have you seen this man?

Years ago, I discovered Karl Tierney's work reading a few of his poems in Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS, edited by Philip Clark & David Groff. One of his poems in the book, "Funereal," shifted the earth under my feet. I admired its careful craft, but I also felt suddenly emotionally connected with a voice that was so distinct and unusual from a name I hadn't heard of before. The poem moves from the historical and grand--"One whole ship set with an entire fire, / wasted on a dead Viking" to the painfully "real": "Satin in a coffin ... Who knows which is more apropos for laying grave side / flowers of plastic or flowers of silk / when there's not only a new decade and another country / but a fresh millennium just around the corner." The death here is personal, so it feels enormous, enveloping, and Tierney paints it with a historic sweep; but there's also a knowing in the ultimate insignificance, especially when it comes to the triteness of funeral aesthetics. This voice of urgency, of erudite, of wit and slight indignation, culminates in the crafting of a dynamic piece that runs the gamut of observation and feeling. When I was co-editing the now-defunct online journal Clementine, I reached out to the executor of Tierney's poems, Jim Cory and asked him if I could publish some of his work. He graciously sent me a slew of poems and I chose three from various points in Tierney's life. At that point I didn't expect to see a collection years later emerge from Sibling Rivalry Press, and I am so happy one did.

"Funereal" appears in the 1991 portion of  Karl Tierney's collection of Castro poems, Have You Seen This Man? and it's just one of the jewels in a both modest and extraordinarily rich collection. This book has been sitting on my bedside table for months. Is there some sort of trepidation that writers sometimes face when they read the poems of another writer whose work they connect with so deeply? Perhaps because you want to engage with it so wholly, or perhaps because it's too much to bear. Karl Tierney's life was cut short at 39 years of age when he jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1995. He had been sick with AIDS. He made sure to contact Cory in the event of his death to take care of his work. Jim Cory's introduction to Have You Seen This Man? is especially poignant--lovingly detailed with moments of acerbic reflection of the life and times of Tierney. In linking Tierney's work to O'Hara, Cory sums up much of Karl's poems vividly--"... the voice is both casual and intense. The poems sometimes sound like someone sharing a confidence with intimates, at other times, they could be rants delivered across a cafe table. Much of their subject matter--cruising, dating, soggy overnight assignations, fumbling attempts at relationships and the recriminations that often follow--concerns the search for erotic satisfaction, if not connection..."

This searching moves through the years, from 1983 to 1995, Tierney's coming-of-age as a poet in the midst of such devastation. I admire his ability to capture expansive subjects succinctly. On "Beauty": "It comes from nowhere  /and has the disturbing quality / of knowing your desire." On "Turning 30": "... one discovers there's no age / when one doesn't feel awkward..." On "Vanity": "... for two hundred dollars / I buy a vanity mirror and have it inscribed / Resentment is the Potting Soil of Scars." If Gary Snyder's The Back Country feels like artfully-constructed diary entries from the natural world at the mercy of the material world, Tierney's poems feel like artfully-constructed entries from the material world (the female impersonator "MacDonna" figures, a poem which doesn't seem so keen on Madonna) at the mercy of the natural and also the historical. Through the years, Tierney's voice understandably grows more complicated and complex, with lines running back and forth with various switching of tone, attitude and stance ("I saw your eyes in the brothels of Tangier. / Oops! Wrong century. All right, then..."). The earlier poems sometimes have a winsome quality, like observing the "Arkansas Landscape: Wish You Were Here" poem where "red-nosed boys from the hills / walk free from sin-shod shoes / through the collegetown mall. / Everywhere there's hair blowing / (brown mostly) / and the bushes huddle together / animated in conversations about the sea..." The consistency is within the craft. Most poems have killer openers ("He sits stiff as Lincoln / on my Salvation Army chair...) and killer conclusions ("The good ones have died / or can't afford a face-lift / and wont answer the phone"), fitting since Cory notes Tierney was meticulous about both filing his poems and writing and editing them. Though none of the pieces have a sterile quality--they are very much alive and reeling. And many intricate portraits emerge--the ghosts of Tierney's times--from the bar rag publisher (his "obituaries ... another / name to scratch and claw from his great black book") to the "Adonis at the Swimming Pool," elegantly drawn until the stinging closer "Who would have me discussed in seedy cafes / and ruin me since I'm deaf to the hiss / behind the teeth in that inspid smile." And the poems are deeply rooted in the changing Castro neighborhood, on the brink of and in the midst of 90s gentrification: at a film retrospective "that closes with this Salò, this controversial / gem, the poet-filmmaker's final reel before murder, shown in / a neighborhood whose men are mostly dead or about to be." These are thorny, unpredictable poems of people in the midst of death and great social upheaval--clubgoers (painted fantastically in "Club Uranus" after Auden--"hounds tie bandanas round sagging necks / coyotes buckle silver above crooked tails / old wolves smolder in leather / and sly young foxes preview naiveté in shorts / when not the season / this is called going out"), yuppies, punks, pretty boys, "twinkies" like "Skippy" from "what everybody's calling Generation X / which is something like a brand-name credence / suffering from what Bush called "the vision thing." / Issues around lack, very American"--all of these people are sketched out in multitudes. The country at large is changing as well as the collection hints at the fading of the old American political gatekeepers (like Nixon and Jackie O) for the incoming powerful like Bush and Elizabeth Dole ("... this cold-tit whore you present in ridiculous pumps / as some sort of liberal is far away your worst assault on truth") of the new conservative movement of their time. "Brutally Honest" and labyrinthine is how I would describe Tierney's portraits and [poems and they always link back to the speaker's psyche, pain and predicament. One the eve of turning 40, alive writer / reader to long-gone writer, I feel fortunate to have your collection that I felt I could finally bear to read--one that has specificity, joy, savagery, and now permanence in this world.

-Jeffery Berg


Further reading:

"Language Could Kill Us" by Patrick Nathan

space struck

Sometimes a sparkly poetry collection comes along where nearly every line is perfect and extremely clever. For me, that is Paige Lewis's Space Struck. It's fitting that the book begins with the setting up of a zoo of "Normal Everyday Creatures" since there are plenty of animals that roam throughout the collection from a "goose-drawn chariot" to foxes to pelicans to "oysters gasping in unison." It's the most distinct and apt opener in a collection I've read recently. Like a zoo or a diorama (there are a few of those here), the collection acts as a viewing and a cockeyed, sometimes raw and absurd, engagement with the natural world (the speaker asks "for more tactile participation" with the "Terre Haute Planetarium"; the title poem is from the point of view of a meteorite-struck victim; in another, a purple finch is struck by something in space too--"burned / to the grill of my car"). "Space" is a word used a lot in poems and in describing poems to almost banal levels. Those stacked gray rectangles (like "sticks of Juicy Fruit"; like the shadows we're stuck with) on the cover end up being slyly deceiving, as Lewis's spaces ultimately emerge as far more complicated and artful than the ones typically wrought in poetry. Throughout I felt the speaker's unease--"the vice president of panic"--a constant shifting, moving "through life like I'm trying to / avoid a stranger's vacation photo" in a landscape where stirrings of joy and confidence is easily stifled: "I'm ready to shout, / Look at my healthy new life! But my friend / thinks it's a bad idea to frighten people / in a place with so many hard throwables." Among this backdrop are figures of power, saints and such and God ("God's Secretary, Overworked") who are evoked brilliantly and perversely. There comes a point in reviewing a book where I feel like, as I also did in writing about Luljeta Lleshanaku's Negative Space, as someone in Space Struck is noted as one destined for "a prison sentence for anyone caught / explaining magic." I really admire this book and how it's so skillfully-written, arranged, realized and arch, and seemingly effortless in both humor and heart.

-Jeffery Berg

the back country

I've long admired Gary Snyder's dexterity of language but there was a different feel in approaching one of his single collections than encountering anthologized pieces or his selected. His 1968 book, The Back Country, runs deep with riveting observations, unusual, tactile use of words, and the complex portrayals of the frissons between the natural world and the material world (a "Van Gogh print on the wall: vase of flowers all yellow / & tawny"). It also houses his translations of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji. Fittingly, having the translations at the end of The Back Country, it is immediately clear that their work shares similarities, and that Snyder's work is indebted to him (" flash of a crow flapping / up from a treetop / --spiritless woods-- / --the atmosphere clearer and clearer / cypress trees standing to heaven / in a dead hush--"). Snyder's poems are rich in sound and textures and telling details about the human condition: "The Chainsaw falls for boards of pine, / Suburban bedrooms, block on block / Will waver with this grain and knot, / The maddening shapes will start and fade / Each morning when commuters wake-- / Joined boards hung on frames..." His ability to capture tone, malaise, and those gnarly natural descriptions--more tough and dirty than lush and serene, is stunning. The pieces read a bit like journal sketches along his different journeys in the wild and yet they maintain engrossing perspectives: "... high in a pine-- / from behind the cypress windrow / the mare moves up, grazing. / a soft continuous roar / comes out of the far valley / of the six-lane highway--thousands / and thousands of cars / driving men to work." And later, "... all these crazed, hooked nations need: / steel plates and / long injections of pure oil." Snyder obviously prizes nature versus the human-made, but perhaps because he is so physically immersed in the natural world and his crisp, terse syntax is so involving,  his poems never feel obvious or pedantic. I appreciate the leanness of his compact, noun-heavy lines--intriguing compound words like "nuthatch," "bullhump," and "buckbrush." Among his travels and his forest-living, there are moments of disdain for humans: "... sightseeing buses crammed. / to view bare rock, brown grass, / space..."; and also moments of longing for connection: "I don't mind living this way / Green hills the long blue beach / But sometimes sleeping in the open / I think back when I had you."

-Jeffery Berg

driving without a license

Janine Joseph's debut collection, Driving Without a License, is on a coming-of-age Filipino experience in America--a speaker without the documents, without the license to "prove" citizenry--and it is a frank, lively and illuminating read. What immediately struck me was its kinetics. So much energy, so many verbs tumbling across the page ("we hipped our boxes," "sideswiping"). The visuals of the poems themselves look restless as well, with their twisty indentations. The poems almost spin in space--in junkyards, in childhood rooms, up in the air, and in cars; the poems spin like the speaker, who jumps through memories, investigating belonging. "Assimilation... was only a matter of time... / I had down the Valley girl like, / hugged my binder and books / close to my chest, like in Clueless, / all of my weight on one leg / so the other could be all / like this." Joseph's poems are distinctively Californian, with underlying conflicts of identity. The speaker bravely admits, in "Playing 'Indentured Servants,'" the sometimes mystifying actions of childhood--speaking "the way we in the schoolyard believed Chinese people spoke"--and performative playground power structures of race. Also within the book is an emphasis on naming. Some of the names have been blotted out, just a simple letter (invoking both intimacy and the sense of "Always Hiding") . In "The Name," ("My father's choice was Jennifer..."), a litany of names spill forth along with the speaker's spry associations. "You Lie" drudges up an American moment that still makes me queasy from 2009. Funnily enough, the "You lie" has stuck, but the "reasoning" of it hasn't. And Joseph reminds us in the CNN blurb note that the two words were blurted out by a representative during the State of the Union after "the president denied that health care legislation would provide free coverage for illegal immigrants." In the poem, Joseph writes, "my medical history / was an unidentified coastline." Overall, I found the poems in this book haunting, with sly lines and excellently-wrought pieces in both form and free verse. There are many lovely moments too, such as in "Break" where "I was a ghost away / from wild magnesium / and our braincases were split- / seconds from barreling the mine shafts / with calcium pearls-- / and no search party for me." There are maps--even an era-stamped mentioning of MapQuest--borders, and archipelagos--all indicative of a speaker's on-going searching and defining.

 -Jeffery Berg

the tradition

"The blk mind is a continuous / Mind. There is a we. I am among them. / I am one of the ones. I belong." Jericho Brown's The Tradition is an extremely exact and beautiful book of poems. It truly feels like an absolute collection--one that builds slowly and elegantly--with a gratifying circular effect. I am thinking in particular of its "Duplex" poems which echo imagery and music through form and repetition-play. In the first one, "A poem is a gesture toward home," and it immediately establishes story, the remixing of memory and one vivid concrete detail (that "burgundy car") that end up being carried throughout until its ultimate, gut-punch conclusion--one that so few poetry collections can deliver, and perhaps the most striking I can think I've read in years. The poems feel of-the-moment, but also timeless, and there's a lovely leanness to them, despite their wide emotional, political scale. The book is flooded with the beauty of flowers, their fragility, intertwined with pain. The title poem is a fulcrum, with the scientific names of flora intermingled with black victims of violence. "Summer seemed to bloom against the will / Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter / On this planet than when our dead fathers / Wiped sweat from their necks." Such a sweeping way Brown is able to capture the oppression, anxieties and deep history in just one sentence. As in the "Duplex" pieces, Brown's poems are often rooted in a concrete image that grows more in its complexity until a final knock-out line, like the ones in "The Trees," where describing the crepe myrtles in the front yard: "It's not that I love them / Every day. It's that I love them anyway." Sonically, thematically, everything clicks. And complexity lies in simple words too, like "big" and "fine," which are evoked as "legend," used "long ago" of men describing women and cars. There is a nick of humor, but Brown, per usual, treads deeper, in describing the eventual "wear and tear" of people and things, once prized. If Brown's art in The Tradition delivers painful subject matter through pleasurable aesthetics (those sturdy capitalized lines; the straightforward diction and internal rhymes), it's akin to a statement the speaker delivers boldly in "Night Shift": "... I am touched, brushed, and measured, I think of myself / As a painting." Abuse and torment and personal and societal perils are lensed through art and succinctness, such as the blues refrains in "Entertainment Industry" ("I don't have kids / Cuz I'd have to send them to school / Ain't that safe as any / Plan for parenthood / Mass shooting blues"). One could slip into simplification, but Brown's poems are extraordinarily-wrought ("Layover" is a skinny poem of haunting power). In "Dark," I am reminded of what Major Jackson does in "Double Major," where the poet has a conversation with himself. Like Jackson, Brown also opens up the poem into something larger about identity and place in the world. In The Tradition, I witnessed the craft on display, but I also was so emotionally connected throughout, that I wasn't just admiring the skill, but deeply affected as well. I recently purchased this book on CD, and am looking forward to its arrival, to hear Brown's work back in all its (morning) glory.

-Jeffery Berg


Further reading:

Invention by Jericho Brown (an essay on the "Duplex" poems--which I'm obsessed with)

is, is not

"Instead of 'Come in' she says 'Not now.'" Like Stephen Dunn's Pagan Virtues, Tess Gallagher's Is, Is Not is a rigorous read. The poems could be described as opaque, but there's a challenge more in the use of language and the physics of situation. Association and sentences sometimes move past what I felt would normally be a comfortable, familiar stopping point. The book itself is quite a lengthy tome too. I literally felt the language trying to push itself, twist itself. Perhaps the whole "is, is not," the "two doors," is the paradox that lies within many of the poems: "sad-happy"; "live step, dead step" (with each step forward, we get a little closer to death; "steps" also lead to "mystery ... How else let difference tell you / what you are?"). The poems are often having direct conversations with others, friends, or even illustrating a conversation with something itself, like "Breath": "... breathe it / open to the glass world. It / breathes back / to prove neither it / nor you can end / this exchange of breath / for worlds." There are moments in the poems of the unending--of an almost obsessive circularity: "I come. I go. You stay. You keep on / staying. I come again. You are here." Or in the description of "March Moon": "How unsatisfying half is / even when heading / full..." Admittedly, I was doubting myself if this was at least somewhat the intended effect until I reached Gallagher's "Afterword" which, like Kimiko Hahn's essay in Foreign Bodies, gives a fascinating look into craft: "The kind of poetry that seeks a language beyond the very one in which it arrives may travel from edge to edge... I find myself trying to out-leap what I can almost say... I seem to be writing in some sense beyond language." And later "[my poems] challenge dualities which tend to blot out a range of possibilities." So yes, there is something more than just simple paradox, the simple two doors, and the simple "is, is not." Gallagher's lyricism attempts to stretch beyond.

-Jeffery Berg

pagan virtues

With Pagan Virtues, that Stephen Dunn is up to his 19th poetry collection among an oeuvre of dense and intelligent work, is certainly admirable. There's a slyness to the language here and a resistance to the melodious and the pretty. This can make Pagan Virtues a challenging read musically and aesthetically. But there's no doubt that Dunn has accumulated noteworthy skill. The collection becomes an invite to an inner voice of trickery, contradictions and paradox. Optimism becomes a "vulgar passion." In "Misfortune," the smell of it is "clean they way rain that has yet to arrive smells clean." The title poem hints at the moment we're in where "the inner weather of our nation" is "dimming" (and perhaps the moment we are always in): "everything that smells of dogma / or the forbidden... investigate what's good, / attempt to live in a world a person from / another world might want to much around in..." I love that use of "muck" which is vaulted as both a terrible and casually pleasing connotation. Doubling and alter-identities is explored in "As If Chekhov Had Written It," which references The Americans, an ultimate television show of doubling identities physically, psychically, and culturally. Dunn's poems grapple with death here too, such as in "The Ghost Song of the Retiree" or "The Year Before the Election" when "all the poets / seemed to be dying..." and not of "suicide, or" drinking "themselves into oblivion," as associated with poets, but of "natural causes." Or works directed to "my eulogist," such as "A Postmortem Guide": "I stumble and fall, / shake and drool, but history's daily horror / trumps any condition of mine. What is it / compared to genocides and demagoguery?" There's also a series of "Mrs. Cavendish" poems which routes through an intimate relationship. While Pagan Virtues might not be as shiny and enveloping as other contemporary works I've read this month, its adroitness is undeniable.

-Jeffery Berg