Tag Archives: jake levine

That Email About That MFA

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Maybe this post deserves another look. Or maybe I’m just twisting the knife, stirring the stew, swatting the bees.

Someone once told me that if everyone had a doll made of themselves that had one of those pull-strings that dolls used to have, and we all could have one tagline, my doll would say, over and over again, “You’re arguing over semantics.”

Maybe that line applies here, and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it applies everywhere, and therefore nowhere, because its own universal application implies redundancy. By all means, don’t let me have the final words on this matter, and don’t let any words on something so transitive as a blog have finality.

-N. Stagg

Review of Kim Gek Lin Short’s Run

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Kim Gek Lin Short’s Run is nothing short of what you always wanted from a cross-genre hybridity of poesy merged with a fatal fable of death/love/sex. I think it’s poetry, but there’s a narrative, so should I just call it new? The new new poetry for the reader that demands a narrative! The closest thing I can think of is Berryman’s Dreamsongs 1-77, where you are either expecting Henry or Mr. Bones to let you in on the story… but they keep you waiting… and not unlike Berryman, there is the aforementioned death/sex, but with Short, and more importantly, the  tale of the girl who gets sold? raped?… married? Either way, these poems, also like Berryman, are strung together by lyric, by music.

In my dream I am running. I turn around and look behind

me there is the cabin and below it dug ground, a place where

my death could be.

from “Run”

This is Lala, a post-confessional matriarch of the counter-Asian-once-removed-immigrant-American-Emmylou Harris, whose center is in her boots rather than her body (this is fractured, I know, but bear with me)

I’ll tell the cops how Baba is a philosopher. How he knows

about theoretical things like why I should give the tourists a

price they do not need to pay beforehand. Make sure they put

the bucks somewhere not the suitcase. In a pocket maybe. On

the body. Why I should never tell my mother he told me to

do this.

from “Suitcase”

In this beautifully crafted handbound chap, from Rope-a-Dope press, Short lays out  the first three sections from her upcoming full length book of poetry China Cowboy (Tarpaulin Sky). The three sections are “ Hell, Hong Kong 1989”, “Fist City, Hong Kong 1997” and “La La Land, Hong Kong 1989”, and while out of order, chronologically, they run thematically from birth, “Ren made the cabin and three la las were put to be. A time of clouding. The roof hit by lightning,” to sexual perversion and loss of innocence, “Ren makes a bargain. He swears to the devil he wants La / La he will do anything… He goes all the way inside.” and later, “Ren is like a bestial organ inside my body that scares me it’s there. No, I say. / / When I can no longer remember my mother I wake up in the middle of the night thirsty and Ren gives me milk. I want water.” To the ambiguous death, which might be thought of as a cultural rebirth, but is La La still alive? – “ After they find La La’s body her mother dreams that she is washing La La’s bloody George V school uniform in a cement sink supported by La La’s legs, boots – on. She is able to get the stains out and she puts the uniform on the line outside the kitchen window to dry. It never dries.”

While sexual deviancy between girl and older man, Lao Ren and La La, provide intrigue, the real struggle here is for La La to acquire identity through American culture. She objectifies her desires through American-female country singers and cereals, and somewhere in between the two, any reader can assemble a remarkably crafted and singular voice for the desire to ‘belong’ to a culture that is not one’s own.  I believe the book’s greatest success lie within the unique fabric that create that character – the language that describes it. Particularly nouns – cowboy boots, knives, microphones, cereal, cabins, are all reoccurring, are reified, and build on a wanton (pun?) Butcher Holler / Loretta Lynn mythology that is alien to the character, geographically, but intricately wound in the fabric of the narrative. Lao Ren, too old to be taking on La La, ends up marrying? / sexing her. If you’re lost, see Coal Miner’s Daughter. That’s where the tension occurs, where the real fabric of what makes this book interesting comes from; geography and culture isn’t what makes us interesting as human beings, but the interstices of experience. (our collective tragedy)

Americans masturbate too. The white devil does not understand why La La always wears her right cowboy boot even to bed. He asks her one day. She says she has her reasons. Then she thinks to herself looking at his gray chest hairs bony pelvis… La La sleeps hard so when she is sleeping he takes off her boot tube sock and with a flame in his finger inspects the handprint wrapped around her lower leg. Calculates she must be about twelve years old.

-JL

Review of Shelly Taylor’s Black-Eyed Heifer

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The man chooses not to see outside of, says my mood’s this, whisks the eggs. An otherwise performance would be a negation of hands into birdcage from which the rose trees grow & so might I, two feet alliance. Fail there & the aster is red sleeper; asters can be red & all October her laden. Since forever is today & today my horse a bike, I call her person, ‘we’ – we go to visit the Brooklyn Bridge. It is ten miles or so roundtrip & since I’m country I smile at everyone, dust off my wheel hoofs & think winter similar to marriage…  when you sell a horse he will not come back.

from Keylight

Shelly Taylor’s first collection Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky) inhabits the possibilities of language, indigenous in its diction, but radically unfamiliar in its jagged syntax and extended lines. This is neither an experimental or pastoral poetry, but a fusion of speech and intellect that reflect a poet who is deeply rooted in the earth, its dirt and concrete, its horses and cats, but speaks in a rhythm that explodes into space, taps into the pacing of a 21st century phantasmagoric, recollected, American landscape and self. If you made Robert Creeley write lines the length of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon says I love you, gave them both the sensibility and precise diction of a contemporary Emily Dickinson riding on a horse fast enough to get from Athens to Brooklyn in 10 minutes, then you’d get something like Taylor’s poems. The pacing is high octane, pyrotechnic, but the discursive function of the content is old school, familiar, and impressively defiant.

Gibraltar, I give you away so easy, shekels, for you are just a baby-/girl I husband myself, still think on. Herein this grand sash/ around her waist, this part of the/ ‘the’: the street kicks, my teeth grit & someone lets out a holler more rebel than get/ yourself on over to my yard sale

From Drowning miss g

Corruption, the loss of innocence, and the perversion of a southern culture and landscape take center stage, but a woman, if she be a poet, rebels against what taints, what comforts, what distills an ideal world into a fallen country. This is no book of nostalgia, but a future battle cry against what was lost and those who remain apathetic.

So I dam up those that need/ a sand-swirling – save the precious – come to change the earth awhile;

And later

And for G,/ whom I know would be wearing a blue bathing suit out on the street pulling hair & kicking as I did, kin of biters, two little broken selves. Blue/ like my first mare Sissy’s eye gone cancerous or blind or worsening like cataracts do, or, a blue for her blindness & mine all the more. Elphin orphan/ child in a honey pot that learnt stir, that against her best learned stay when I said/ it’s time now.

From Drowning miss g

There is a tension and violence to this work between men and women that is paralleled in our relationship to nature. What one discovers in nature is a peace in loneliness. In cityscape, to cultivate that peace, the speaker often alludes to a fantasy spinster version of herself as crazy cat lady, queen of the feline.

damn this man & now that all the street cats have eaten by my hand, I know no more than lonely women who talk the cats up, is how it goes. If I had home enough I’d bring them all in, talk to them Sunday-to-Monday, feed them; self-loathing, you owe the truth.

And later

Men with guns all/sizes, sad now because the city-wide/ordinance, no guns. This is the modernity./ Sons believe I’m a witch done cursed/the field of its deer, by morning/ come home empty-handed. Land voodoo,/ we women love four legs. Tell me now how fine/ mine are.

From For Love

Perhaps what will save us from each other, and from our own ‘self-loathing’ is imagination, is play. Taylor’s greatest gift to us as poet is her ability to revivify words, conjure up a past language and renew our affiliation with it. She uses sound as a way to build intimacy, seduces us by it, and pushes us away just at the right times, just enough to keep us wanting more. In that push & pull we fall in love, and for that this book is a triumph.

keep your flashlight still, this bear / he just might choke me. Anyone can/ save a frog though certain animals are more or less tricky. Along came / a spider & sat down beside ‘er. I engage myself with & as the photographer, / & with & as the photographer I dress my red lips rightly.

From Call the thing til it returns unbothered

-Jake Levine