A friend recently handed me a copy of Bridge and Tunnel by John Hennessy, whom he knew growing up in Rahway, NJ. A wonderful collection—though I’m sure that part of my enjoyment and appreciation came from revisiting some of the sites and sounds (and smells) of my boyhood home. The Merck factory, of course, the trains and neon, the rivers and gutters blooming trash (the ubiquity of iniquity?), the juxtaposition of cattails and oil slicks, the state pen (where I worked one summer)–they’re all here. The language, rhythm, and imagery, often jarring and disjointed, are intense and palpable, and Hennessy is clearly present in the moment when he reaches back into his formative past.

The book title is of course appropriate and evocative. The Rahway area is not far from New York, accessible from New Jersey only by bridge and tunnel. And even if NYC is not often mentioned directly, its specter haunts every poem, representing, as it does, the gateway to something bigger and better, beginnings and limitless vistas (at least from the perspective of a boy in urban/suburban New Jersey). But if New York is the promised land, the otherworld, a state of grace, the bridge and tunnel represent two ways of getting there, two world views and life circumstances. The bridge rises over and above, removed from the grit and desolation below. The tunnel requires a literal and metaphorical descent into the underworld, the base and worm-ridden bowels of the human psyche. The bridge and tunnel suggest an achievable heaven and hell—but while the bridge is always an option, most characters in this book choose the tunnel.

Both structures link two separate but nonexclusive places or states—and here again, the symbolism runs deep. Hennessy apparently grew up in the Irish catholic tradition, and the attendant symbols and references are plentiful. But this tradition (at least in my experience) focuses less on the desire to achieve a state of grace than on the need to repress basic human desires and emotions. Hennessy pairs that upbringing with the classical tradition, the Greek and Roman myths—though not surprisingly, he tends to focus on the myths that deal in some way with the underworld, a gestalt that admixes original sin and the baser elements of our nature. Persephone, the Minotaur, Orpheus, Polyphemus, and even Pan rub shoulders with Satan himself.

Hennessy’s Rahway is not just a figurative place, but a physical space with real inhabitants. Many of these are Hennessy’s boyhood cronies, but some are the neighborhood denizens, invariably damaged and cast off in some way. Of these, the most haunting is a character known as Dog-Star Freddy, an apparent sex offender or pedophile. He appears directly in at least four poems, emerging from his basement (underworld) only long enough to torment birds and lure away delinquent youths. Which brings up another salient feature of this book: it’s not just a collection, its a cohesive whole, and owes a debt to Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Many of the characters glimpsed in early poems return in later poems, often gaining depth and complexity in the interim. So the altarboy of one poem, Paul (whom I knew personally—the brother of the friend who handed me the book) is also seen delivering newspapers and ultimately retreating to a Buddhist monastery in South Korea. When the love/sex interest of an early poem (named Ball—and if that’s her real name, what a wonderful coincidence) returns in the final poem, we learn that his affections for her were much deeper and more complicated than the earlier poem would suggest. Taken collectively, then, the poems suggest a mind that is obsessed and fixated with the past as object, a puzzle that must be solved or a trauma that must be confronted before the poet can move on.

If I have any gripe about the book, it’s that it seems to be written for a small circle of friends, or readers with insider knowledge. But then again, I have to include myself in that group. Hennessy and I had friends in common, and I’d guess he remembers as well as I do the smell of burnt coffee in a certain house on Seminary Ave. I’ve lately been parsing through my memories, wondering whether we had met years ago. A moot point, I suppose: after reading Bridge and Tunnel, I get a sense that I know him.

Has it really been a month since my last post? Blame the holidays (and the fact that I know nobody is actually reading this blog—kind of reduces the urgency).

But I’ve got a stack of lit mags that I’ve been wending my way through. As always, a mixed bag.

Cimarron Review, fall 2011, is visually beautiful and refined, from the cover photo and coverstock to the typography and layout. It has a wonderful piece by Elton Glaser, “Down on the Farm.” What I love is not the pathos—I know nothing about the vicissitudes of growing up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and couldn’t truly relate on that level—but simply the language, the apt metaphor and simile that seems to spring from the particular sensibility of the southern drawl: “you unruly as a mule with a bur in its bowels,” Glaser writes, and “you’ve got more grit than a rooster’s gizzard,” “night crawlers / like convicts at a prison break, betrayed by the moon.” I appreciate metaphors that arise naturally from the environment. I also love the description of catalog items as “those slimsy innuendos of a riper life.” Slimsy? Fabulous! (I assume that wasn’t just a typo—if so, keep it!). I also love the lush, extended metaphor that beings Naveed Alam’s “Citizen of Inconclusive Republics,” which notes, “One must / dry sadness on the balcony till it stiffens, dust off // the sand, take it down the corridors…” On the other hand, this poem begins to ramble and wanders too far from where it began. Also, I’m not real keen on Mary Jo Bang’s attempts to update “The Inferno”: “Inside that cavernous hole / that I was staring at like Cortez at the Pacific…” Cortez? What’s a conquistador got to do with Dante? And is Bang purposely perpetuating Keats’ inaccurate depiction of Cortez as the first European to view the Pacific? I was similarly confused by Doren Watson’s “The Dogs in Shakespeare’s Dog Sonnet,” which suggest the “bark” in “It is the star to every wandering bark” is not a boat but a dog’s yelp. I can’t quite figure out if Watson is being cheeky or not—surely the editors would know better, but then again, who can say?

River Styx, #86, is far less visually appealing, but it is always worth a read. The highlight for me in this issue is Joan Murray’s “Groundhog and Crow.” Told from the perspective of a dead groundhog—now there’s a mindset you don’t enter every day—it describes and fully conveys her ecstasy, her rapture, at the coming of a crow, which can only be the longed-for god:

I love the urgency of the language—two stanzas, the first comprising two sentences, the second, just one, chopped up by commas in increasingly small and compelling pieces (I also have a soft spot in my heart for poems about dead and dying animals). You can’t stop reading until the end, which leaves the reader with perhaps the same “breath-knocking thud” that signaled the animal’s demise. Interestingly, this poem is followed by another by Elton Glaser (would that I were so prolific!), this one recounting the overall scene of desolation that was brought to New Orleans by the great hurricane. Moreso than the “Down on the Farm,” though, this piece seems to require a connection to the place—and though I’ve been to New Orleans a few times (mardi gras!), I guess I just don’t share that intimacy. Also noteworthy is George Bilgere’s “Eighty Yards,” which starts with a literally pedestrian scene—”a couple of black kids / are ambling down Lee Road”—that launches into a whirlwind of spectacle as one of the kids, a track star, begins racing down the street, “a pulse of pure velocity,” before settling down again, a brief meteor that takes us outside ourselves and our suddenly sad limitations for just a moment. The whole poem is a single sentence, which dutifully conveys the awe and wonder of being visited by a god, “wing-footed Hermes,” in the least likely place. I love that the poem is essentially pictorial, narrative—the poet lets the scene speak for itself and resists any attempt to editorialize. Also notable is Robert Levy’s “Delivery.” Levy diplays a deft handling of rhyme in these six six-lined stanzas rhymed abcabc. The scene, too, is wistfully portrayed, and the poem ends with a balled up wad of emotions—inadequacy, regret, shame, desire–that is objectively mirrored in the balled up wad of dollar bills that fill the speaker’s hand.

Well, that’s two. Plenty more lit mags are piling up on my desk.

Two new books of poetry have recently reached my hands (consolation prizes from contests that I entered and did not win). The first, Mutiny Gallery by B.K. Fischer, won the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State Univ. The second, The Madeleine Poems by Paul Legault, won the 2011 Omnidawn Poetry Prize.

What I find most interesting is that neither is a mere (mere?!?) collection of poems, but a book-length concept. Ms. Fischer’s book is a novel in poems—not necessarily a single poem in numerous, identically shaped parts, such as Seth’s Golden Gate or Tennyson’s In Memoriam, but a series of distinct poems that comprise a chronological series. Indeed, the publisher has dubbed it “a road trip novel-in-verse.” It tells a tale of a mother who runs away with her young son, fleeing, it seems, an abusive husband. Details of their current flight and past life are revealed through a series of museums that they visit along the way.

Mr. Legault’s book does not seem to impose any chronological narrative. The poems spill freely across the page, with little to suggest a unifying genius—some are only two lines long, others comprise sequences wandering across the breadth of several pages. All, however, share the conceit—or is it more of a gimmick?—of the name “Madeleine” in the title.

Ms. Fischer’s poetry at times exhibits an alluringly mischievous approach to language, marked by an engaging display of compression and elision; at other times, however, it reads more like a blog entry. Mr. Legault’s book mostly left me scratching my head, though of course, the same can be said of much of contemporary American poetry, which seems to combine the solipsism and sparseness of the Deep Image or American Surrealist movement with French Absurdism (and, one may go so far, Computer-Generated Nonsequitur). Indeed, I had the suspicion, leafing through this book, that many of the individual poems were first penned under different titles, until the poet was inspired to impose a unifying structure in the form of the cryptic Madeleine sobriquet.

Which brings me back to my earlier point—is it becomingly increasingly necessary for a contest-winning book of poetry to be more than a straightforward collection, but rely upon an overarching theme or concept? Has poetry become too homogenized, to the point that a manuscript requires something more to distinguish it from the rest? Or does simply thinking in terms of a book-length project imply a grander genius that demands the attention of editors and reviewers? It’s possible, too, that these and other poets have an unacknowledged debt to Bell’s Book of the Dead Man, the influence of which, I think, will not fully be appreciated for many years to come. In any case, I envy those poets graced with the time and wherewithal to conceive and execute such a project. I just wish I could be as enamored of the individual components as I might be of the concept overall.

Recently received the latest issue of Southern Poetry Review. Some wonderful stuff. The cover photo is wonderfully evocative, as was the one on the last issue. I was immediately taken with Anne Pierson Wiese’s “Due North,” an honest and simple character study (appropriate for the honest and simple character portrayed) untainted by excess sentimentality or disconnected irony. The language is a bit talky, I admit, and does nothing in poetic form that it couldn’t do in prose form. But the aphoristic delivery of “It’s long been known that redundant / information, if delivered in novel form, is welcome.” Well, isn’t that what poetry is all about? (It’s hard to get the news from poems….) And I love the vivid presentation of driving “down white / gravel roads blinding as sun that gave off great ghosts / of dust as we passed.”

I also enjoyed George David Clark’s “Update to the Old Encyclopedias,” a poem with a formal rhyme scheme that likens the decline and fall of the speaker’s parents to the decline and fall of great empires. What’s not to love about a poem that successfully rhymes “Napoleon” with “simoleons” (as in dollars?)

Maura Stanton’s foray onto the rooftop of a cathedral in Galicia is recounted in “Las Cubiertas.” Interesting rhyme scheme: abba cddcc, sort of a variation of the Spenserian stanza. She doesn’t stick to it religiously (forgive the pun)—and on the one hand, I think a poet needn’t be too dogmatic, in terms of rhyme, but then again, I wonder whether the poet gave up too easily.

Still gothic—but of the Southern gothic type—is Craig van Rooyen’s “Faith Healer.” Powerful language in the service of imagery, as in “the choir, swaying like / cobras in their robes.” Wow, where’d the snakes come from (reminiscent of those rattlesnake-kissing cult/churches, or a sly nod toward the garden of Eden?)? I also love how the traveling-circus/church, set up on a movie theater (religion as spectacle, as commercial entertainment?) becomes “infused with the popcorn / scented prayers of the jobless and the fat.” Of course, the poet takes a risk in including an allusion to “The Andy Griffith Show”—has the younger generation even seen a black-and-white TV show?—but it wasn’t lost on me, at least. And van Rooyen really nailed the ending:

Martha Zweig’s “By Way of Illustration” also caught my attention. I’ve read her work in the past, and have always been awed by the play of sound and words—in fact, it often seems that the words themselves are on some level irrelevant, selected only for the sounds that stack up and reverberate on the page. This poem shares that trait, though ultimately, it did not impress me as much as some of her other poems.

All four seasons, I believe, are represented in this issue. Another favorite shows a Winter scene: “Plowing,” by Brittany Perham. I love how the description of “the sliplace / of crusted pasture” evokes a covering of snow as sheened and satiny as a slip, and how “someone’s spring-stacked heap of burn wood” seems so much more appropriate than “firewood,” which is hard to say without imagining a cozy fire in the hearth—an image that would undermine the pale and chill that dominates the scene portrayed. I also love how the brothers undershirt echos the sliplace (assuming I’m reading that word correctly), further accentuating the wide whiteness of the scene.

Paul Martin’s “The Flood Baby” also held my attention. A simple rendering, just two sentences long, that captures the devastation of a flood and the subsequent hopeful (and doomed?) rebuilding through the detail of a child who pulls a doll from the storm debris. The details are vivid, but not so extraordinary as to draw attention from the narrative. Too much linguistic fervor would certainly have undermined the final lines, which describe the doll’s “ashen face, / the wide, still terrified eyes.”

I also reread Neil Shepard’s “March Myth” several times, each time rewarded by new connections and insinuations. It’s not quite clear to me wether the speaker is the baby, or another child in the house, or even if the perspective is that of a child. The poem starts on a blue note, literally, with “Postpartum blues / and Parker’s ‘Embraceable You.'” March is of course the end of Winter, so it’s physically true when Shepard writes, “The snow’s growing old.” But the snow immediately takes on greater connotation, speaking “an idiom peculiar to itself: crust / rust dust just us. Like the snow, we are all aging into dust. And I love the unexpected (perhaps even unintentional) interconnections: one stanze has the word “world” twice, so it’s hard not to misread “word” in the next stanza as a third “world.” And we also go from “a cradle to rock” in one hand to a baby “on a roll” in another. Rock and roll? Well, we do have Charlie Parker. But the sense of longing for the mother is palpable, especially as she wraps her arms around herself and dances alone in the kitchen. And while I’m not familiar with the Parker version of “Embraceable You,” I know the lyrics of the Gershwin original, which croons, “above all, I want my arms about you,” so it’s even more bittersweet as the poem concludes with the mother “opening her arms” (but for who, if anyone?).

Lots of charms in this latest issue of SPR, and I love them all.

My problem with Southern poetry, in general, is that it often takes the form of, “hey, remember when we were kids, and we did this or that, and the grownups behaved a certain way? I kind of miss that.” Or, it simply presents a stoic, deadpan image of a stoic, deadpan people. Many of the requisite images recur and recur: the barns, the tobacco fields, a particular species of tree, the scrimping mother and repurposed rags. And of course, there’s race and religion–some poets seem to acknowledge the necessity of discussing such issues without actually discussing such issues (but rather, falling back into the safety of nostalgia or dispassion).

Crab Orchard Review dedicates its most recent issue to what it calls “Old & New: Re-Visions of the American South.” And while some of the poems do exhibit some of these traits, many succeed in breaking through the pattern. I was particularly intrigued by the first poem in the volume, “Yesterday, four nurse sharks washed up on Wrightsville Beach,” by Lavonne Adams. The description is intense and attentive, as when the mangled sharks are portrayed “trailing / loops of blue intestines,” “brightened by patches of ragged pink flesh,” while their fins in the morning light “flow / coral, a shade too lovely for death.” (Of course, even this fine poem shifts back to a childhood memory, and closes with a prayer of sorts. Also, the poet might want to consult a dictionary regarding the difference between “further” and “farther.”)

Richard Boada’s “Louisiana Fugue” was another bright spot. It opens:

I love the way the second line ends—”the town’s bald,”—because it forced so many rereadings: First, I read “the town is bald,” but realized that wasn’t right. Then, I thought the comma was incorrect, and read “the town’s bald men and women,” but the second comma clearly delineated an apositional phrase. Finally, I read “bald” as a collective noun, further described by “men and women.” On the other hand, I think the poet might need to consult a dictionary about the difference between “lipid” and “limpid” in the phrase “tonics on shelves / mulitply in lipid mirrors.” (Though admittedly, the correct “limpid” does not sound quite as neat).

In “What I see Now,” Kathryn Stripling Byer moves narratively from the culture of the Southern debutante to the bombing of the Montgomery baptist church decades back. A poem in two parts, it starts with a literal revisiting of place and moves to the past (which is a different country, after all). Both parts are formally united in their final stanzas, which move from a freeflowing long narrative line to a short series of clipped lines, each 3- or 4-syllables long.

I also liked the aphoristic pronouncements of Amorak Huey’s “Wade Walton’s Barber Shop,” which notes, “nothing / outlasts music,” and “every train whistle / sounds like the one before, the one after.” And still, depsite the quiet desperation, the poems ends on a note of awe, of walking out “into this wonder / and smoke and silence of springtime.”

Another highlight was “Maple Ridge,” by Erika Meitner. This disturbing narrative juxtaposes the attempt of a mother to lead a normal, civilized life (as might be defined by a university professor) against the pride of a man teaching his prepubescent stepson to wield an assault rifle. The title hearkens back to “Ruby Ridge,” which has became sort of an Alamo moment for the weaponized radical right. The poem takes on even deeper connotations in light of Ms. Meitner’s current position (as noted in the the contributor bios) as a teacher in the MFA program at Virginia Tech, site of a recent student massacre by a deranged man carrying more firepower than reason would allow. Once again, though, the poet needs to consult a dictionary about the difference between “dissemble” and “disassemble” in the lines, “The wind does not howl. / It surgically dissembles / each set of metal chimes / we hang from the porch eaves.”

Another standout was James Thomas Miller’s “George Jone’s 4th of July Party, 2000,” which tells a quirky narrative that revolves around a Southern gothic character.

Jenna Rindo’s “Swallow a Southern Cure” was notable as being among the very few (perhaps the only?) poem in the volume to employ some sort of formal device–in this case, the pantoum form. The pantoum, which repeats two lines from each stanze in the following stanza, can be limiting, to be sure, but Ms. Rindo is not strict in her interpretation, and the result is surprisingly fluid.

Two poems by John Willson also merit mention, “The Good Appetite” and “Blacksmith.” As for the first, I’m reminded of a poem by Billy Collins that remarks how few poems are written from a position of contentment. The whole poem comprises a single sentence, which gradually builds to its crescendo summary: “you are ready to go on.”

“Blacksmith” mentions the “Gullah tour” of Charleston, which ties it thematically with the following “Gullah Women,” by P. Ivan Young. This poem, too, has some remarkable language:

Such language is all the more striking in juxtaposition to the Gullah patois, which seems incapable of expressing such ethereal beauty.

Of course, the connection from one writer to the next is coincidental: the poets are arranged in alphabetical order. I can’t help wonder wether a more focuses editorial eye could have positioned the poems in a way that might suggest deeper connections and evoke subtler nuances.

The Oct/Nov 2001 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle had an interview with a poet I hadn’t read before, Katherine Coles. Her credits include a recent stint as poet laureate of Utah and director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute at the Poetry Foundation. I was intrigued by Ms. Coles’ background in science and mathematics, and admired her explanation about how the scientific method informs her poetry. Much modern American poetry seems to eschew any critical analysis of the ways we make sense of the world. Perhaps this is reflective of a broader American zeitgeist (starkly evident in national politics) that disdains reason and nuance in favor of intuition and inherited beliefs. Many poets seem to reject logical clarity and rational narrative (and basic sentence structure!) to get closer to the unadorned “feelings” that occasion a poem’s conception, but too often, such tactics come across as simply sloppy and imprecise. Worthwhile poetry must combine intuition and a sense of tradition with a willingness to question generally accepted tenets and a desire to fill in the blanks in our understanding and experience of the world—the same qualities that might well motivate good science. In the interview, Ms. Coles notes that “The uncreative scientist is a technician; the undisciplined poet merely a flake. Neither will produce much that matters beyond the moment.” Well said. (Note to the magazine editors: a semicolon should separate related but independent clauses, not sentence fragments.)

The interview concludes with a few selections from Ms. Coles’s work, and here, I must confess to some disappointment with the formal structure of the poems. Many of the rhymes are simply too slanted to qualify. For example, the line endings in the first stanza of “2000” set an expectation for a familiar abba rhyme scheme: arbitrary–this–kiss–obituary. So far, so good. But the line endings in the next stanza already undermine the expectation: years–heaven–gone–numbered. If it were just one stanza, we might just let it go. But Ms. Coles continues to push the boundaries of what me might consider rhyme—and ultimately pushes them too far. It’s really a stretch to rhyme “passion” with “insist on,” “something else” and “quarrels,” and “violence” and “voice,” as Ms. Coles does in this poem. Similarly, the poem “Anthropomorphism” pairs “film” with “unknown,” “rebuilding” with “unstrung,” and “heart” with “comfort.” One wonders why the poet would bother establishing a rhyme scheme only to ignore it as often as not—or, as Frost might’ve said, why bring the net to the tennis court but never string it up? One of the true virtues of rhyme is that it forces the poet to concede that his first word choice might not be the best, forces an openness to other possibilities, forces and analysis of alternatives. Surely, these are qualities that any researcher would recognize as essential. It’s bad science to fudge your data; it’s bad poetry to fudge your rhymes. Of course, in these same poems, Ms. Coles manages a few surprises—she rhymes “squirrel” with “barrel” and makes the pairing seem completely natural, even inevitable. The magazine only presented a small sample of her work, and I’ve no idea how representative that sample is—but I’d have liked to see more of that scientific rigor in the formal vehicle of the poems.