But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

(Red Hen Press, 2012) 

reviewed by Katherine Hollander

“We will learn / more about the cosmos then apply / that knowledge to the arts,” promises Lillian-Yvonne Bertram in her poem “The New Thing,” succinctly articulating the strategy at work throughout her first book, the deft and confident But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise. Many poets these days want to bring the natural sciences to poetry, but Bertram does it with rare finesse and real beauty; instead of clinical mimesis or grotesquery, Bertram delivers what she promises, putting the mysteries of physics and chemistry in service of her own expression of an American reality. And the America she presents is one not only of coyotes, elk, and starlight, not only of cornfields, highways, and 4-H fairs, but also one of racism, misogyny, poverty, and courage.

Bertram is good with language—very good. She is a master of the one-shot, the atmospheric Polaroid of phrase, with lines like, “chuckle-colored barns,” “deer-white light,” “my heart’s blackening egg,” and “the devil in his hide of night.” She deals, too, in the economy of hurt, as in “the julienne I make of my thumb and peppers,” “January’s frigid waistcoat / slinging my belly,” or the horrifying epithet, “nigger piglet,” hurled at a young woman on her way home from the late-shift. Perhaps most powerful is when Bertram combines extra-distilled images with the wry tone of her most frequent speaker, the one who can scoff, “Them and their silky vaginas,” who suggests you “uncostume. And I don’t mean / in the swanlike way,” and who muses ruefully on “dark matters of design: those particulates causing all the trouble.” The spare but gorgeous “Circles in the Sky” (“I want to want / to tell you / about dakota”), the tender “Golfing in the Dark with Old Man Heart” (“dirts of the prairie fly from us”), and the title poem (possessed of too many great lines to choose one) are some of the best in a very strong collection.

Sometimes, though, Bertram’s commitment to the pliability of language gets the better of her. Poems like “Behind the Christian Door” (composed only of repeated iterations of the phrase, “And when is the state gonna pay us?”), the overly mathematical “Queen City Fractal,” or “Hinterland Ham Radio Signals,” which includes entire column-inches of “jettajettajettajetta,” become self-consciously experimental to a degree that feels like posturing, a hipster-acrobatics that makes Bertram seem more like other (weaker) poets and less like herself. The diagram that bursts into the otherwise fantastic “The Science of Heart” does more harm than good.

Another snag concerns the title, which borrows a famous phrase from the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1941). Bertram’s book is so deeply rooted in the American West that nothing of Benjamin (or of Paul Klee’s painting, “Angelus Novus,” which inspired the passage) expresses itself in the collection; and though Bertram is vigilant about attributing her wide-ranging allusions, it’s Benjamin who gets the prime spot, despite his absence from the book at large.

Deliberate or not, this move allows Bertram to wink at those of us who know the Benjamin essay, while letting unfamiliar readers attribute all the mystery and pain and magic in that line to Bertram herself, as Steve Davenport does in his blurb for the book (“What’s a storm doing in Paradise . . . And why’s it blowing this way? I blame Bertram”). This is problematic, not least because it participates in the wide-scale appropriation of a man who suffered humiliation and hardship only to become, after his death, a kind of saint of postmodernity. It is acute because one of the things Bertram does is talk about a marginalized, invisible underclass—a status to which Benjamin, who committed suicide in flight from Vichy France, found himself relegated in the Europe of his time.

I raise this complaint in admiration for the book and for Bertram, who seems about to leap into relief as a poetic voice of real national importance. Judging from the Tupelo Press website, where her name appears frequently as a contest finalist, Bertram has at least three more collections nearly ready to release into the world. If she is to become one of our next great American poets, I hope she will extend to her influences the same care, sympathy and precision she has for language itself—the care, sympathy and precision that allows her to confide so beautifully in the collection’s opening poem that “All planets but this one were named after gods.” I look forward to more worlds of her crafting.

New and Selected Poems 1957-2011 by Robert Sward 
(Red Hen Press, 2011) 


reviewed by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Robert Sward begins his New and Selected Poems with a disclaimer borrowed from the spiritual figure Ram Dass, “Old age is about harvesting whatever your life’s work has been.” Indeed Sward’s new book presents a harvesting of his long, productive career as a poet. Sward, who is now in his 70s and lives in Santa Cruz, CA, began his writing career in the 1950s. During this career, Sward has written over twenty books of poetry. At its heart, the collection follows a winding path that switches between views of seemingly opposite worlds: the domestic world and the divine, what’s forgotten and what’s remembered, the living and the dead. Walking this path where nothing is held back by imagined boundaries brings the epiphanies, or a sort of dual vision where one world intersects with another and, in doing so, illumes a truth that could not otherwise have been understood.

Throughout the collection Sward writes of the domestic world and its deep connection with the divine. “If God lived on earth…people would knock out all of His windows.” For Sward, the domestic life is simultaneously humorous and filled with epiphany. For example, in this exchange between a poet husband and his wife found in “My Muse,” the poet’s wife updates the idea of what a muse is to a twentieth century woman:

    “Talk about muses,” I sulk,
    “Yeats’ wife was visited in her dreams by angels
    saying, ‘We have come to bring you images
    for your husband’s poetry.’

    “Yeah? So what?” she says. “It’s out of style.
    I already do too much for you.”

Sward temporarily lost his memory when he was in a car accident in 1966, and that sense of amnesia haunts the domestic sphere of his poems. In “Mr. Amensia” the speaker meets a young mother who had gone fishing in Lake Michigan and catches him as if he is a deep dwelling fish. It’s not until the speaker emerges from the deep that he realizes he has been caught and rescued by his own wife and children. This sense of amnesia equally haunts the many intimate, domestic portraits of Sward’s children he includes in the collection. In “Hannah,” the speaker eats breakfast with “the smallest person in the world” whose “third eye is strawberry jam.” The speaker in “Water Breather” describes the seemingly unsurpassable distance he feels from his estranged son as “the hunger.”

Sward, who lost his mother at age 14, also writes poems that inhabit an emotive realm between the living and the dead. The young boy who loses his mother is filled with grief and anger at a god he had just come to understand, “At 14, I walk out / Looking / For stones / I might hurl into heaven.” But the ghost mother, who is summoned through the poems, isn’t soothing and comforting. Rather, she is a straightforward atheist and her portraits are weighted in the objects that make up a home such as beauty cream and cigarettes.

    Mother applies Pond’s Beauty Cream. Her face glistens.
    Massages her forehead with one hand, holds the other to her heart.
    “What’s the point?” she asks, cigarette ablaze,
                        mouth tightening.
    When she dies, they bury her not in a shroud, but in pancake make-up and best gray dress.

When the child asks this mother if there is an afterlife, his mother tells him to shape up and “‘You are my afterlife. / God help us.’” Sward’s poems about the loss of his mother are peppered with troubling wisdom from his father and grandfather as in “A Prayer for My Mother” when his Grandfather tells him “The Angel of Death is made entirely of eyes.” 

Even though Sward is a poet that wanders between worlds, he is also a poet that is at times grounded in place. “Four Incarnations” presents a biographical epic that examines Sward’s beginnings as a poet and the act of poetry as based on a theory of Thoreau’s: “While at sea, I began writing poetry as if poems / to paraphrase Thoreau, were secret letters from/ some distant land.”  In “Ode to Santa Cruz,” a poem written for the place where Sward finally moored, he defines the aesthetic of the college beach town in an energetic collage of disparate things:

    A busload of German tourists
    applauding (applaudieren!)
    the sunrise.
    clam chowder, O scrubbed blue light
    melon balls and watermelon shooters,
    arcade, pink neon, roller coaster heart-shaped mirror.

The vast breadth of poetry included in this collection showcases the wisdom Sward has accumulated over his career as a poet. It is evident that Sward’s definition of poetry is as deep and wide as the life he has lived:

    What is poetry? For me it’s the restrained music
    of a switchblade knife. It’s an amphibious warship
    magically transformed again into a basketball court, and
    then transformed again into a movie theater showing
    a film about the life of Joan of Arc. It is the
    vision of an amnesiac, bleeding from a head injury,
    witnessing the play of sunlight on a redbrick wall.

Indeed, the winding road offered by New and Selected Poems 1957–2011 is a fruitful, enlightening journey where we are mesmerized by the sounds and sites of a poet who has examined not only what poetry is, but what it means to live as a poet.
     

Booker T. and Them: A Blues by Bill Harris

(Wayne State University Press, 2012) 

reviewed by Patrick Thomas Henry

With its cover festooned in banners and patriotically bordered in stars and stripes, Bill Harris’ Booker T. & Them: A Blues promises a manifesto about Booker T. Washington’s uncanny knack for working across political factions to redefine race relations. It’s no surprise that the collection’s cover copy designates it a “bio-poem” about Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) which is akin to claiming that Disneyworld is a monument dedicated to Walt Disney, instead of a celebration of creative minds orbiting Disney’s sphere of influence. More accurately, Booker T. & Them studies an era, “Booker T. Washington Time. / [. . .] from 1881 to 1915,” and Booker T.’s position between black activists and the racist, white establishment. To represent this collusion, Bill Harris has melded poetry, blues, historical quotations, and commentahry into a lyric social history that should be shelved alongside Howard Zinn and David McCullough. Harris’ scrutiny applies not just to Booker T., but also to pugilist Jack Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, President Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Thomas Alva Edison, Jack London, and others. Harris’ dramatis personae perform the scope of African American travails and inequality, progressing beyond history á la Zinn, McCullough, and company, who pin social woes to class struggle. Yet despite Booker T.’s efforts and the awareness Harris’ lyric history generates, equality remains unattained:  “& still,” Harris reminds us, “it is a tough time for negroes.”

Harris writes that his “interest [. . .] is the depiction, in historical and imaginative ways, of several figures, with the emphasis on black males in the process of seeking to be men who mattered in racist America.”  Harris culls quotes from speeches and writings of the period’s powerbrokers, and his play with these textual artifacts performs, like Booker T. himself, a negotiation between the era’s racism and African Americans’ needs. But Harris strangely tamps down the quotations’ gravity with a tendency to hammer in definitions or data in a “Who’s Who?” format. In the collection’s opening chapter, this technique cudgels Thomas Alva Edison:

    “I never did a day’s work in my life. It was
    all fun.”  Thomas A for Alva
    Edison (1847–19-
    31) tinkers, & is a man of
    business. “I find out what the world needs. Then I go
    ahead and try to invent it.”

The authorial insertion about tinkering and business renders Edison’s own utterance redundant, diluting this moment’s irony. Harris could have armed himself with Edison’s verbal firepower and shot the inventor down with his own artillery. Edison’s claim that work is fun and games is anathema to the men and women Booker T. represents. Harris’ indexing technique also pares potential away from some provocative moments, such as when a senior at Booker T.’s Tuskegee Institute recollects a visit from William Howard Taft and Andrew Carnegie:

    Remembers:
    William Howard Taft & Andrew Carnegie
    were 2 who paid Tuskegee a call:  Taft (18-
    57-1930), ton-sized future
    President (27th), & stumpy Andrew
    Carnegie (1835-1919),
    with no more schooling than a cat, but is the 2nd
    richest man in the world.

Harris’ imagined Tuskegee student might have judged these men and their attributes’ insinuations—instead of blandly recounting Taft’s girth or the paradox of Carnegie’s lack of education-cum-surfeit of wealth. Harris inters the only hint of judgment in a possible pun. “[S]tumpy Andrew / Carnegie” may refer to more than the steel baron’s height. Reading generously into this, the student might view Carnegie as stumping for Taft’s Republican values and, ergo, white prejudices.

Harris’ indexing technique, as well as many interspersed dictionary-style definitions, are questionable recurring structures in this blues for Booker T., especially when we hear Harris’ evocatively jagged line breaks and his riffs of figurative language. The harsh enjambment rollicks this book along, the breaks splintering names, dates, thoughts, and conjectures. Because Harris fragments this data, the poem lulls the reader into a sixteenth-note-sized pause, just enough quiet to reflect on the hatred that whitewashed history conveniently neglects. Harris’ enjambment even dismantles Jack London, that celebrated figure of tough realism, and his derision of African American pugilist Jack Johnson. London is a

    Bastard, partially raised by an ex-slave; pseudo-
    socialist son of an off-kilter suicidal
    mother who channels a Native American
    spirit [. . .]

That “pseudo-” insinuates that London has little time for his own biography, factoids that could challenge his notions of white supremacy. The line break opens the line—and us—for that takeaway, which reverberates into the following line:  London’s a bad socialist, from unstable stock. Harris salvages this bit from the annals of petty, campaign advert character attacks by, naturally, summoning London’s writing on white supremacy:

    “[. . .] there is a certain
    integrity, a sternness of conscience, a
    melancholy responsibility of life,
    a sympathy and comradeship and warm human feel,
    which is ours, indubitably ours . . .”

Harris’ London has cast his intellectual rod to fish for the right abstraction, but to no avail:  the enjambment has shaken any belief a reader might have placed in London’s integrity. (Besides, Jack Johnson knocked out London’s “Great White Hope” prizefighter, Tommy Burns.)

Yet, it is Harris’ figurative language that offers the most scathing assessment of Booker T.’s epoch, as his diction creates historical, mythological, and cultural allusions. Repeated references to faces rewind us to the Roman Janus, the two-faced deity who gazes into the past and the future simultaneously. Harris hints at this in Booker T.’s initial meeting with Teddy Roosevelt, when the prior is “[s]howing his full face duplicity”—an impossible feat, since Booker T.’s middleman status (as a moderate and as a former slave) forces him to gaze toward an equal future yet backward toward slavery. Even the student at Tuskegee (who was strangely maladroit at criticizing Taft and Carnegie) recognizes how these dual facets bind Booker T.:

    the different faces Washington dons for each [white guest]
    [. . .]
    What face would our principal wear if Champion Jack [Johnson]
    came?—not that he’d be invited, not that he’d accept.

Booker T.’s faces weaken his sway with such figures as the student, Jack Johnson or W.E.B. Du Bois, because they recognize putting on the most appeasing visage as a political tactic and a weakness. This one-faced versus two-faced distinction transforms into symbolic shorthand for one-faced ideological stalwarts (both for good and for ill) and those Janus-faced men, like Booker T., muddled between incompatible visions for humanity.

Fortunately, the repeating images don’t receive the same blunderbuss as the indexing gimmick, as Harris dispatches deft similes and metaphors to telegraph the underlying themes of racial tension. For instance, Booker T., en route to Tuskegee, deems a stifling steam locomotive “suffocating as the mine,” the simile a reminder of blacks’ weary and often-calamitous physical labor. Likewise, in an interlude set during a Macon County, Alabama, lynching, the victim surveys the crowd from the gallows and sees “[s]moke, a curtain, thick as ginned cotton.”  This “ginned cotton” simile summons Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, an invention that accelerated King Cotton but subjected slaves to the caprice of white taskmasters; the lynch mob is the ruthless shadow of those cruel overseers and plantation life. We can detect a tiered symbolism, if we connect Whitney’s timesaving device to Edison’s claim about work equaling fun:  racist whites see no evil, because only blacks suffer the fatal consequences. After hanging this nameless black man, the mob gathers its weapons and its “[c]hained hounds, panting” a subtle metaphor for racism’s perpetuation of cruelty. Here, even Booker T. is told to “[l]ay low.”

The figurative language inoculates us against any chance of missing Harris’ point:  “& still it was a tough time for negroes.”  Yet, Harris yearns for Booker T. and Them to stand as an object lesson, a scholarly yet lyrical challenge to blanched History Channel-grade accounts of turn-of-the-century America. So, concluding this collection, Harris has compiled a few “After Words,” including W.E.B. Du Bois’s lament in “Black Reconstruction in America”:  “One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. [. . .]  The difficulty [. . .] with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example.”  These “After Words”—the book’s last pages—are rather late-game announcements of Booker T. & Them’s mission, but we receive the book’s raison d’être:  if we remain ignorant of historical evils and human rights violations, the powers that be shall perpetuate those atrocities. Bill Harris’ lyric social history reminds us that history, freed from sanitizing re-writes, can offer a liberating education in principles and perspectives.
 

Sugar's 2012 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Sugar House Review's excited to announce our 2012 Pushchart Prize nominations:

• Rob Carney’s “A Lesson Every Shipwreck Learns Too Late”
• Steven Cramer’s from Clangings, [Mother said you count your friends on one hand…]
• Amy Eisner’s “Wasting Water”
• Kate Greenstreet’s “719”
• Jay Hopler’s “That Necessary Evil”
• Carl Phillips’s “Your Body Down in Gold”

It's never easy to pick just six out of so many amazing poems. So, a special thanks to all of our 2012 contributors--obviously, without you, there is no Sugar.

Burnt Sugar Reading

We're really excited to be doing our first joint reading--it's especially exciting to be doing it with burntdistrict, who is normally too far away. burntdistrict recently celebrated the launch of
its inaugural issue at AWP in Chicago. Based in Omaha, it takes its name from the city’s 19th century red light district.

Tuesday, June 5
7:30 p.m.
Eccles Community Art Center

Contributors from both magazines will read:

Shanan Ballam
Liz Kay
Christopher Leibow
Joel Long
Susan Nyikos
Natalie Young


Wine, cheese, and sugar reception to follow the reading.

Sugary Year

It's been a full year for Sugar so far. AWP was insane and great; we met a lot of contributors and subscribers, which is always nice. We sold out of our the Fall/Winter 2011 issue (at least what we brought with us), which is also nice.

In the past month we launched our 6th issue, Spring/Summer 2012, and while it took longer than planned to get it ready, it was worth the extra time. Contributor and subscriber copies finally shipped this week. We're proud of this issue, so if you're not a subscriber, you should find out how to get your hands on one.

Also this last month, we found out Patricia Smith's poem "Laugh Your Troubles Away," from our Fall/Winter 2011 issue, won a Pushcart prize and will be featured in the 2013 anthology, due out in the fall. We felt lucky just to get Patricia Smith's poems in our pages, and feel much more than lucky to have our second Pushcart winner. (The issues with Pushcart-winning poems are available for purchase on our website: #1 Fall/Winter 2009, #5 Fall/Winter 2011.)

To sum this up, we are overwhelmed by the good things Sugar's been able to be a part of in the first part of 2012 (and the two years previous). Our next issue will mark three years (!). For the four of us who founded the magazine (Natalie, Nathaniel, Jerry and John), it seems pretty crazy. This endeavor is a lot more work than we anticipated, but it's also has much bigger rewards than we expected. Thanks for supporting us. We couldn't do it without you--subscribers, contributors, volunteers, submitters, event attenders, candy eaters, etc.

We have yet to figure out how to be good blog keepers, but we're hoping someday soon, we'll get it better at it. Thanks for being patient.

Join Sugar for Issue 6 Launch Party

Help us launch our 6th issue--Spring/Summer 2012. Come for an amazing reading featuring current and past contributors:

Curtis Jensen
Nate Liederbach
dawn lonsinger
Laura Stott
Wendy Blankenship

More info on our Events page (see tab at top of page).