Kate Greenstreet. Learning the Language.

Richard Hell & David Shapiro. Rabbit Duck.

Stacy Szymaszek. There Were Hostilities.

John Colleti. Physical Kind.

Tony Tost. World Jelly.

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Kate Greenstreet, Learning the Language .

Etherdome. http://www.durationpress.com/etherdome/index.htm

Kate Greenstreet’s chapbook Learning the Language opens with the line “Learning a language is a form of travel.” From there, the poems take off on an adventure driven by the desire to know and the desire to get things accurate—both of which can never be satisfied. On the journey, the poems travel back and forth through time, fluctuate between dream and memory, and consult seers and fortunetellers to learn the future. At the center of the poems seems to be a desire to understand loss—the end of relationships, and the deaths of loved ones. The narrator attempts to make meaning with math, attempts to connect separate instances with bridges, and ultimately gives up, asking that the math be scraped away, gotten rid of.

Throughout the collection, the language rushes forward incorporating other voices and repeated phrases. As Greenstreet says herself in the first “Yellow Book,” “Every rearrangement makes a meaning.” The narrator is a constant pupil, always attempting to learn and re-learn language. The reader is let in on this process and recognizes it. “Galka (little bird)” asks and answers what is missing in poetry: “A regular greeting, / a couple of maps, / a good looking equation,” all things which are present in Learning the Language. Though dealing with confusion and unpleasantness, this is a friendly poetry, one that resonates, that greets the reader and leads him or her on the journey full of turns and surprises. No matter what is planned one is bound to wind up somewhere else. “This is a traveling song” explains: “We waited for the optimum conditions, / but in the end we set off in a storm.”

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Richard Hell & David Shapiro, Rabbit Duck.

Repair.  http://singlepresse.com/repair.html

Rabbit Duck is a collection of thirteen mostly untitled collaborative poems between Richard Hell and David Shapiro. The teaming of two musicians—one classically trained, the other a punk—results in poems that are delightful in their movement and musicality. At times there is an obvious push and pull between the two artists, like in the third poem where one voice seems to be at odds with what the other one is saying: “Maybe I should add a few lines, then start a dumb brutal nothing. / Perhaps I should start again, without thinking ‘song’ because of you.” This appears again in the tenth poem where one interrupts the other: “‘How many stupid springtimes must a man,’ / he starts. I interrupt…” At other times the tension disappears and the voices become indistinguishable, a flowing lyric, like in the fourth poem:

Inside our collaboration is a film
inside the film not even a butterfly’s sculpture
on the butterfly’s back there is a postcard of the nineteenth century nude
all this forgetting the theme of small and large or bigness or neverness
because the butterfly’s blown across the block (getting cold)
Our taboo emerged on the eleventh block
like a balloon with a little song or an old mad despised President
and just before the taboo broke (getting hot)
you could, said the scholar, add, subtract, assemble or let be
and tumbling as wrecked solar panels across
the planes and plans, refracting
like crazy, attacked by bluejays
smaller and smaller, ecstatically
and still smaller but,
like a thriller’s thrilling
false endings, smaller still. By any means.
By all means. Whatever’s required: thoughts
extend, they multiply, tangling
frantically, to get the further small

Each poem in the collection manifests in different ways—sometimes quick moving stream-of-consciousness, sometimes a meditation on a single subject, other times lists of objects and anaphoras, and there is even a rhymed sonnet. The voice that emerges between the two writers is sometimes humorous and other times serious, but always markedly New York School.

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Stacy Szymaszek, There Were Hostilities.

Release.  http://singlepresse.com/release.html

The poems in Szymaszek’s There Were Hostilities are set in a suburban neighborhood full of fear and alarm, where “FUCK YOU” fences go up and restrooms are patrolled by undercover agents determining who gets to use them. Neighbors distrust one another and are hostile towards each other—placing things in other’s garbage cans, destroying plants, disrupting each others’ privacy, etc. The poem “conditions exist” captures the mood:

if it comes at night it will be too late

we recommend sleeping in the basement

if you hear a siren seek shelter

in a bathtub or in a stairwell

anything that sounds like a freight train

is cause for alarm

open a window or close a window

and seek shelter under a doorway

or if you are in a car drive into a ditch

we will continue covering the possibilities

This is a world of judgment where assumptions are made by all involved—the gay bookstore proprietor thinks he knows what his clients are looking for, and the narrator of the poems is surprised when a young butch swaggers by: “I’m ready / to give her the nod but she moves / right past me without notice / like it’s no big deal”.

More than just social commentary, the poems throughout are engaging through their concise and musical language:

red sled

lawn chair

inner tube

bent wrench

cold bird

yellow crest

shrub nest

other guide

still alive

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John Coletti, Physical Kind.

Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs / boku books.  http://www.sonaweb.net/brendaiijima.htm

John Coletti’s Physical Kind is longer than most chapbooks. The forty poems that make up this collection establish a strong voice. Sometimes sad, sometimes funny, the reader trusts this voice, never knowing where it will take him or her, but always willingly following along. The poems often feel fragmented, like Coletti is only revealing a piece of the story or thought, but in that fragment the language is so delightful and surreal, you don’t really feel like anything is missing. The poems are packed full of wonderful lines and images from “Satan listened to your heart glowing / Before you even knew it glowed,” to “Popcorn popping / On the apricot tree.” The poem “A New Round of Touché” offers a back and forth of, well, um…touchés: “How did Robin / Get around in those elf shoes,” “Life is not this / Bullshit art scene,” “So did pushups in sleep & / Still did like 4 or so,” “Worth every penny of / Let people down therapy,” and so on.

The poems are quick moving and short in length. One very brief poem, “Sotto Sotto” reminded me of early Creeley:

In the yellow yellow trees

in the yellow

in the elephants

Coletti has mastered the short form, sculpting tight lines where not one word is wasted. Somewhat mysterious, the poems are intriguing and inviting.

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Tony Tost, World Jelly.

Effing Press.  http://www.effingpress.com/

After the sprawling prose poems of his first book, Invisble Bride, Tony Tost offers up short lyric lines and “bootleg couplets” (and tercets, quatrains, quintets, and single-lined stanzas) in the serial poem that is World Jelly. In the notes that accompany the book, Tost acknowledges Chris Vitiello, Robert Poland, Bob Dylan, and Jack Kerouac as influences, and also credits the Guided by Voices Song Title Generator with the title and other noun strings that appear throughout the poem—World Jelly as a foray into flarf? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

There is a confident voice carrying the reader through the poem, a lyric I that is sometimes tender and sometimes brooding, an animal beneath the surface, “secretly breathless / with shit in my teeth.” The pleasure of the poem comes in the words themselves—the unusual combinations, the sound and images they produce. Like “Riders finding joy in the sunlight / on the face of the earth,” the reader finds joy in the words on the face of the poem:

Situation cowboy vortex

whistlers whistling (11)

Texture trapper

mind your sleep (13)

Remembrance

stands before me

parrot phantom

drifting ship (15)

Sister saucer

father stump (21)

Absence rooster (23)

This is not to say that is all the poem has to offer. One can read into lines like “Resist the successful statement” and “the targets are searching / gathering clues” as a way to make sense of the disparate stanzas—a poetic statement perhaps. The I is reflexive, moving between philosophical statements, defining words as magic “because they hang / one mystical experience / away from a crisis,” employing sterile language, “It is in the instead / we find an argument / for the whole,” and something more personal, a voice claiming he does not want the sun on his back, stating “I promised nothing.”

—Gina Myers