The Sound of Sugar....Kat Finch

WAKE

             he’s a hypnic jerk, he’s a hypnic jerk, in my ear he’s a hypnic jerk
and he got blue knees, yeah he got blue knees—he’s a cosmic squeeze
        baby bound bowline hook and sinker so the butter is mellow
       feeling all sorts of yellow
let it go let it go let it go (let it snow (repeat x3))
             electro-pop rocks and soda synth slough almost make it true
this isn’t a poem about you cosmic blue and an old black shoe
        it’s about tenfold and coming on fast or slow
              shit red bike and a 40, hey no now not nearly 42, 42 is never not you
atlantic pedantic and neurotic too
                   homily anomaly stitch the tool mouths blue blue
squeeze let out the tease let loose the tease take it whole
      bike fight bike fight saw sasquatch bleached dead bleached
legs not so cosmic not so cosmic you electro-funk fool
                   put past the ears the nears put past the you break it blue
            and a hypnic jerk just a picnic jerk he’s a hypnic jerk the ear whore you
sop blue knees sop blue knees nobody ever did never say please





About the poet:

Kat Finch is a poetry editor at Mixed Fruit Magazine. She likes her orange cat and her copper bike. Her poems can be found in Birdfeast, The Dirty Napkin, and The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review among others.



About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors.We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.

The Sound of Sugar....Matt Mason

September 21: Poem For Omaha

There’s just enough mist
for the lamp posts to masquerade
as tent poles tonight;

instead of spilling
down, they hold up
canvases of light.

And 30th Street shines
like a river under the moon
washing past brown pawn shops gone to bed,

because this city smells
beautiful, this city
of wet leaves

sticking like frescos
along the sidewalks, a masterpiece
the length of my city

that I remember–with a start
as I drive home, window down–
I love.



About the poet:

Matt Mason has won a Pushcart Prize and 2 Nebraska Book Awards (for Poetry in 2007 and Anthology in 2006); organized and run poetry programming with the U.S. Department of State in Kathmandu, Nepal and Minsk, Belarus; and been on 5 teams at the National Poetry Slam. He is Executive Director of the Nebraska Writers Collective, former board president of the Nebraska Center for the Book, and has served as the Nebraska State Coordinator for Poetry Out Loud, a Poetry Foundation/NEA program. His website is matt.midverse.com.  This poem appears in his book The Baby That Ate Cincinnati, out from Stephen F. Austin University Press in Spring, 2013.

About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors.We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to

Jeff Whitney: [Everyone in Goya’s black paintings...]

[Everyone in Goya’s black paintings...]

Everyone in Goya’s black paintings was mad. It’s true; they grazed
in fields like cows, slept at night using chickens for pillows. In the
mornings they’d wake thirsty. If rivers are a sign of something big-
ger farther on, their wide eyes were surely rivers though I can’t say
to where.

Things have a way of disappearing that pleases the gods. You’d be
mad to try and stay.
           

About the poet:

Jeff Whitney is the co-founding editor of Peel Press.  Recent poems have appeared in Devil’s Lake, Thrush, Whiskey Island Review, and Verse Daily.  He teaches English in South Korea.

About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors.We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.

The Sound of Sugar....Jeff Whitney

[Everyone in Goya’s black paintings...]

Everyone in Goya’s black paintings was mad. It’s true; they grazed
in fields like cows, slept at night using chickens for pillows. In the
mornings they’d wake thirsty. If rivers are a sign of something big-
ger farther on, their wide eyes were surely rivers though I can’t say
to where.

Things have a way of disappearing that pleases the gods. You’d be
mad to try and stay.
           

About the poet:

Jeff Whitney is the co-founding editor of Peel Press.  Recent poems have appeared in Devil’s Lake, Thrush, Whiskey Island Review, and Verse Daily.  He teaches English in South Korea.

About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors.We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.

Katherine Hollander: Poem

POEM

And if I sing of snow, it won’t be poisoned,
falling on gravestones and in rivers.
And if I mention grandfathers, they won’t drool
from wheelchairs, unless they’re stolen wheelchairs,
they won’t bounce anyone on their knee, they won’t
be fallen gods. They’ll all be old warlocks and Reds,
telling you how it used to be. All the snakes
St. Patrick cast out of Ireland will be there, and the wolves
got themselves hunted out of England, they’re
there, too. The lovers I mean won’t be
the silent-curses type, hating one another weakly
over dirty dishes, they’ll be fucking in libraries,
reaching for one another over the old beloved volumes.
In this song I’m making for you, darling, a tree
is a living birch and it’s a canoe that you can steer
around the pink rocks in silver water, and nobody murdered
the old Commune of Paris, they’re still there, making
their ecstatic decisions, emancipating every
baguette and demitasse, every precious tiny cuillère.
This song has a house for you, my love, tucked among
pagan tenenbaums, each ablaze with an angel, her foot
just touching the topmost branch like a white owl.


About the poet:

Katherine Hollander has published poems in Slate, Literary Imagination, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in modern European history at Boston University.


About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors.We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.

Absence is such a Transparent House by Aby Kaupang
(Tebot Bach, 2011) 


reviewed by Andrew David King

Of all the challenges Aby Kaupang’s Absence Is Such a Transparent House poses to a reader encountering poetry through narrative goggles, the most vexing might be that of voice: who’s speaking, and when? Kaupang’s collection dismantles the hegemony of the “I,” though not entirely; shards of the first-person shred through the background chorus’s panoply. These instances of individual testimony manifest like ghosts—forms that linger long enough to be recognized but are intangible, secondary to the landscape of material things. More specifically, these poems long for the materials of the body: what it’s tied to, how it breaks, and what’s lost in its dissolution. “Language poetry had as its explicit aim to oppose such ‘natural’ expressivist speech, such individual voicing and accessible syntax,” Marjorie Perloff writes in Unoriginal Genius. Kaupang’s book is not the sound of any single voice, but the clamor of bones in a box.

And there is music in this bone-clamor, be it the glossolalia of “{tongues}”—“cori cori cori cori kana nai,” one line reads—or the fatigued syntax of the “I”-speaker in “what he’d seen | seen through.” In a stanza from the latter poem, the logic of the first person is interrogated:

    one set of lips or
    tongue beneath my age
    & I concedes

“what closes in on me          concerns me alone” offers another such complication, one page after the provision of the name of the woman whose death, it seems, spurs the book’s project:

    this is my deaths I’m anxious for
    but there you are

In both these excerpts, the “I” is lost—first in a whirlpool of mourning, then in a multitude of second-person possibilities. This isn’t Kaupang’s modus operandi, though, which includes enough conventional “I” sentences to prompt the inference that, despite the grammatical complexity on display, there’s a human presence in there somewhere. In “{admittance},” it emerges several times: “I am a girl with a flawed pelt” and “I am the one tonguing in flesh.” But why is this parsing of the “I”-speaker from its linguistic materials important? Because in its attempt to unravel grief Absence becomes concerned—no, obsessed—with the self and, as an extension, what makes up the self. Everywhere in these poems the “I”-speaker, whether comprehensible or outside of the realm of intelligibility, seeks to reconcile his or her individual existence not with the fact of loss as much as in spite of it: and so ensues the fight for sovereignty.

That many of these poems would deal with the mystical as well as mythical, then, makes perfect sense; the psychic terrain explored is rough, and requires such. Only in the last third of the collection do more telling details about the tragic event that serves as its locus reveal themselves—this is more a symptom of this slow-burning self-investigation than a failure of exposition. But when Kaupang’s Heideggerian speaker voyages into the theological, some of the collection’s best, most rending pieces are produced. In “{Soak},” the self agonizes over its uncertain place in a cosmology that is one part Elizabethan Great Chain of Being to two parts Donato Creti paintings:

    me, a tender haunting in the glass beneath the waves
    me, a blessed peacemaker
    me, tonguing Chiron for his skiff
    me, my own My Heavy—

The beatitudes, a famed centaur, and surreal proper nouns: each is subjugated to the antecedent, anaphoric “me” that begins the lines. This search for grounded-ness that starts out with the deceptively clear coordinate of the “I” grows out of anxiety and disintegrates into discord. “Little ‘g’ god grows tired of me,” the speaker confesses before the question of “me” becomes a necessary, chant-like repetition. Religion is the façade, but the materials of language are most of interest to the consciousness behind these pieces. For Socrates, the body was the prison of the soul; this same impulse is on display in poems like “{living tombs},” a four-part opus on the life cycle and the problematic divide between living organism and corpse:

    the body  {the body mumbled
    lock}

The poem employs brackets that echo and compartmentalize—much like the titles in this section, all of which are in brackets. Bracketed text is visually segregated from the rest of the field; it is a container, one that holds something, but one that cannot be read as existing in its own reality entirely despite the barrier between areas it represents. In this way, like many other sleights of hand sleeping in the wrists of these poems, an examination of language-as-body is prompted. Both are vehicles; both appear to hold something, though how much they can hold and whether or not they distort it is up for debate. But do both decay? In the face of mortality, is there any possibility of self-preservation via linguistic embodiment? And what about clarity—can we attain it, or are we doomed to the sarcophagus of what we almost successfully said?

Kaupang’s speaker throttles, and is throttled by, these notions of identity that language imposes (or, as the case may be, the ones it holds hostage). But rather than “defeat” these notions by shoehorning them into reductive, clean-cut epiphanies, she gives us the gore and ragged edges. Excluding the book’s Prelude and Postlude, it consists of four sections, termed “symphyses.” It’s fitting that a collection so intently scrutinizing the body as a permutation of language, and vice versa, would label each of its composite parts with the word used to name the fibrocartilaginous fusion between bones. Language, after all, is what holds the artifice together—even if it is artifice, even if it eventually falls. And loss can rattle the rafters: “what is death to me now,” the speaker asks in “I hardly remember the days.” The book’s sense of fatalism gives way to chaos, which in turn gives way to fatalism again, as in “{three angels canting}”:

    2.    god    my brute necessity
        is perfectly
                nonpresent

    3.    if

        god wants me     god will

        find me

Models of supernatural ecology are plotted in the collection—corporeality as an extension of ethereality, ethereality as an extension of divinity, which is itself a form of corporeality—though it does take a breather here and there. At points, the speaker recalls being found asleep “in [the deceased’s] jade scarf,” and that at the funeral “her rings were a transom / her guitar was a transom.” There are the quotidian but immovable things—green valleys, anise, maroon bells, hyssop. And then there are aggressive, Zukofsky-esque loops, as with the dizzying “{Adventum].” But Kaupang is at her best when her speaker’s associative flywheel doesn’t off-kilter the poem with its momentum, when there’s visible conflict between her linear and nonlinear inclinations. In “we go to the garden of swords and fire    and go,” the speaker ponders how small a catalyst could send one into the afterlife:

    even the underworld articulates emergency
    and snarling and poppies startling
    in their sudden orangeness

    these are sights I could leave for
    accidentally—my driving eye drawn
    to a plosive bank of poppy

The sonic flora here is dense: the sharpened glee of “snarling” and “startling,” the alliteration of “plosive” and “poppy,” the enjambment of “I could leave for / accidentally”—and all of this faux-tiered by triplets. Relatively short words and earthen sensibilities govern much of this musicality; “what sudden lightening in a torso / what Rorschach of angst song,” she writes in “a woman chooses a bird and buries it.” In “{Ecclesia}” and “{Ecclesia cont…},” among the most well-wrought poems in Absence, several call-and-responses are paired, one addressing language (“& this too is semantics”; “syntax is long remembered”) and another time (“god lays such burden on us—eternity”; “such a burden on eternity      living with god”). The seances in Kaupang’s throat recall poets ranging from Dickinson to Brigit Pegeen Kelly.

As the books closes, the speaker’s verbal riffing, that angst of which is clear, sets roots down: we’re given more details about the central event, its character (Sue, maybe the woman to whom the book is dedicated), and a scenario (death by car crash). Whether or not Kaupang intended this incorporation of narrative elements to so fully aid the book’s speech, it does so; in light of the second half, the first is made more sensible in that it seems the necessary, aphasic stage preceding any communicable attempt to cope with grief. The book eventually defends its titular hypothesis: though grief is a place to be inhabited, its walls are transparent, constricting but unable to be navigated. The tone of the work might not be overtly optimistic, but the fact that such an experience can be at least partially conveyed is promising for the speaker and for language’s capacities in the midst of loss. “And death i think is no parenthesis,” writes e. e. cummings in his 1926 collection is 5. And neither is it a bracket, as Absence Is Such a Transparent House uncovers.

Every Green Word by Mark Jackley

(Finishing Line Press, 2012) 

reviewed by Christopher Lee Miles

Mark Jackley’s concise, free-verse poems keep their aesthetic distance from the reader. They’ve outlived the vain and youthful need to be heard. Independent of assumptions, they seem sanguine without being slight; learned without being preachy. They are uninterested in whether or not you care for their quality—a quality that distinguishes itself within the field of contemporary poetry by dramatizing, not the rock colliding with the water, but the concentric ripples afterward. But Jackley’s brevity excludes neither awe nor dread. These poems employ the images and the fictions they need to reveal the truth. And the truth is whatever guides us through the dark.

    In the end,
    we are villagers.
    There is magic and a wolf.

    Shuffling,
    She clutches
    her coffee like a torch.

In this poem, “At the Hospice’,” the fairy-tale motif lends the final-line the weight of closure: we hear a heavy oak door click shut. But we were invited in before we left: the speaker includes the readers in the village. The wolf is the woman. And the magic is the transformation of her coffee whose steam, like the light of a torch, is her guide. By her persistence, we witness the woman lift herself from her animal nature into the light of compassion. She projects onto her cup of coffee the need for something to help pull her, or help her pull others, through that final threshold of death. Whether a patient or a worker, she either helps people die or is dying herself. It doesn’t matter which. Jackley has mythologized coffee, which is slightly comical—all good myths make us laugh—but valuable and true.

When a poet delivers a comedic and tragic poem in six lines, technique is in charge. Heaney made the distinction between technique and craft in his essay “Feelings into Words.” Craft merely translates thoughts into words, whereas Technique translates feelings into thoughts. The latter is where the best poems in Every Green Word dwell: down below, in the hinterland, occasionally bobbing up above the waters of the unconscious, revealing themselves to be globes of dream-stuff, soft and weighty, buoyantly resting on their true fictions, as in “Kentucky Lush”:

    Bourbon floods the curving
    two-lane of the tongue.

    The moment stretched like red-wing
    blackbird tules, we are

    lost again and savor
    every green word.

Because the metaphor is poetry’s, the reprieve of self-forgetting—as a major function of art—is praised in six cerebral but concrete lines. This poem owes homage to Baudelaire’s ‘Be Drunk.’ And how deft that first couplet: a line of iambic pentameter—its first foot a trochee, its final an anapest—split in two. On the other hand, the poems that dwell in craft, strangely enough, shoot a straight and sober look at objects, events, or psychological states, without making a high or symbolic leap. They rest on image and tone. Sometimes they try to be technique poems and don’t make the cut. Whether it’s a urinal or a motel room, they ride on a fact of experience, not a genuine deception. Of this batch, the best are love poems, and they rival the poems informed by Technique. Magnifying heartache, pain, and regret, they do not look for agreement or sympathy from the reader. They assert themselves, step off the stage, and let the echo of their words work on you. Not green, but middle-aged, they seize love knowing its wrack and ruin. And yet they remain sweet, smart, and sensitive to their own implications. Their speakers have tasted the hard fact that shows through in a spouse after a few years of marriage, when the fantasy of goodness and beauty is stripped. They do not affirm love from the platform of one who is addicted to that early fog of falling, but the later drought, when daily duties rise and nearly claw one into a machine. But these poems go even further: they know the only thing preventing that final transformation into a robot is companionship tethered by kindness. Without compassion, they say, love fails. The sweetest and funniest of these poems is “Vow.” Like some of the best free-verse poems, it is a list guided by a narrative. A candid poem polished with humor, it is a watermark not only of Jackley’s craft, but also of our culture’s domestic life.

    If you, Kim, take me to be
    your lawfully wedded guy
    and in your loving arms
    take all my baggage, like
    marriages one and two, the tales
    of wine tossed down and dishes
    flung, of breaking hearts
    at 4 a.m. and lawyers
    and their bill — my god, their bills —
    if you will take my failing
    eyes, weak knees and everything
    that sags, my daughter too,
    her pre-teen sass, the brutal fact
    we’ll be pushing sixty
    when she goes to college,
    if you will take my punk rock
    and my scraggly beard,
    placing them alongside
    your Tim McGraw CD’s,
    your Alabama Christian
    faith and tidy spice rack,
    your perfect penmanship,
    oh honey, if you will,
    I will do the dishes
 
Every Green Word’s epigraph states this book is for no one in particular. A humble statement. The delight in these poems rests on their wisdom, which is knowledge derived from experience. It’s easy, and perhaps fashionable, to toss a fat rock and make a loud splash; but if you come to poetry, not for noise or disrupting splatter, but for reflection in the waters of your mind, then this book is for you.