no irony. It is the glint of real that sparks every line in his new book, in his face, in his decision to live it straight, not fancy. Wiler is one of our most underrated poets, and if you haven’t read him yet, here you go. In this book he even broaches his time with AIDS, a topic till now verboten for him. The bleakness, the searing truth of it, stops you cold. But, as he says about his brother (us) in “The Taste of Beer in Late Fall,” “He needs to know. / I need to tell.”
I’m weighing in here on Elizabeth Bishop’s Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), edited by poetry maven and New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn. And folks, the word is passion, and it’s Alice’s for poetry and for Bishop after Dickinson, and it’s Bishop’s for the essential. And together these two give you reason to live. The drafts/fragments are fascinating, the notes illuminating and clear. Any brouhaha about how poems, drafts, fragments, shards or splinters are best left in a box in a dust museum is beyond the point, so far beyond the point of what poetry is that it becomes a precious thing in a rear-view, you up front protecting. Poetry Needs No Protection. Reveal!
1719 Union Street (Wasteland) is the slender first from Alicia E. Vasquez, a poet who was “discovered” when Steve Zeitlin, Director of City Lore, “the urban folklore center,” tracked down the author of a 9/11 poem found posted at Ground Zero. Vasquez remains a singular voice, straight from the street called Heart. An autodidact, Senorita Vasquez toes no line, ethic or aesthetic -- she says it like it is and it is: “often I’d bathe and dress her / her pride in my hands / to give back if she became lucid / ‘can’t stay long’ I told her / and left her in Miami / with those costly ineffective medicines / lined up in rows like soldiers on their way to a lost war.”
I need only quote one line from Manifest Density by Eddie Kilowatt (Full Contact): “lucky is the man / who finds the clitoris / at an early age.”
Willie Perdomo’s Cypher Books, an imprint of the sensational zine and culture nexus Rattapallax, continues its run of Best of the New with Roger Bonair-Agard’s excelsior Tarnish and Masquerade. A whirlwind whose performances are pure music and plain magic, Bonair-Agard’s first book is a carousel of language, physical, sonic, and pulse. The accompanying CD is, like all Cypher productions, well-made with touches of experimentation: here, Milica Paranosic adds organic sounds to “cane Brulee” that conclude with a real tropical downpour, Jammaster Celena Glenn beds three poems, and the CD concludes with a rousing live performance recorded in Munich.
