- Katharine Cole's "Trail Guide"
- Katie Kingston's "Concourse A Exhibit"
- Steve Langan's "The Midwest"
- Greg Pape's "Waking to Rain"
- Patricia Smith's "Laugh Your Troubles Away"
- Theodore Worzobyt's "Fugal"
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Sugar's 2011 Pushcart Prize Nominations
We are excited to announce our Pushcart Prize nominations for this year. Thanks to all of our contributors for two fantastic issues in 2011. We wish our nominees lots of luck.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Issue 5: Fall/Winter 2011 Launch
Sugar House Review Issue 5 Reading
Wednesday November 16th 7:00—9:00 P.M.
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Celebrate the release of recent issue of Sugar House Review with readings from Shanan Ballam, Star Coulbrook, Jen Hawkins, Cathy Peppers, and Mike White as part of the City Art Reading Series.
Shanan Ballam poetry has appeared in several journals, including Indiana Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Cream City Review. Her chapbook, The Red Riding Hood Papers, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2010. She teaches poetry writing and academic writing at Utah State University.
Star Coulbrooke directs the Utah State University Writing Center and is responsible for Helicon West, a bi-monthly open readings/featured readers series. Her poems are published in journals and anthologies such as Redactions: Poetry and Poetics and A Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses. Her poem, “How I Stopped Selling Life Insurance,” was named Editor’s Choice in the anthology, New Poets of the American West. Star lives in Smithfield, Utah, with her partner, Mitch, and their three labby-heelerish dogs.
Jen Hawkins is an English/Philosophy double major and Art minor at Idaho State University. Her writing and artwork have been published widely and have received numerous awards. A recovering masochist, Jen enjoys caffeining, shebeening (with all due moderation) and making stuff. She loves Joe with all her bleeding heart.
Cathy Peppers holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University, a PhD from the University of Oregon and has taught at Idaho State University since 1998. She lives with singer-songwriter Bob Picard on a one-hundred-year-old farmstead with superfluous creatures, including a blackjack of cats, two horses, a motley of chickens and a goat. Her poetry is loosely collected in a few manuscripts; the poems here are from Arts & Sciences (call it love), regressing forward and in loving detail.
Mike White poems have appeared in venues including Poetry, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, The Threepenny Review, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Witness, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize anthology on six occasions, most recently by Sycamore Review. He is a graduate of the doctoral program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and a former editor-in-chief of Quarterly West.
Most featured readings are followed by an open reading. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City Public Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.
The event is free and open to the public. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
A Murder of Crows by Larry D. Thomas
(Virtual Artists Collective, 2011)
reviewed by Jeffrey C. Alfier
Texas poet Larry D. Thomas is as keen an observer of the natural world as any of America’s best Regionalist poets. Pervading the heart of A Murder of Crows, Thomas’ sixteenth collection of poems, is an intensely rich, imagistic evocation of the life of birds, an articulate vision that enables the reader to cross into a phylogenic hinterland.
So positioned, Thomas witnesses intractably arrant realities, a world re-inscribed in crisp, penumbral language exemplified through terms such as “black angular presence,” “utter darkness,” “looms there in stark solitude,” “sonata of darkness,” or “a world beyond the sun.” Even “a canvas of blue sky” is laden with a coal-black portent. One may even place Thomas alongside certain European Expressionists, particularly in their use of synaesthesia to merge or blur metaphoric borders of the senses, combining them in a single image—that deliberate creative expression, consciously developed by writers, particularly in the Expressionist and Keats traditions. We see this, for instance, in “Blackbirds,” their “blue- / black cacophony / of terror, / a choir / of wildest eyes,” and likewise in the “savage cerulean scream” of the golden eagle, in “Raptor.”
Thomas arrests us through an immersion in the sensual, often violent, aesthetics of the sublime, an element that drives the intelligence of raptors and scavengers alike. In “Unabridged,” Thomas cites the crow’s “genius // with a perfect IQ / of instinct.” In “To Sight a Bunting,” this variety of passerine is plagued by starlings which “settle their voracious breasts / on straw still warm / from the slaughtered dead,” the dead being the bunting fledglings murdered by the starlings and shoved from their nest. To complement this scene, on the facing page we see the shrike, “weighing in // at but an ounce / or two, / ... / impaling your prey // on barbs and thorns.”
The artistry of such language traverses and melds with other art forms, offering the reader resonation across various mediums, particularly painting. In “Sanderling Chick,” the flurry of the bird’s legs immediately recalls Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. In “Great Blue Herons,” the opening lines, “They stand so still in the shallows / it’s as if they’re outgrowths / of the river itself,” hold a mirror up to Cubism’s intersecting surfaces. Thomas speaks even more directly to the painter in “Raven (oil on canvas by Otis Dozier),” noting the late artist’s apperception, “What life there is / is silent, solitary / against the vastness // of place, locked in the black, / angular presence of a raven.”
Thomas opens his compilation not with a grand raptor but with the lowly sparrow. Here, he turns any deceptively diminutive view of this pedestrian species on its head, pointing us to “its world where survival / by the minute is enough,” this beast all-too often beholden of “cold, hunger, or the brutal / amusement of a cat.” Similar to the sparrow, Thomas does not leave out the unexciting “Pigeons,” that bird so woven into human folklore. Thomas acutely renders the pigeon “the urban version / of the buzzard,” not flocking to tourists feeding them in a Venice square, but “embedded in the grill of SUVs”; and, at the sudden crack of a crushed pecan shell, departing a tree en masse, and beautifully so, in a “ravishing shrapnel / of feathers.” “Pigeon Egg,” the companion poem on the facing page, shares a kindred imagery with “Pigeons” with its “bloody // calculus” of hatchlings born on “desiccated clods of potting soil.” Such blood, moreover, is not simply a byproduct of the hunt, but an ingredient intrinsic to a predator’s survival, as we are reminded in “Preying for Rain.”
A reminder that man shares in birds’ ultimate destiny appears in “Inca Dove,” where a dead young bird is buried by Thomas’ wife, “loosing it / to the shadow we’re all headed for, // the black unraveling shadow / of a phoenix on extended wing.” Thomas opens this poem through an incisive apposition where “Dove” in the title contrasts quickly with the simile of “mean-spirited schoolmistress” in the first line. In “Winged Gull” and “In Rowdy Reverence,” a synergy abounds; from the bucolic “canvas of blue sky,” gulls do their work “with breath reeking / of fresh fishrot,” still “giddy in an epiphany / of soaring, the mindless blue,” likewise, the raven’s “fetid breath fumes from his beak, / the price he pays for acumen / in the commerce of death.”
As readers may well deduce at this point, wherever Thomas’ sense of the pastoral is evoked, it is a harsh one. When we read, in “Starlings,” that these birds “descend / from the heavens / like shredded // midnight,” baby sparrows in their clutches, in order to “drop them / to burst / like ripe figs,” we witness a pastoralism equal to that of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. Moreover, the juxtaposition of terror and beauty is Thomas’ forte, for both elements become a pact between opposites where artistic tension is created and where images are delivered so skillfully. In “Old Blue Jay,” the image of “the rosy fabric / of the dawn” is staged alongside a beautiful blue jay’s rage for eminence as it “leaves a trail / of scraggly feathers, / he could care less [about].” Such is the dark fortitude that endures across the legacy of beauty and terror.
Survival-laden habits often jar us with their severity, like the purple martin mother that murders her young, “one by one, extending / with their deaths the feathers / of a sole surviving heir / who’ll one day take to the sky” his bloody lineage, his “resilient kind.” Similarly, the crow will be “content to turn / upon his nephew // for a meal” in “Both the Proposition and the Proof.” Even among gulls we suspect as laggards in the bird kingdom, there reigns an ominous vigilance born of deadly experience. We see this exemplified explicitly in “Eyeing the Gulf,” where gulls cannot afford to spare—lest their prey flee—“for one split second, / the bestial, / ocular excellence / of their guard.” This deadly experience is captured by Thomas in interesting ways, as in “Totem Crow” where death seems to haunt even the simulacrum of a crow fashioned by the hands of men. Thomas also considers the sublime’s steeper ledge, the stalking ghost of extinction that lingers over the natural world. In “Ten Brown Pelicans,” his poet’s eye watches these species “rowing the oars / of wings through the storm- / tossed sea of extinction,” and suddenly we wonder if these creatures will go the way of millerbirds, or the pelican’s fellow sea mate, the dusky seaside sparrow.
Yet not all is the terror of the sublime, the starker realities of the hunt. There is, for Thomas and his readers, space to relish the beauty of birds. In “House Finch in Summer,” we behold the finch “never tiring of his antics, // as if relishing the air.” “Old Crow” is a celebration of the life and rustic splendor of longer-living birds abiding in blessed habitation, one “content to rattle / against the shell of odds / his tasty kernel / of longevity.” Thomas often speaks to a sense of anatomical and metaphoric duality in the fact that bird wings are hollow (pneumatized). Such hollowness is requisite for the birds’ aerodynamics, but it also harbingers fragility, one that brings them into the wider vanishings around them. Confluent with beauty are spiritual echoes that cut across several poems, not in a full transcendental sense, but in one that speaks to the junction of art and science. In “Above the Bait Stand,” gulls are “patient as pillars / of salt,” recalling Lot’s wife gazing perilously back in the Bible and Cities of the Plain. In “The Screaming, Actual Angel,” a gull becomes trapped in a church sanctuary, finally captured by a priest, the bird becoming the “actual angel / flung into the sanctuary // by the inscrutable hand of God.”
Texas poet Larry D. Thomas is as keen an observer of the natural world as any of America’s best Regionalist poets. Pervading the heart of A Murder of Crows, Thomas’ sixteenth collection of poems, is an intensely rich, imagistic evocation of the life of birds, an articulate vision that enables the reader to cross into a phylogenic hinterland.
So positioned, Thomas witnesses intractably arrant realities, a world re-inscribed in crisp, penumbral language exemplified through terms such as “black angular presence,” “utter darkness,” “looms there in stark solitude,” “sonata of darkness,” or “a world beyond the sun.” Even “a canvas of blue sky” is laden with a coal-black portent. One may even place Thomas alongside certain European Expressionists, particularly in their use of synaesthesia to merge or blur metaphoric borders of the senses, combining them in a single image—that deliberate creative expression, consciously developed by writers, particularly in the Expressionist and Keats traditions. We see this, for instance, in “Blackbirds,” their “blue- / black cacophony / of terror, / a choir / of wildest eyes,” and likewise in the “savage cerulean scream” of the golden eagle, in “Raptor.”
Thomas arrests us through an immersion in the sensual, often violent, aesthetics of the sublime, an element that drives the intelligence of raptors and scavengers alike. In “Unabridged,” Thomas cites the crow’s “genius // with a perfect IQ / of instinct.” In “To Sight a Bunting,” this variety of passerine is plagued by starlings which “settle their voracious breasts / on straw still warm / from the slaughtered dead,” the dead being the bunting fledglings murdered by the starlings and shoved from their nest. To complement this scene, on the facing page we see the shrike, “weighing in // at but an ounce / or two, / ... / impaling your prey // on barbs and thorns.”
The artistry of such language traverses and melds with other art forms, offering the reader resonation across various mediums, particularly painting. In “Sanderling Chick,” the flurry of the bird’s legs immediately recalls Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. In “Great Blue Herons,” the opening lines, “They stand so still in the shallows / it’s as if they’re outgrowths / of the river itself,” hold a mirror up to Cubism’s intersecting surfaces. Thomas speaks even more directly to the painter in “Raven (oil on canvas by Otis Dozier),” noting the late artist’s apperception, “What life there is / is silent, solitary / against the vastness // of place, locked in the black, / angular presence of a raven.”
Thomas opens his compilation not with a grand raptor but with the lowly sparrow. Here, he turns any deceptively diminutive view of this pedestrian species on its head, pointing us to “its world where survival / by the minute is enough,” this beast all-too often beholden of “cold, hunger, or the brutal / amusement of a cat.” Similar to the sparrow, Thomas does not leave out the unexciting “Pigeons,” that bird so woven into human folklore. Thomas acutely renders the pigeon “the urban version / of the buzzard,” not flocking to tourists feeding them in a Venice square, but “embedded in the grill of SUVs”; and, at the sudden crack of a crushed pecan shell, departing a tree en masse, and beautifully so, in a “ravishing shrapnel / of feathers.” “Pigeon Egg,” the companion poem on the facing page, shares a kindred imagery with “Pigeons” with its “bloody // calculus” of hatchlings born on “desiccated clods of potting soil.” Such blood, moreover, is not simply a byproduct of the hunt, but an ingredient intrinsic to a predator’s survival, as we are reminded in “Preying for Rain.”
A reminder that man shares in birds’ ultimate destiny appears in “Inca Dove,” where a dead young bird is buried by Thomas’ wife, “loosing it / to the shadow we’re all headed for, // the black unraveling shadow / of a phoenix on extended wing.” Thomas opens this poem through an incisive apposition where “Dove” in the title contrasts quickly with the simile of “mean-spirited schoolmistress” in the first line. In “Winged Gull” and “In Rowdy Reverence,” a synergy abounds; from the bucolic “canvas of blue sky,” gulls do their work “with breath reeking / of fresh fishrot,” still “giddy in an epiphany / of soaring, the mindless blue,” likewise, the raven’s “fetid breath fumes from his beak, / the price he pays for acumen / in the commerce of death.”
As readers may well deduce at this point, wherever Thomas’ sense of the pastoral is evoked, it is a harsh one. When we read, in “Starlings,” that these birds “descend / from the heavens / like shredded // midnight,” baby sparrows in their clutches, in order to “drop them / to burst / like ripe figs,” we witness a pastoralism equal to that of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. Moreover, the juxtaposition of terror and beauty is Thomas’ forte, for both elements become a pact between opposites where artistic tension is created and where images are delivered so skillfully. In “Old Blue Jay,” the image of “the rosy fabric / of the dawn” is staged alongside a beautiful blue jay’s rage for eminence as it “leaves a trail / of scraggly feathers, / he could care less [about].” Such is the dark fortitude that endures across the legacy of beauty and terror.
Survival-laden habits often jar us with their severity, like the purple martin mother that murders her young, “one by one, extending / with their deaths the feathers / of a sole surviving heir / who’ll one day take to the sky” his bloody lineage, his “resilient kind.” Similarly, the crow will be “content to turn / upon his nephew // for a meal” in “Both the Proposition and the Proof.” Even among gulls we suspect as laggards in the bird kingdom, there reigns an ominous vigilance born of deadly experience. We see this exemplified explicitly in “Eyeing the Gulf,” where gulls cannot afford to spare—lest their prey flee—“for one split second, / the bestial, / ocular excellence / of their guard.” This deadly experience is captured by Thomas in interesting ways, as in “Totem Crow” where death seems to haunt even the simulacrum of a crow fashioned by the hands of men. Thomas also considers the sublime’s steeper ledge, the stalking ghost of extinction that lingers over the natural world. In “Ten Brown Pelicans,” his poet’s eye watches these species “rowing the oars / of wings through the storm- / tossed sea of extinction,” and suddenly we wonder if these creatures will go the way of millerbirds, or the pelican’s fellow sea mate, the dusky seaside sparrow.
Yet not all is the terror of the sublime, the starker realities of the hunt. There is, for Thomas and his readers, space to relish the beauty of birds. In “House Finch in Summer,” we behold the finch “never tiring of his antics, // as if relishing the air.” “Old Crow” is a celebration of the life and rustic splendor of longer-living birds abiding in blessed habitation, one “content to rattle / against the shell of odds / his tasty kernel / of longevity.” Thomas often speaks to a sense of anatomical and metaphoric duality in the fact that bird wings are hollow (pneumatized). Such hollowness is requisite for the birds’ aerodynamics, but it also harbingers fragility, one that brings them into the wider vanishings around them. Confluent with beauty are spiritual echoes that cut across several poems, not in a full transcendental sense, but in one that speaks to the junction of art and science. In “Above the Bait Stand,” gulls are “patient as pillars / of salt,” recalling Lot’s wife gazing perilously back in the Bible and Cities of the Plain. In “The Screaming, Actual Angel,” a gull becomes trapped in a church sanctuary, finally captured by a priest, the bird becoming the “actual angel / flung into the sanctuary // by the inscrutable hand of God.”
As well, there are unexpected resonances with the world of men. In “Hawks,” the raptors’ airborne formation, spaced at intervals nature bred into them, is imagistically set alongside a man musing on the sleeping form of his adulterous wife: “her slow, guiltless breathing, / the aquiline silhouette” of her silent, recumbent form. Another deep trait observed by Thomas is the persistence, if not faith, of rituals. In “For Her Nest,” humans observe, near-incredulously, doves enduring “wind and violent thunderstorms” just to keep two hopeful “perfect stems” of grass for a nest, “as if her weightless, ledge- / clawed life depended on it.”
No simple poetic ornithology, Thomas’ verse treads far afield as he folds human lore into the history of his birds. One can witness the pride of chiseling the bark of the Chinese tallow in “Hairy Woodpecker,” this folklore-laden bird “excavate / a cavity” in its florid colors of “concupiscent cockiness.” In “A Dark Choir,” Thomas reminds us that ravens have, “For thousands of years / ... haunted / human consciousness, // shuddering the quill / of poet and shaman.” On occasion, he will employ the scientific names of birds. This has the effect of casting certain birds in elegantly ominous terms.
Amid the scientific grounding, the poet finds a godlike quality to the purview of certain bird species. Thomas opens section three of his book with the austere beauty of our national symbol, noting at the onset that “Everything that moves / is potential prey / as she has / no natural predator,” soaring in almost omniscient
tones in surveillance over “everything that moves.” We find this same sense of omniscience in the owl that probes “every atom / of the shadows.” A prime characteristic of such raptors is a pinpoint aim. For under a white-tailed hawk’s boresight “a mouse freezes, / holds its breath, / but blinks / its death knell.” Unlike the misty shores inhabited by Thomas’ gulls, raptors are often set in his verse against the chasmal blue of desert skies—“a dome / of limitless, / unfaceted / sapphire.” Though expansive in breadth, Thomas leaves his enlivened readers to ponder the deep well of natural mysteries inhabiting the realm of birds, from the common crow and seagull to the resplendent, rarely-seen eagle. For those who want the best in poetry, Thomas is one who belongs on their bookshelves. I give A Murder of Crows my highest recommendation.
Amid the scientific grounding, the poet finds a godlike quality to the purview of certain bird species. Thomas opens section three of his book with the austere beauty of our national symbol, noting at the onset that “Everything that moves / is potential prey / as she has / no natural predator,” soaring in almost omniscient
tones in surveillance over “everything that moves.” We find this same sense of omniscience in the owl that probes “every atom / of the shadows.” A prime characteristic of such raptors is a pinpoint aim. For under a white-tailed hawk’s boresight “a mouse freezes, / holds its breath, / but blinks / its death knell.” Unlike the misty shores inhabited by Thomas’ gulls, raptors are often set in his verse against the chasmal blue of desert skies—“a dome / of limitless, / unfaceted / sapphire.” Though expansive in breadth, Thomas leaves his enlivened readers to ponder the deep well of natural mysteries inhabiting the realm of birds, from the common crow and seagull to the resplendent, rarely-seen eagle. For those who want the best in poetry, Thomas is one who belongs on their bookshelves. I give A Murder of Crows my highest recommendation.
The Network by Jena Osman
(FENCE Books, 2010)
reviewed by Nick DePascal
Early in his essay “Spacey Rooms: A Note on Translating ‘Lamentation on Ur,’” poet/essayist Tom Sleigh describes translation as the “attempt to experience that [deep] structure through the alienating medium, the at first incomprehensible strangeness, of another tongue.” But what of the strangeness and power that exists within one’s native tongue? Part of the thrill in reading Jena Osman’s ambitious third poetry collection, The Network, is the exploration and excavation of the English language that occurs as Osman seeks to understand the world through its existing structures.
The book is split into five sections, each called a “network,” and each of these concerns itself with a particular theme: “The Knot,” “The Joker,” “The Franklin Party,” “Financial District” and “Mercury Rising”. Each network deals with a particular event or events in history, and traces their origins into our current day through an exploration of linguistic connections. To that end, most of the sections are peppered with subject words, related to the sectioned themes, that trace these words back to their earliest roots. These maps allow the reader to see how the seemingly different words such as ‘peace’ and ‘propaganda’ derive from the same linguistic origin.
In the section entitled “The Joker,” Osman traces the early origins of the joker, or jester, from medieval times, when “only the jester could openly criticize the king,” up through the current Philadelphia Mummer’s Parade, where questions of immigration policy are acted out by white men in sombreros. Interspersed with these accounts is a plethora of historical and cultural tangents including a brief history of Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs and its influence on the later Batman comic character The Joker, a look at the sugar monopoly in America, as well as racism after Reconstruction. Osman’s blending of prose and poetry allows different subjects to speak to each other and facilitates transitions between these subjects:
Not surprisingly, the
epic journey of Gwynplaine does not end well. He gives up his seat
in despair. Upon his return home, his true love (a blind, goodhearted
girl whose life he saved in infancy) dies. In response he kills himself
by drowning.
The book is split into five sections, each called a “network,” and each of these concerns itself with a particular theme: “The Knot,” “The Joker,” “The Franklin Party,” “Financial District” and “Mercury Rising”. Each network deals with a particular event or events in history, and traces their origins into our current day through an exploration of linguistic connections. To that end, most of the sections are peppered with subject words, related to the sectioned themes, that trace these words back to their earliest roots. These maps allow the reader to see how the seemingly different words such as ‘peace’ and ‘propaganda’ derive from the same linguistic origin.
In the section entitled “The Joker,” Osman traces the early origins of the joker, or jester, from medieval times, when “only the jester could openly criticize the king,” up through the current Philadelphia Mummer’s Parade, where questions of immigration policy are acted out by white men in sombreros. Interspersed with these accounts is a plethora of historical and cultural tangents including a brief history of Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs and its influence on the later Batman comic character The Joker, a look at the sugar monopoly in America, as well as racism after Reconstruction. Osman’s blending of prose and poetry allows different subjects to speak to each other and facilitates transitions between these subjects:
Not surprisingly, the
epic journey of Gwynplaine does not end well. He gives up his seat
in despair. Upon his return home, his true love (a blind, goodhearted
girl whose life he saved in infancy) dies. In response he kills himself
by drowning.
Before the dark sugar is put on the
American table,
it must go to a refinery to be whitened.
Although Hugo’s novel is now considered one of his more obscure
works, Mark Twain almost instantly appropriated it on publication
in order to satire the presidency of Andrew Johnson.
Thus, Osman works through a hybrid of poetry and the lyric essay. Even the more documentarian portions have a poetic sparseness to them, and like good lyric essays, attempt to answer questions about inherent racism within the sugar trade or the Mummer’s Parade.
This blending occurs in each network in the book as each section is a network of ideas and explorations surrounding language. It’s also easy to see how such an erudite and sometimes abstruse work of art reflects our current times, even while referencing history. In “Financial District,” while discussing the financial intrigues of the slave and sugar trade in America, we get the lines:
but the end, money paid as an end or settlement comes from via
end settlement. blood on the hands, a paradoxical policy of tolerance
for those who can invest. to end comes with such forms as peltry. as
whence the yields becomes becomes whence whence. the company
brought trapped Africans to the colony. clothing and architectural
implements from the English hurt trade for the Dutch.
The format of this passage is dense, yet one could almost scan the lines for meter. In addition to the blending of prose and poetry, this passage, with its rampant violence and exploitation in the name of profits, seamlessly connects the images of the past to the financial crisis of our present in a way that feels natural and unforced. Likewise, in “The Franklin Party,” that failed expedition that likely ended in cannibalism, Osman laments:
2003. While the U.S. makes its case for invading Iraq in the
newspapers, I find myself making another attempt. I hardly touch the
analogy: the brute force of the expedition, its naivete. Franklin and
his men had no plans to hunt for food, no sleds, too many mouths to
feed, giant ships that almost instantly locked in the ice, and particular
opinions about the locals.
Though Osman discounts the analogy, one cannot help but be drawn into the comparison between the tragedy of the Franklin Party and the ill-fated and seemingly endless quagmire in Iraq. A few pages later Osman drops a line that could stand as the aim of the book as a whole: “How to map a changing thing, rather than a target of frozen / particulars.” Osman tracks our histories, both of language and events, in a way that gives credence to the fact that the import and meaning of words change throughout time.
At times, the linguistic jargon is confusing. Accounting of linguistic trails and etymologies pull the reader out of the poems. Some poems drag a bit, waiting on another historical note or tightly crafted lyrical line. For example, in “Whitehall + Securities,” within the section “Financial District,” the passage ends with the lines “there remains the Latin prefix-compound: the privative prefix without / from ‘without anxiety or care’ when the adjective Latin has / derivative oblique stem whence and yield.”
While it’s clear that Osman took care to give even these passages a taut sonic quality, meaning and reference are occasionally lost in the shuffle. As the density of the jargon in this network is taxing, its length suggests import to Osman in interpreting the text. However, in a collection that is so focused on language and meaning, this confusion could be a positive attribute if the “Financial District” section had been a bit shorter.
One reason that this particular section sticks out is that the other sections so beautifully meld the linguistic concerns with imagery and musicality. Early in the book, in the section entitled “The Knot,” we get these incredibly evocative lines:
cp. Nexus, node, noose
he builds a wall and slips in sand
the sand then parts and takes his hand
below the sea
nouch, a brooch, a tie, a chain
the hand is now the sea’s debris
it washes up
and winters out
a rope to tie the animals, ouch
polished further into depth
pushing its shell
breaking its dust
a noose is from nous see node
emerging on shore
pulling himself up
what’s this place?
ou or eu
or neo net
Here, the confusion is tempered by Osman’s attention to music and rhythm of the section. Rhyme, both within the columns and between them, helps blend the two seemingly disparate subjects into one. Furthermore, the etymological discussion that happens on the right hand side of the page proceeds poetically, the white space giving the reader time to digest what precedes and follows.
Early in The Network, the speaker tells us, “Rather than invent a world, I want a different means to understand this one.” The rest of the collection tries to understand the world, both present and past, through a close examination of language. What is realized, in a fresh way, is the old cliché of history repeating itself. Whether it’s in the racist tendencies of the Philadelphia Mummer’s Parade, first aimed at African Americans, and now more towards immigrants, or the sly influence and control big industry has in our government (at one time big sugar, now big oil), Osman’s collection repeatedly remolds the tool of language. The collection provides a fresh consideration of the many ways in which words create the world. Ultimately, in her search to understand the world semantically and syntactically, Osman imparts the sheer complexity of the language we use which, while beautiful, is a dangerous thing, rife with blind alleys and trap doors leading us to meanings we never intended.
American table,
it must go to a refinery to be whitened.
Although Hugo’s novel is now considered one of his more obscure
works, Mark Twain almost instantly appropriated it on publication
in order to satire the presidency of Andrew Johnson.
Thus, Osman works through a hybrid of poetry and the lyric essay. Even the more documentarian portions have a poetic sparseness to them, and like good lyric essays, attempt to answer questions about inherent racism within the sugar trade or the Mummer’s Parade.
This blending occurs in each network in the book as each section is a network of ideas and explorations surrounding language. It’s also easy to see how such an erudite and sometimes abstruse work of art reflects our current times, even while referencing history. In “Financial District,” while discussing the financial intrigues of the slave and sugar trade in America, we get the lines:
but the end, money paid as an end or settlement comes from via
end settlement. blood on the hands, a paradoxical policy of tolerance
for those who can invest. to end comes with such forms as peltry. as
whence the yields becomes becomes whence whence. the company
brought trapped Africans to the colony. clothing and architectural
implements from the English hurt trade for the Dutch.
The format of this passage is dense, yet one could almost scan the lines for meter. In addition to the blending of prose and poetry, this passage, with its rampant violence and exploitation in the name of profits, seamlessly connects the images of the past to the financial crisis of our present in a way that feels natural and unforced. Likewise, in “The Franklin Party,” that failed expedition that likely ended in cannibalism, Osman laments:
2003. While the U.S. makes its case for invading Iraq in the
newspapers, I find myself making another attempt. I hardly touch the
analogy: the brute force of the expedition, its naivete. Franklin and
his men had no plans to hunt for food, no sleds, too many mouths to
feed, giant ships that almost instantly locked in the ice, and particular
opinions about the locals.
Though Osman discounts the analogy, one cannot help but be drawn into the comparison between the tragedy of the Franklin Party and the ill-fated and seemingly endless quagmire in Iraq. A few pages later Osman drops a line that could stand as the aim of the book as a whole: “How to map a changing thing, rather than a target of frozen / particulars.” Osman tracks our histories, both of language and events, in a way that gives credence to the fact that the import and meaning of words change throughout time.
At times, the linguistic jargon is confusing. Accounting of linguistic trails and etymologies pull the reader out of the poems. Some poems drag a bit, waiting on another historical note or tightly crafted lyrical line. For example, in “Whitehall + Securities,” within the section “Financial District,” the passage ends with the lines “there remains the Latin prefix-compound: the privative prefix without / from ‘without anxiety or care’ when the adjective Latin has / derivative oblique stem whence and yield.”
While it’s clear that Osman took care to give even these passages a taut sonic quality, meaning and reference are occasionally lost in the shuffle. As the density of the jargon in this network is taxing, its length suggests import to Osman in interpreting the text. However, in a collection that is so focused on language and meaning, this confusion could be a positive attribute if the “Financial District” section had been a bit shorter.
One reason that this particular section sticks out is that the other sections so beautifully meld the linguistic concerns with imagery and musicality. Early in the book, in the section entitled “The Knot,” we get these incredibly evocative lines:
cp. Nexus, node, noose
he builds a wall and slips in sand
the sand then parts and takes his hand
below the sea
nouch, a brooch, a tie, a chain
the hand is now the sea’s debris
it washes up
and winters out
a rope to tie the animals, ouch
polished further into depth
pushing its shell
breaking its dust
a noose is from nous see node
emerging on shore
pulling himself up
what’s this place?
ou or eu
or neo net
Here, the confusion is tempered by Osman’s attention to music and rhythm of the section. Rhyme, both within the columns and between them, helps blend the two seemingly disparate subjects into one. Furthermore, the etymological discussion that happens on the right hand side of the page proceeds poetically, the white space giving the reader time to digest what precedes and follows.
Early in The Network, the speaker tells us, “Rather than invent a world, I want a different means to understand this one.” The rest of the collection tries to understand the world, both present and past, through a close examination of language. What is realized, in a fresh way, is the old cliché of history repeating itself. Whether it’s in the racist tendencies of the Philadelphia Mummer’s Parade, first aimed at African Americans, and now more towards immigrants, or the sly influence and control big industry has in our government (at one time big sugar, now big oil), Osman’s collection repeatedly remolds the tool of language. The collection provides a fresh consideration of the many ways in which words create the world. Ultimately, in her search to understand the world semantically and syntactically, Osman imparts the sheer complexity of the language we use which, while beautiful, is a dangerous thing, rife with blind alleys and trap doors leading us to meanings we never intended.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Nick Demske & Rob Carney Reading
Sugar House Review in partnership with the Utah Humanities Council is pleased to announce a reading with poets Nick Demske, author of Nick Demske, and Rob Carney, author of Story Problems on Monday, October 24th at 7:00 p.m. at the Mount Tabor Lutheran Church (175 South 700 East). This event is free and open to the public and is part of the Utah Humanities Council Book Festival. Sugar House Review would like to thank them for their sponsorship.
Nick Demske’s first collection, Nick Demske, is ostensibly a collection of sonnets, though it’s more like sonnet taxidermy, the sonnet eviscerated. The hide is in place, the constraints are there, but our pet is no longer our pet. The eyes are different and the lips curl up just so. The fourteen lines are present, except when they trail off. The rhyme schemes, while they shift from poem to poem, are nearly always present though Demske innovates on the form by simply breaking words as is convenient to make rhymes work, a move now known as “the Demske.” These breaks are startling, confusing, and simultaneously hilarious once the pattern begins to emerge.
Nick Demske writes from culture like the Hollywood version of a rebellious slave, the role shredding off him, culture's synthetic exemplary tales shredding and piling up on the floor of the projector room, but non-biodegradable, sticking around, the pancake makeup also strangely persisting, rendering his face plastic and one with the material of the film, the celluloid itself. How can we tell this dancer from his nasty dance? The sonnet is one brief sequence played backwards and forwards until its fake, twitchy face says everything. –Joyelle McSweeney
Nick Demske lives in Racine Wisconsin and works there at the Racine Public Library. His self-titled manuscript was chosen by Joyelle McSweeney for the Fence Modern Poets Series Award and published by Fence Books in 2010. He is a founder and editor of the online forum boo: a journal of terrific things (http://boojournal.wordpress.
Rob Carney is originally from Washington State and earned his BA from Pacific Lutheran University, his MFA from Eastern Washington University, and his PhD from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He is the author of New Fables, Old Songs (Dream Horse Press, 2003) and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon Press, 2003), which won the 2004 Utah Book Award for Poetry. His collection This Is One Sexy Planet won the 2005 Frank Cat Press Annual Poetry Chapbook Contest, and he won The National Poetry Review's 2004 Chapbook competition for The Book of the Living. His writing has appeared previously in Atlanta Review, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, and many others, as well as in the collection Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton, 2006). Currently, he is a professor at Utah Valley State College and lives with his son Quentin in Salt Lake City.
Destroyer and Preserver by Matthew Rohrer
(Wave Books, 2011)
reviewed by Steve Langan
In his brilliant and immediate eighth collection, Destroyer and Preserver, Matthew Rohrer meshes, welds and bolts together phrases and sentences with precision and daring. He also allows his gift, the triple-threat of cleverness, humor and wit, to lead him to deeper and more mature and complex subject matter. The poem “Casualties” begins, “My son says / are soldiers good or bad? / I say it’s very complicated.” Rohrer freely moves into melancholy and despair. Arriving there, however, he makes a series of choices that his fast and engaging use of language provides (and even requires): evasions, shifts and jukes of which the late Walter Payton would be proud. Rohrer is a master of renaming the metaphoric impulse at its finest. In his best poems, he goes on counter-attack of the serious subjects our culture compels him to put into play and, splicing on one more statement or image and then another one, he counters again. Destruction and preservation mingle, often in the same line, throughout these poems; they become unified, not separate, impulses, which is what makes these poems exciting and necessary.
The mundane and its ongoing complications—raising a family, getting older, doing the day to day—is the starting place for many of these poems. “Dull Affairs,” one of the best in this book, begins,
How am I to concentrate
on the heavy and dull
affairs of state
with the sound of a baby having a dream
in the other room.
Unlike the speaker in the above passage (and Rohrer’s conception and realization of art, we could say), the state
cannot change
it is like the sound of a baby crying out
that is only imagined
it is much worse/a small cloud
that looks like an enormous flea
crouches over the city.
A restless interrogator and transformer, Rohrer ends the next poem, titled “They Pull a Suicide from the Water”: “they pull a suicide from the water / I clip my toenails out the window / it is going to rain.” There are many uses for the mundane. In Rohrer’s poems, the mundane bores, inspires, distracts, angers, confuses, burdens, gives, takes away, distresses, soothes. At the end of “Poem for Starlings,” which recounts just another harried day of not getting his way in the city, the speaker says all we really need and want him to say, “I wish / the world were different.” “The Terrorists,” a poem in five parts, is mysterious and ominous. A series of 24 interconnected spare four-line stanzas describes a vivid commute. It’s titled “Believe.”
Aware that punctuation is just a 15th century innovation, Rohrer eschews it in most of these poems, and summons it idiosyncratically in others. This creates openings and opportunities for his complex and multi-layered voice. Like almost everyone else who has been reading and writing poetry during the last 50 or so years, it is clear that Rohrer has been listening to W.S. Merwin, who established the possibilities for ambiguity at the level of the line, and Merwin’s many descendants. But if Merwin is trail guide to the transcendent, Rohrer is watching us, and watching us watch him, as he moves us down the trail toward a transcendence that is almost always incomplete. Make no mistake: this stunted transcendence is no fault of these poems, which are remarkable and genuine achievements. The complex culture, with its endless levels of social distortion, anxiety, compromise and horror, intervenes—and Rohrer is right to acknowledge these facts, right here in these vivid and contemporary poems ... right in the middle of a line. And then, with and for us, he provides a service, turning away.
The mundane and its ongoing complications—raising a family, getting older, doing the day to day—is the starting place for many of these poems. “Dull Affairs,” one of the best in this book, begins,
How am I to concentrate
on the heavy and dull
affairs of state
with the sound of a baby having a dream
in the other room.
Unlike the speaker in the above passage (and Rohrer’s conception and realization of art, we could say), the state
cannot change
it is like the sound of a baby crying out
that is only imagined
it is much worse/a small cloud
that looks like an enormous flea
crouches over the city.
A restless interrogator and transformer, Rohrer ends the next poem, titled “They Pull a Suicide from the Water”: “they pull a suicide from the water / I clip my toenails out the window / it is going to rain.” There are many uses for the mundane. In Rohrer’s poems, the mundane bores, inspires, distracts, angers, confuses, burdens, gives, takes away, distresses, soothes. At the end of “Poem for Starlings,” which recounts just another harried day of not getting his way in the city, the speaker says all we really need and want him to say, “I wish / the world were different.” “The Terrorists,” a poem in five parts, is mysterious and ominous. A series of 24 interconnected spare four-line stanzas describes a vivid commute. It’s titled “Believe.”
Aware that punctuation is just a 15th century innovation, Rohrer eschews it in most of these poems, and summons it idiosyncratically in others. This creates openings and opportunities for his complex and multi-layered voice. Like almost everyone else who has been reading and writing poetry during the last 50 or so years, it is clear that Rohrer has been listening to W.S. Merwin, who established the possibilities for ambiguity at the level of the line, and Merwin’s many descendants. But if Merwin is trail guide to the transcendent, Rohrer is watching us, and watching us watch him, as he moves us down the trail toward a transcendence that is almost always incomplete. Make no mistake: this stunted transcendence is no fault of these poems, which are remarkable and genuine achievements. The complex culture, with its endless levels of social distortion, anxiety, compromise and horror, intervenes—and Rohrer is right to acknowledge these facts, right here in these vivid and contemporary poems ... right in the middle of a line. And then, with and for us, he provides a service, turning away.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Nick Demske by Nick Demske
(FENCE Books, 2010)
reviewed by Michael McLane
In sitting down to write a review of Nick Demske’s debut collection, Nick Demske, I wanted to pay homage to the man, to find the perfect contemporaries and precursors to compare him to and lump him in with, to fit him comfortably into the ultraviolent or infrared end of the sonneteer spectrum.
But I had to be honest with myself, and with you, Nick Demske. Your willingness to address yourself in the third person again and again like some kind of hip-hop mogul makes me comfortable addressing you directly. This admission only serves to display how the prime real estate of my mind has been foreclosed on by pop culture but, throughout my reading of Nick Demske, all I could think of was a stunning routine by comedian David Cross where he describes the way rednecks threaten one another before a barfight:
I’m the last guy you wanna fuck with, man. Cause you don’t know me
man [ ... ] Cause you don’t know man I’m like a motherfuckin’ earthquake,
wrapped in a hurricane, nestled in a box of tsunamis, man. That’s what I am
man. I’m like a fuckin’ natural disaster times triplicate [ ... ]
Nick Demske, as you say in “Will Not be Televised,” I’ve been “Nick Demsked.” Your poems are a motherfuckin’ earthquake, wrapped in a hurricane, nestled in a box of tsunamis. Unlike the Nick Demske in “Pop Sonnet” who tries “not to think about art,” I am trying to think about it, but like the best Priapus poems, your sex jokes and scatological references remind me that the overlap between those two views is where all the fun is.
Nick Demske is, ostensibly, a collection of sonnets. It’s more like sonnet taxidermy, the sonnet eviscerated. The hide is in place, the constraints are there, but our pet is no longer our pet. The eyes are different and the lips curl up just so. The fourteen lines are present, except when they trail off, as in “Sonnet,” which contains only the octave and ends,
[ ... ] Because I say it’s
Poetry. Because I am the substitute teacher, better than any
[insert six more lines here]
The rhyme schemes are present though Demske innovates on the form by breaking words to make rhymes work. These breaks are startling, confusing, and simultaneously hilarious once the pattern begins to emerge. The first example is in “Common Sense,” which begins,
I didn’t think it was loaded. But it was a kn
Ife. So we’re both right. I forsee
The last word in the first line is later rhymed with “dan” rendering the “k” in “kn” silent. “Dan” itself is a cut-up of “dancing” and the second syllable has been sent to the beginning of the next stanza. Later in the poem we find a similar tactic, only this time using slant rhyme.
Uglying everything else a reflect
Ion so unfamiliar you feel impolite confronting it. I am the lex
Icographers, staring back into a nightingale.
Some of these breaks seem more self-conscious than others. The ones that work best offer both pause and insight into the image against which they are juxtaposed or they participate in one of the numerous jokes or puns that Demske employs, as in the second stanza of “Breakdown” which ends,
Gawk. You’re ruining the ending like a pre
Mature apocalypse. You suck at life. Your combustion lacks spontaneity
These breaks beg for the poems to be read out loud. When they are verbalized, they give the poems a stutter that would make Tzara and Schwitters proud (there it is, Nick, I finally got some names in here).
As if the line breaks aren’t enough to keep the reader off kilter, the passage dem-
onstrates another prominent Demske peculiarity—self-reference. The title of the book clues the reader into this immediately but he wastes no time working Nick Demske into the poems.
Remind me what it’s like to be offended, Nick Demske.
Ah. Already with thee.
And several pages later, in “Hotdog,”
Nick Demske you are everything wrong with the world. Which is to say: the wor
Ld. Share with me your secret ingredients.
Remarkably, the trope is not tiresome. Instead, we look for Nick Demske to return—extravagant, prodigal son that he is—and his absence is conspicuous. Nick Demske the character quickly becomes a kind of Coyote or Loki figure within the book, while Nick Demske the author broadens his scope of self-reference to include not only himself, but also the larger task at hand—the writing of the book. Demske references his own trials with poetry repeatedly, each time more self-effacing and charming than the last. In “Bowdler-Dash” he writes,
Do not look directly at the poem. Offer val
Id only at participating locations. MF
A. Slave dialect. I want your native tongue in the recess
and adds an even more striking example in “As a Dog Returneth to His Vomit,”
[ ... ] Just one won’t hurt. I promised
Myself I’d stop writing poems. I broke that promise.
I line broke that promise. I enjambed that promise
So far up the Muse’s tuchis we still shit shards of meter.
In Nick Demske, we are dealing with a man who knows himself well and likes what he sees; even his failings shine. But this is not narcissism, not self-love for its own sake. Demske simply can’t resist a good turn of phrase (i.e. “If you’re going to act like a brat, / I’m going to eat you like one”), especially those in which the profane glad-hands with more conventional images. He appreciates that the best jokes come at the expense of one’s self, such as in “Bowdler-Dash”
[ ... ] I’m a tramp on the streets and a Jesus freak
in the bed. Don’t ask stupid questions? At a low, low price? Point and click.
Shuck and Jive. Do you want to feel
My scars? My sweet topography, like rubberized Braille?
I thought you’d never ask.
That said, the best joke in these poems may be the one played on those for whom poetry is only a matter of reverence, poetry spelled with a capital “P.” Here poetry is force bred with pop culture to make a nightmarish amalgam—a swearing, retching, fucking beast that, unlike most of our crimes against nature, is far from sterile and much like revered fallen pop stars, is impossible to look away from. Thus, we see Dr. Love, Dr. Kevorkian, Dr. Huckstable and Dr. Frankenstein appear back to back to back to back in “Everything Personal.” It is no small feat that Demske rhymes delectable with Huckstable or that Madonna should appear as the muse at the end of “Pop Sonnet” in what is a deceptively ominous couplet about inspiration.
[ ... ] and she’s not okay
With that. In the midnight hour. I can fee
L your power. Down on my kneeeeees.
These jokes are deftly arranged and the reader is as likely to gloss over them as they are to laugh out loud. What is more impressive is that they never grate. Instead, they propel the book forward, much like trickster Nick Demske, and make of it a puzzle. However, the most remarkable thing about Nick Demske is how subtly Nick Demske uses references and puns to lure the reader into deeper and darker waters as the book progresses. This is a funny book, but it is not just a funny book. Its humor begins to coalesce into a defense mechanism that leaves the reader wondering which emotion is a suitable response, embodying the lines of “View From a Balcony.”
Doesn’t asking this further question just make matters worse? No.
It makes anti-matters better. [ ... ]
And
[ ... ] I’ll hold back your hair. Like lovers, we two; obscene.
Rest your weary head, which is a chip, on this shoulder. Which is a guillotine.
Nowhere is this effect more disorienting than in “Dying Words,” which is quickly recognized as partly a litany of taglines from pop culture artifacts but is devastating nonetheless.
I want my MTV. I want my daughter back.
I want AIDS. I want my brother’s wife. I want to be pretty.
I want a midget. I want my daddy.
I want to puke. I want to go home how. I want a rematch.
I want of a better word. I want to go to college.
I want my money back. I want an apology.
So maybe, in the end, this poetry thing is serious business. Maybe Nick Demske
is on to something here. After all, how much of our favorite comics’ best work is
birthed in tragedy? Perhaps humor is the best way through the attention-deficit
morass we’ve made of our culture. Late in the book, Demske writes “Wow. How
do you follow that? Perhaps with a procession / Of mourners, a light reception.”
In the book’s final poem, he offers a glimpse into the birth of the quipping mad-
man that occupies most of its pages and he comes out of it decidedly human,
frail, and sharp.
[ ... ] I want to do something permanent,
Something undoable. I want to kiss you
And reveal my secret feelings for you. For a long time I considered
Hating everything in the world. Instead, I decided
To huff it. All of it.
But I had to be honest with myself, and with you, Nick Demske. Your willingness to address yourself in the third person again and again like some kind of hip-hop mogul makes me comfortable addressing you directly. This admission only serves to display how the prime real estate of my mind has been foreclosed on by pop culture but, throughout my reading of Nick Demske, all I could think of was a stunning routine by comedian David Cross where he describes the way rednecks threaten one another before a barfight:
I’m the last guy you wanna fuck with, man. Cause you don’t know me
man [ ... ] Cause you don’t know man I’m like a motherfuckin’ earthquake,
wrapped in a hurricane, nestled in a box of tsunamis, man. That’s what I am
man. I’m like a fuckin’ natural disaster times triplicate [ ... ]
Nick Demske, as you say in “Will Not be Televised,” I’ve been “Nick Demsked.” Your poems are a motherfuckin’ earthquake, wrapped in a hurricane, nestled in a box of tsunamis. Unlike the Nick Demske in “Pop Sonnet” who tries “not to think about art,” I am trying to think about it, but like the best Priapus poems, your sex jokes and scatological references remind me that the overlap between those two views is where all the fun is.
Nick Demske is, ostensibly, a collection of sonnets. It’s more like sonnet taxidermy, the sonnet eviscerated. The hide is in place, the constraints are there, but our pet is no longer our pet. The eyes are different and the lips curl up just so. The fourteen lines are present, except when they trail off, as in “Sonnet,” which contains only the octave and ends,
[ ... ] Because I say it’s
Poetry. Because I am the substitute teacher, better than any
[insert six more lines here]
The rhyme schemes are present though Demske innovates on the form by breaking words to make rhymes work. These breaks are startling, confusing, and simultaneously hilarious once the pattern begins to emerge. The first example is in “Common Sense,” which begins,
I didn’t think it was loaded. But it was a kn
Ife. So we’re both right. I forsee
The last word in the first line is later rhymed with “dan” rendering the “k” in “kn” silent. “Dan” itself is a cut-up of “dancing” and the second syllable has been sent to the beginning of the next stanza. Later in the poem we find a similar tactic, only this time using slant rhyme.
Uglying everything else a reflect
Ion so unfamiliar you feel impolite confronting it. I am the lex
Icographers, staring back into a nightingale.
Some of these breaks seem more self-conscious than others. The ones that work best offer both pause and insight into the image against which they are juxtaposed or they participate in one of the numerous jokes or puns that Demske employs, as in the second stanza of “Breakdown” which ends,
Gawk. You’re ruining the ending like a pre
Mature apocalypse. You suck at life. Your combustion lacks spontaneity
These breaks beg for the poems to be read out loud. When they are verbalized, they give the poems a stutter that would make Tzara and Schwitters proud (there it is, Nick, I finally got some names in here).
As if the line breaks aren’t enough to keep the reader off kilter, the passage dem-
onstrates another prominent Demske peculiarity—self-reference. The title of the book clues the reader into this immediately but he wastes no time working Nick Demske into the poems.
Remind me what it’s like to be offended, Nick Demske.
Ah. Already with thee.
And several pages later, in “Hotdog,”
Nick Demske you are everything wrong with the world. Which is to say: the wor
Ld. Share with me your secret ingredients.
Remarkably, the trope is not tiresome. Instead, we look for Nick Demske to return—extravagant, prodigal son that he is—and his absence is conspicuous. Nick Demske the character quickly becomes a kind of Coyote or Loki figure within the book, while Nick Demske the author broadens his scope of self-reference to include not only himself, but also the larger task at hand—the writing of the book. Demske references his own trials with poetry repeatedly, each time more self-effacing and charming than the last. In “Bowdler-Dash” he writes,
Do not look directly at the poem. Offer val
Id only at participating locations. MF
A. Slave dialect. I want your native tongue in the recess
and adds an even more striking example in “As a Dog Returneth to His Vomit,”
[ ... ] Just one won’t hurt. I promised
Myself I’d stop writing poems. I broke that promise.
I line broke that promise. I enjambed that promise
So far up the Muse’s tuchis we still shit shards of meter.
In Nick Demske, we are dealing with a man who knows himself well and likes what he sees; even his failings shine. But this is not narcissism, not self-love for its own sake. Demske simply can’t resist a good turn of phrase (i.e. “If you’re going to act like a brat, / I’m going to eat you like one”), especially those in which the profane glad-hands with more conventional images. He appreciates that the best jokes come at the expense of one’s self, such as in “Bowdler-Dash”
[ ... ] I’m a tramp on the streets and a Jesus freak
in the bed. Don’t ask stupid questions? At a low, low price? Point and click.
Shuck and Jive. Do you want to feel
My scars? My sweet topography, like rubberized Braille?
I thought you’d never ask.
That said, the best joke in these poems may be the one played on those for whom poetry is only a matter of reverence, poetry spelled with a capital “P.” Here poetry is force bred with pop culture to make a nightmarish amalgam—a swearing, retching, fucking beast that, unlike most of our crimes against nature, is far from sterile and much like revered fallen pop stars, is impossible to look away from. Thus, we see Dr. Love, Dr. Kevorkian, Dr. Huckstable and Dr. Frankenstein appear back to back to back to back in “Everything Personal.” It is no small feat that Demske rhymes delectable with Huckstable or that Madonna should appear as the muse at the end of “Pop Sonnet” in what is a deceptively ominous couplet about inspiration.
[ ... ] and she’s not okay
With that. In the midnight hour. I can fee
L your power. Down on my kneeeeees.
These jokes are deftly arranged and the reader is as likely to gloss over them as they are to laugh out loud. What is more impressive is that they never grate. Instead, they propel the book forward, much like trickster Nick Demske, and make of it a puzzle. However, the most remarkable thing about Nick Demske is how subtly Nick Demske uses references and puns to lure the reader into deeper and darker waters as the book progresses. This is a funny book, but it is not just a funny book. Its humor begins to coalesce into a defense mechanism that leaves the reader wondering which emotion is a suitable response, embodying the lines of “View From a Balcony.”
Doesn’t asking this further question just make matters worse? No.
It makes anti-matters better. [ ... ]
And
[ ... ] I’ll hold back your hair. Like lovers, we two; obscene.
Rest your weary head, which is a chip, on this shoulder. Which is a guillotine.
Nowhere is this effect more disorienting than in “Dying Words,” which is quickly recognized as partly a litany of taglines from pop culture artifacts but is devastating nonetheless.
I want my MTV. I want my daughter back.
I want AIDS. I want my brother’s wife. I want to be pretty.
I want a midget. I want my daddy.
I want to puke. I want to go home how. I want a rematch.
I want of a better word. I want to go to college.
I want my money back. I want an apology.
So maybe, in the end, this poetry thing is serious business. Maybe Nick Demske
is on to something here. After all, how much of our favorite comics’ best work is
birthed in tragedy? Perhaps humor is the best way through the attention-deficit
morass we’ve made of our culture. Late in the book, Demske writes “Wow. How
do you follow that? Perhaps with a procession / Of mourners, a light reception.”
In the book’s final poem, he offers a glimpse into the birth of the quipping mad-
man that occupies most of its pages and he comes out of it decidedly human,
frail, and sharp.
[ ... ] I want to do something permanent,
Something undoable. I want to kiss you
And reveal my secret feelings for you. For a long time I considered
Hating everything in the world. Instead, I decided
To huff it. All of it.
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