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the review books come in. “Take what you want,” said my editor as I
hopped through the door a couple of weeks ago. The kind of perks I can learn to
love. I already had a little stack going before the windfall, and now, it’s close to
being a teetering stack. So, let’s start at the most illogical place – the bottom.
That is, the books I picked up a few months ago. The poetry books I’d waited for
for months.
At the last South By Southwest Poetry Show, San Francisco’s Manic D Press
featured four poets in a show-stopping showcase. The Bay Area duo represented in the
round-robin, Oakland’s Beth Lisick and San Francisco’s Justin Chin, are two of the most
dynamic poets on the slam poetry scene, each with distinctive styles and memorable
presences, and in releasing their books, Manic D has done a valuable service to slam
fans by giving scripts which with they can follow along.
The books are also great reads. Of the two, Lisick’s Monkey Girl (Manic D, $11.95, paper) provides the most immediate gratification. Comprised of
fast-moving prose pieces and narrative poems, the book is full of savvy observations and
smart personal politics from a sharp and sassy writer. One of Lisick’s primary
strengths is her journalistic ability to get and use great quotes, such as the
reprehensible men from her “Man Comes Up to Me in a Bar” series, or from the
owner of a San Francisco rock club who says, “I can’t bring my ad in. I’m too
depressed. Here comes stupid ass fucking Christmas and nobody cares about rock and
roll.” But Lisick also makes a number of cutting observations on her own, especially
in “The Answer Is Plastic,” based on her high-school stint as a
secretary for a plastic surgeon, and her highly caustic “Skinny,” a piece
about anorexia that deceptively appears insensitive before revealing itself to be nakedly,
transcendently profound.
Bite Hard by Justin Chin (Manic D, paper, $11.95) contains a denser
thicket of poetics and language than Lisick’s book, and his tattooed punk edginess
and gay Asian heritage starts his writing off with a propulsive and combustible
inertia which he often takes to extremes. At first read, his barbed tongue and fearless
writing style might be unsettling, but it’s just that quality of shake-up that makes
Chin such a rewarding poet to stick with. Whether it’s the metaphysical bedroom
politics of “Flesh/Wound,” the displacing, normal-world-is-weirder quality
of “Sold,” or the tumultuous ranting laments of “Pisser,” Chin finds beauty in
vulgarity and parades it like a peacock. There’s a lighter side of Chin, too, as he
good-naturedly skewers ex-boyfriends’ taste in mood-setting music, the dangers of romping
around in the wild (“Nature makes me itchy”), or crass tour guides. But
he’s at his most powerful and most insightful apogee when he’s at his most
incendiary.
Speaking of incendiary, and for that matter, performance poetry, there’s
Verses That Hurt (St. Martin’s Griffin, paper, $14.95), an anthology culled from
the New York-based Poemfone dial-a-poem project. The project is quite inspired –
a rotating group of poets host the line for a month at a time, coming up with a new poem
a day – and the resultant anthology includes the pleasing likes of Allen Ginsberg,
Hal Sirowitz, Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, King Missile singer John S.
Hall, and ex-Nuyorican Poets Cafe ringleader Bob Holman, as well as a cadre of
assertive, powerful women with less name recognition but with compelling work nonetheless. In
reviewing performance poetry anthologies, it’s a copout to say some of it just doesn’t
work on the page. Well, of course not – in this case, it’s meant for the phone,
and in documentations such as this, it’s nice to just have the script in hand.
Still, I just have to ask: Might we lose the performance-poem-on-the-page
clich�s? Such as the ALL CAPITAL LETTERS THROUGHOUT LARGE SECTIONS OF THE POEM or the
dance of phrases
all across the page
that calls much more attention
to the empty space than is
necessary?
I’m just asking here. Lord knows poets deserve the kind of presentation
this book offers, complete with hip photos of each one, although again, this sort of
thing just plays into the style over substance thing that plagues performance
poetry. We won’t even talk about the barbed wire motif running through the book. What I
would like to talk about is one of the anthologized, Sparrow. His contributions
range from blas� to unpleasant, but he’s one of my personal heroes anyway – he’s
the one who picketed The New Yorker last year with a sign that said, “My
poems are as bad as yours.” He eventually got published by The New
Yorker as a result of the stunt. Here, though, his poems aren’t just as bad as yours –
they’re worse.
Another interesting package of poems that came down the pike in June just
in time for Father’s Day is Fathers (St. Martin’s Press, $16.95, hard), a collection
of mostly short pieces from 118 (!) American poets. With a pool this large, it’s easy
to find familiar names and favorite poets, and pieces from the likes of Li-Young Lee,
Maxine Kumin, and Louise Gl�ck are succinct, sharp, and worthy of
anthologizing. There’s the occasional curveball, too – I specifically say curveball because of the
contribution from Dan Quisenberry, known more for his career on the baseball mound than
for his career as a poet. The range isn’t quite what you’d expect from a group this
diverse; although there are some divergences from the central theme of memorial and
reflection, a lot of the poems here tend to look back on Dad and smile. Still, as blatant
as the very idea of the anthology first appears, if it gets more Dads reading,
then more power.
Now, on to some solo works. One of the more consistent, active poets out
there right now has just released her 13th volume of poetry, What Are Big Girls
Made Of? by Marge Piercy (Knopf, $25, hard). The book is arranged in five
sections, starting with the “Brother-less” series, a set of linked poems
voiced by a narrator speaking to and about a dead brother. The series starts with a
snapshot and ends with an attempt to make a peaceful goodbye, occasionally spinning
the touching core of the family relationships around more general issues, like Vietnam and
the Sixties Civil Rights movement. From there, Piercy goes from specific
incisiveness to pieces that swell to a centered, grounded voluminousness, without ever
wasting words or throwing out cheap emotion. Piercy can craft, yet she can also sing.
She’s definitely worthy of your attention. Les Murray has the most creative title
of the stack: Subhuman Redneck Poems (Farrar, Straus Giroux, $18, hard). The
title seems to scream “Pick your favorite stereotypical Southern state,”
but Murray writes from a different kind of Southern state – specifically, New
South Wales, Australia – and he’s won numerous awards, including the recently awarded T.S.
Eliot Prize, a British award for the best new book of poetry in English. Murray’s
work does a fair amount of language-bending and language-play; lines like
“Your burnished rims tilt and rebound/among bristling botany,” for instance, shows a
sort of mischievous playfulness. But there’s plenty of clean lines and sharply
expressed sentiments throughout, which Kathryn and Ross Petras peg “a unique and
fascinating type of writing.” Specifically, they hone in on a number of published
poets – many from the 19th century – who bobble rhyme schemes, gum up phrases,
and/or write passages as wooden and clunky as a child’s first birdhouse. They had much fun
at the expense of my own personal favorite bad poet, William McGonagall, who
wrote tabloid-esque pieces about falling bridge disasters, replacements for said falling bridges,
and disasters at sea. But they only excerpt some of his worst pieces, allowing
ample space for the likes of James Whitcomb Riley, whose “The Happy Little
Cripple” works the phrase “Curv’ture of the Spine” into as many places as
possible, and Julia Moore, whose death and disaster-obsessed poetry led one critic to
label her “worse than a Gatling gun.” (The total casualty count in one of
her books? 21 dead, 9 wounded.) Of course, there’s some unfair jabs, such as
Wordsworth’s “The Thorn,” which was a groundbreaking piece even though it might
seem clunky or cloying to the modern reader.
The book is actually quite heavy on 19th-century material, which is sort
of an easy target, given the ornate tendencies of the time, especially when
compared to our more streamlined and direct modern poetry approaches. But still, the book
is ultimately a lot of fun, and the editors are attuned enough to know when to
wrap up the joke. Still, there’s plenty of the 20th century available for
skewering, although that selection process could be a little less wry and a little more
political. An Even More Bad Poetry? Maybe in the next stack.
This article appears in August 1 • 1997 and August 1 • 1997 (Cover).