Rain Taxi 6/07 by John Jacob
Two new books from Hanging Loose Press explore identity from very different points of view. The first, BOY DRINKERS by Terence Winch, uses narrative poems to describe his experiences growing up Irish-Catholic, much as Jim Carroll did in THE BASKETBALL DIARIES and LIVING AT THE MOVIES. Winch discusses school, church, and the vengeful ways of nuns in three sections that never stray far away from religion and his boyhood.
In the first, titular section, Winch addresses faith, values, and authority in terms of desire, celebration, and the complicated comfort offered by his religion. Winch confesses to having a phony draft card since he was fourteen, the age when he started drinking. The rest of the poem deals with the worry of his parents, who stayed up at all hours as his mother's health declined, and the home visits made by their pastor.
All five poems in the second section are about nuns, each naming a sister who affected the narrator deeply, such as the principal of his school. These witty, narrative poetics are light, brave particles of truth against which his childhood must be judged. The last section titled, "O Mary, I Could Weep for Mirth," deals with stories of his mother, his own sins, and his way of practicing his religion as best as he can.
If Winch calls to mind Jim Carroll, Joan Larkin might not feel badly to be told that she resembles Dorothy Allison. Her poems reflect very directly on the changing of her body, delving deeply into the toughness and harshness of aging. These poems are intensely felt scenes of real life, almost all of them about choices she had made as time has passed her by; she even looks into the future to see what she will be like and discovers herself, measured in brave poetics reminiscent at times of Marge Piercy or Margaret Atwood.
These highly narrative poems discuss what it means to be a woman, and how women are treated in our culture. Each is a woman, and how women are treated in our culture. Each is a measure of what we are and have become. As she says, "I think it only fair to warn you / the heart is sexless," while discussing a lesbian relationship, she seems to conclude that love is an emotion we have regardless of gender or the choices that we are faced with by society. Larkin clearly embraces those challenges, and, while Winch's poems seem to pray, Larkin's rather shout.
Stephen Beal in French!
This news from Stephen Beal:
Saturday I received two copies of the French poetry journal Midi in which a poem of mine appears. It concerns the Marche de la Poesie, the 23rd thereof, which I attended in June 2005. (Pansy always attends.) Between thirty to forty poetry "vendors" -- magazines and publishers--managing individual booths in the plaza Saint Sulpice before the eponymous church. I dedicated the poem to the French poet Jean Barral, a good friend, but I didn't know till Saturday that he'd translated the poem for Midi.
Marché de la Poésie
Paris, Place Saint Sulpice
23 – 26 Juin, 2005
for Jean Barral
C’est poétique! I cry to a woman whose flowered summer skirt has blown up
to disclose her dark red panties.
My, it’s been hot in Paris these past three days, and now comes the storm that we’ve been hoping for—on the first day of the poetry market, at five in the afternoon—and it sends publishers and poets and editors scurrying for cover into their booths, covering their wares and rolling down their awnings.
A big striped umbrella takes off for Saint Sulpice, and I follow, arriving in the portico among wet poétiques and surprised homeless, then retreating into the cavern of the church while the thunder thunders and the rain rains and my heart pounds with joy—
joy for the poetry, joy for the storm, joy for the church, joy for God above, joy for the broken heat, extinguished like the devil on this day of summer days.
Review of DOING 70 by Hettie Jones in Commonweal
COMMONWEAL, June 15, 2007 by Marie Ponsot
Try Hettie Jones, too. Her DOING 70 (Hanging Loose Press, $15, 92 pp.) is light and profound. She celebrates being a grown-up grandmother at seventy, with the young vigor of her lively mind. "To exist," she reminds us, "is to stand forth." You may recall her from her wonderful best-selling memoir, HOW I BECAME HETTIE JONES. These tuneful poems are equally centered and engaged. She gives us ourselves, in our middle estate on middle earth, dealing with our stuff and nonsense (cars, clothes, scaffolded city streets, high skies, books, toolboxes), and learning from each other to do the best we can. I know of no other poet's voice so at ease in welcoming the fact that we are all people of color, "looking / for bread but asking / for roses."
Try Hettie Jones, too. Her DOING 70 (Hanging Loose Press, $15, 92 pp.) is light and profound. She celebrates being a grown-up grandmother at seventy, with the young vigor of her lively mind. "To exist," she reminds us, "is to stand forth." You may recall her from her wonderful best-selling memoir, HOW I BECAME HETTIE JONES. These tuneful poems are equally centered and engaged. She gives us ourselves, in our middle estate on middle earth, dealing with our stuff and nonsense (cars, clothes, scaffolded city streets, high skies, books, toolboxes), and learning from each other to do the best we can. I know of no other poet's voice so at ease in welcoming the fact that we are all people of color, "looking / for bread but asking / for roses."
Forthcoming Reviews on Winch and Violi
BOOKLIST
Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof
Issue: July 1, 2007
Boy Drinkers.
Winch, Terence (Author)
Jul 2007. 96 p. Hanging Loose, hardcover, $25.00. (9781931236812). Hanging Loose, paperback,$15.00. (9781931236805). 811.
Poetry doesn’t get much more plainspoken than Boy Drinkers, Winch’s nostalgic new collection about growing up in Irish Catholic New York in the 1950s and 1960s. There is no rhythm, rhyme, or poetic diction of any kind in most of these pieces, and yet they pack the undeniable punch of memories dragged up and, if not quite shaped, at least pried away from whatever might have obscured them from view. There is a parade of priests—kindly or drunken, athletic or preening, indifferent or cruel—including the cringe-inducing Cardinal Spellman, who “waltzed with/J. Edgar Hoover and built monuments to himself,” and the spellbinding Bishop Sheen, whose “piercing eyes won the hearts of all the Irish girls/and his ratings that year even beat out Milton Berle’s.” That last couplet hints at the Larkinesque prankster that Winch should aspire to be more often. As he is, hilariously, in “Prayer to St. Patrick,” a plea for a ban on professional Irishness: “Dear saint of our isle, we’d like to send ya/an urgent plea to abolish Enya.”
— Kevin Nance
Plymouth Magazine, fall 2007
Overnight
by Paul Violi
Pub. Hanging Loose Press, 2007,
Brooklyn, NY 11217-2208
A new collection of poetry by Paul Violi is something to look forward to with relish. His work is always erudite, yet never dull or predictable, invariably full of the sort of surprises you can never see coming, and at the same time wonderfully entertaining and witty. His use of the colloquial is essentially graceful, artful but not ‘arty’, inducing laughter – sometimes out loud and manic – but usually provoking thoughtful consideration in the aftermath. He’s been my favourite contemporary American poet for some time now and this book was simply a joy to read.
The range of the material is wide and his ability to ‘mix genres’ is both accomplished and often hilarious. Take ‘House of Xerxes’, for example, which in its fusing of cinematic technique and classical background, reminds me of his extremely funny rewrite of the French Revolution-as film-score, ‘King Nasty’, which appeared in an earlier collection. I’m not quite sure when ‘…Xerxes’ was written, but it surely can’t be a coincidence that this book came out at around the same time as the film ‘300’, which dealt with the mythic subject of Spartan defiance in the face of overwhelming odds at the battle of Thermopylae. The received wisdom of the aftermath of this battle, of course, states that this was a vital defence of Greek democracy and this inheritance is deeply entrenched in Western thought. Given recent events in the middle-east there’s a certain absurdity in Miller’s graphic homage to military heroism, but Violi’s poem concentrates much more on the visual excess of the military spectacle, and its mix of camp humour and pithy, clipped language is eloquent and entertaining. I can’t believe that Violi hadn’t seen the film before writing this but I may be wrong:
Here come those splendid Persians!
We were expecting fireworks
And here they are!
Short bows, long arrows, iron breastplates-
Nice fish-scale pattern on those breastplates.
Just the right beach touch, very decky.
Quivers dangling under wicker-worky shields,
A casual touch, that.
And those floppy felt caps
Make it all very wearable, very sporty.
Huge amounts of gold,
A killer-look feel
But it still says A Day at the Shore.
This is simply hilarious and ‘echoes’ the films’ insistence on foregrounding the costume design as theatrical spectacle. One of the final shots in the movie depicts the dead Spartans, resplendent in red and gold, tastefully covered with arrows (no arrows anywhere near the naughty bits), mini-tunics displaying muscles and gym-enhanced oiled bodies, slightly eroticised in their heroic death-throes.
The opening poem, ‘Appeal to the Grammarians’, plays with the registers of language in a manner which fuses an easy-going erudition (Violi makes it all look so simple!) with a shock-value ending, more abrupt-halt than the expected bathos! I can just hear him read this piece and hear myself begin to chuckle well before the mood is suddenly seized by something more wrenchingly down to earth!:
We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we’re capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity. …………..
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it. …………….
But mainly because I need it--here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-age couple
Come strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, “See, that’s why
I don’t like to eat outside.”
Violi is simply brilliant at conjuring this sort of drama out of the domestic or street life he observes and experiences. Sometimes, as in ‘As I was Telling Dave and Alex Kelley’, the ‘humour’ is much grimmer, as the narrative skips from the improbable and absurd to the tragic yet unbelievable. The protagonist in this story (real or imagined – either Violi has a life filled with drama and strange incidents or he has a great imagination – possibly both are true!) comes between two glamorous women fighting in a restaurant, only to discover that they are in fact acting – It was a supper club theatre. The real point of the story however, turns out to centre around – A man who, more than most, feared heights – climbing a ladder and then being hauled off down the road to his death by his wife driving off in their car. His children had, apparently, been using a rope (attached to both ladder and car) in an attempt to steady the ladder. The telling of this story combines bathos with a real sense of tragedy yet you are never quite sure whether this was something that might actually have happened or not!
Violi also has a more lyric, melancholy side, which infuses his writing with succinct, descriptive depth. In ‘Light Rain Falling on Deep Snow’ the ‘I’ of the poem is interrupted by a distant murmur while reading a book in bed. The description of this interruption and its mood-enhancing after-effect is wonderfully conveyed and reminds me of John Freeman, a writer who otherwise I wouldn’t have considered as being at all similar to Violi. The fact that Violi can evoke this mood within the reader – the effect feels genuine to me, not something I could say of every lyricist – and then shift gear into something more akin to satire or the foregrounding of wordplay is an indication of a serious talent, I think.
There are plenty of examples of the latter, as with ‘In Khlebnikov’s Aviary’, where the effect is more akin to a sort-of restrained version of a Bob Cobbing sound poem:
O you Cacklers, cackle away!
O Cacklers and Cacklettes,
Cackle cackle cackle!
This shifts gradually into the more unpronounceable and tongue-twisting variety of poem which nevertheless retains its subject and never quite loses control. I’d love to hear him read this one out loud! In ‘Counterman’, the starting point for the poem is a series of conversations between a street food-vendor and his various customers. We start off with brevity:
What’ll it be?
Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.
Whaddaya want on it?
A swipe of mayo.
Pepper but no salt.
You got it. Roast beef on rye.
You want lettuce on that?
No. Just tomato and mayo.
Tomato and mayo. You got it.
…..Salt and pepper?
No salt, just a little pepper.
You got it. No salt.
You want tomato.
Yes. Tomato. No lettuce…………………
This continues and becomes a staccato exchange which has the feel of a ‘worked upon’ found poem. The next customer is more demanding and the language gets classical and clever. This is Violi in full flow:
….The lettuce splayed, if you will,
In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
In a multi-foil arrangement
That eschews Bragadonian pretensions
Or any idea of divine geometric projection
For that matter, but simply provides
A setting for the tomato
To form a medallion with a dab
Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
And--eclectic as this may sound—
If the mayonnaise can also be applied
Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
And as a festoon below the medallion,
That would be swell.
You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?
Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.
You got it.
Next!
I can imagine that there are places in New York where you could have that kind of conversation without the least sense of pretension or hard business reality getting in the way but perhaps I’m just about to awake from a Violi-induced daydream. I did say he was my favourite living American poet, didn’t I? This is a fantastic collection which contains depth as well as surface, will make you think, laugh and, hopefully, fall in love with the intoxication of his words. Fantastic.
Steve Spence
Article on Paul Violi in Jacket Magazine
http://jacketmagazine.com/33/quattrone-violi.shtml
Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof
Issue: July 1, 2007
Boy Drinkers.
Winch, Terence (Author)
Jul 2007. 96 p. Hanging Loose, hardcover, $25.00. (9781931236812). Hanging Loose, paperback,$15.00. (9781931236805). 811.
Poetry doesn’t get much more plainspoken than Boy Drinkers, Winch’s nostalgic new collection about growing up in Irish Catholic New York in the 1950s and 1960s. There is no rhythm, rhyme, or poetic diction of any kind in most of these pieces, and yet they pack the undeniable punch of memories dragged up and, if not quite shaped, at least pried away from whatever might have obscured them from view. There is a parade of priests—kindly or drunken, athletic or preening, indifferent or cruel—including the cringe-inducing Cardinal Spellman, who “waltzed with/J. Edgar Hoover and built monuments to himself,” and the spellbinding Bishop Sheen, whose “piercing eyes won the hearts of all the Irish girls/and his ratings that year even beat out Milton Berle’s.” That last couplet hints at the Larkinesque prankster that Winch should aspire to be more often. As he is, hilariously, in “Prayer to St. Patrick,” a plea for a ban on professional Irishness: “Dear saint of our isle, we’d like to send ya/an urgent plea to abolish Enya.”
— Kevin Nance
Plymouth Magazine, fall 2007
Overnight
by Paul Violi
Pub. Hanging Loose Press, 2007,
Brooklyn, NY 11217-2208
A new collection of poetry by Paul Violi is something to look forward to with relish. His work is always erudite, yet never dull or predictable, invariably full of the sort of surprises you can never see coming, and at the same time wonderfully entertaining and witty. His use of the colloquial is essentially graceful, artful but not ‘arty’, inducing laughter – sometimes out loud and manic – but usually provoking thoughtful consideration in the aftermath. He’s been my favourite contemporary American poet for some time now and this book was simply a joy to read.
The range of the material is wide and his ability to ‘mix genres’ is both accomplished and often hilarious. Take ‘House of Xerxes’, for example, which in its fusing of cinematic technique and classical background, reminds me of his extremely funny rewrite of the French Revolution-as film-score, ‘King Nasty’, which appeared in an earlier collection. I’m not quite sure when ‘…Xerxes’ was written, but it surely can’t be a coincidence that this book came out at around the same time as the film ‘300’, which dealt with the mythic subject of Spartan defiance in the face of overwhelming odds at the battle of Thermopylae. The received wisdom of the aftermath of this battle, of course, states that this was a vital defence of Greek democracy and this inheritance is deeply entrenched in Western thought. Given recent events in the middle-east there’s a certain absurdity in Miller’s graphic homage to military heroism, but Violi’s poem concentrates much more on the visual excess of the military spectacle, and its mix of camp humour and pithy, clipped language is eloquent and entertaining. I can’t believe that Violi hadn’t seen the film before writing this but I may be wrong:
Here come those splendid Persians!
We were expecting fireworks
And here they are!
Short bows, long arrows, iron breastplates-
Nice fish-scale pattern on those breastplates.
Just the right beach touch, very decky.
Quivers dangling under wicker-worky shields,
A casual touch, that.
And those floppy felt caps
Make it all very wearable, very sporty.
Huge amounts of gold,
A killer-look feel
But it still says A Day at the Shore.
This is simply hilarious and ‘echoes’ the films’ insistence on foregrounding the costume design as theatrical spectacle. One of the final shots in the movie depicts the dead Spartans, resplendent in red and gold, tastefully covered with arrows (no arrows anywhere near the naughty bits), mini-tunics displaying muscles and gym-enhanced oiled bodies, slightly eroticised in their heroic death-throes.
The opening poem, ‘Appeal to the Grammarians’, plays with the registers of language in a manner which fuses an easy-going erudition (Violi makes it all look so simple!) with a shock-value ending, more abrupt-halt than the expected bathos! I can just hear him read this piece and hear myself begin to chuckle well before the mood is suddenly seized by something more wrenchingly down to earth!:
We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we’re capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity. …………..
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it. …………….
But mainly because I need it--here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-age couple
Come strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, “See, that’s why
I don’t like to eat outside.”
Violi is simply brilliant at conjuring this sort of drama out of the domestic or street life he observes and experiences. Sometimes, as in ‘As I was Telling Dave and Alex Kelley’, the ‘humour’ is much grimmer, as the narrative skips from the improbable and absurd to the tragic yet unbelievable. The protagonist in this story (real or imagined – either Violi has a life filled with drama and strange incidents or he has a great imagination – possibly both are true!) comes between two glamorous women fighting in a restaurant, only to discover that they are in fact acting – It was a supper club theatre. The real point of the story however, turns out to centre around – A man who, more than most, feared heights – climbing a ladder and then being hauled off down the road to his death by his wife driving off in their car. His children had, apparently, been using a rope (attached to both ladder and car) in an attempt to steady the ladder. The telling of this story combines bathos with a real sense of tragedy yet you are never quite sure whether this was something that might actually have happened or not!
Violi also has a more lyric, melancholy side, which infuses his writing with succinct, descriptive depth. In ‘Light Rain Falling on Deep Snow’ the ‘I’ of the poem is interrupted by a distant murmur while reading a book in bed. The description of this interruption and its mood-enhancing after-effect is wonderfully conveyed and reminds me of John Freeman, a writer who otherwise I wouldn’t have considered as being at all similar to Violi. The fact that Violi can evoke this mood within the reader – the effect feels genuine to me, not something I could say of every lyricist – and then shift gear into something more akin to satire or the foregrounding of wordplay is an indication of a serious talent, I think.
There are plenty of examples of the latter, as with ‘In Khlebnikov’s Aviary’, where the effect is more akin to a sort-of restrained version of a Bob Cobbing sound poem:
O you Cacklers, cackle away!
O Cacklers and Cacklettes,
Cackle cackle cackle!
This shifts gradually into the more unpronounceable and tongue-twisting variety of poem which nevertheless retains its subject and never quite loses control. I’d love to hear him read this one out loud! In ‘Counterman’, the starting point for the poem is a series of conversations between a street food-vendor and his various customers. We start off with brevity:
What’ll it be?
Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.
Whaddaya want on it?
A swipe of mayo.
Pepper but no salt.
You got it. Roast beef on rye.
You want lettuce on that?
No. Just tomato and mayo.
Tomato and mayo. You got it.
…..Salt and pepper?
No salt, just a little pepper.
You got it. No salt.
You want tomato.
Yes. Tomato. No lettuce…………………
This continues and becomes a staccato exchange which has the feel of a ‘worked upon’ found poem. The next customer is more demanding and the language gets classical and clever. This is Violi in full flow:
….The lettuce splayed, if you will,
In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
In a multi-foil arrangement
That eschews Bragadonian pretensions
Or any idea of divine geometric projection
For that matter, but simply provides
A setting for the tomato
To form a medallion with a dab
Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
And--eclectic as this may sound—
If the mayonnaise can also be applied
Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
And as a festoon below the medallion,
That would be swell.
You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?
Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.
You got it.
Next!
I can imagine that there are places in New York where you could have that kind of conversation without the least sense of pretension or hard business reality getting in the way but perhaps I’m just about to awake from a Violi-induced daydream. I did say he was my favourite living American poet, didn’t I? This is a fantastic collection which contains depth as well as surface, will make you think, laugh and, hopefully, fall in love with the intoxication of his words. Fantastic.
Steve Spence
Article on Paul Violi in Jacket Magazine
http://jacketmagazine.com/33/quattrone-violi.shtml
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