What We’re Reading: Permanent Record
This is a collection of poems about the cycles of one man’s life. Put that simply, it might not sound intriguing; but trust me, Vinz captures the essence of each period in life with such potent relatability that you will find your poetic appetite satiated.
The book is in four sections; the first of which is called “Boys Will Be Boys”. Yes, it captures boyhood, and the discomfort that arrives with that. The speaker learns many things in this section, learning of his family’s baggage, the cost of things, authority, guilt, punishment, and simple enjoyment. Vinz captures this section especially (and the following sections, too) with straight-forward word choice. He also works his poetic muscles by being funny, irreverent, and heart-wrenching, all in the same poem.
One of the main themes of this first section is the emphasis on guilt, and not being a “good boy”, such as in the poem “Sayings”:
I
“Eat up and be somebody” was my mother’s
favorite saying, especially when it came
to all those vegetables left on my plate.
I knew the somebody she talked about
was probably a good boy, but I seemed
to be having some trouble with that one.
It’s an overhanging presence, this guilt, and one that is concentrated in a way that only an adolescent boy speaker could accomplish. Vinz’s straight forward, but well-chosen word choices pulled me right into that emotional setting. This guilt is translated into later sections with ideas of responsibility and habit.
There’s also a level of unknowing, uncertainty, and a sort of acquiescence to the fact that as a kid, our speaker will never have all the answers (at least not like adults think they do). However, he doesn’t seem too disturbed by this not knowing.
This section chronicles an age now past, an age of Ovaltine, squirming during church sermons, bicycles, and “family values.” Every once in a while, the passing of time catches up with the speaker, as it does in the poem “Cautionary Tales”, a poem about a bull in a pasture:
[…] And so I
skirted the acres just to keep my distance,
peeking through the leaves to see if he still
was watching me, waiting for some foolish move–
those fierce red eyes, the thunder in the ground–
or maybe that was simply nightmares. It’s
getting hard to tell, as years themselves keep
gaining ground relentlessly, their hot breath
on my back, and not a fence in sight.
The second section, “Sightseeing”, follows the speaker as an adult. He’s more self-assured, and the tone veers into less direct, more poetic prose. He’s comfortable following his whims where they wander. There is some cynicism that has come with age, but there is also an admiration of love and beautiful things, such as in the poem “A Perkin’s Love Poem”:
Their few scant words were limited to food,
and when his meal was done, her salad boxed
in styrofoam, they counted out their cash,
blinked at the chatty waitress, scraped back chairs,
lunged for each other’s hands, and hurried off,
perhaps to find some calmer, darker place —
one where they wouldn’t need to speak at all.
This whole section does what the title of the section denotes: sightseeing. Observing, learning from human relationships seen during the speaker’s travels and daily interactions. The first two sections contain more active learning; the last two sections which I’ll talk more about briefly in a moment, are more about reflective learning.
The third section is called “Curmudgeon Songs” which is prefaced with a Mark Twin quote: “There is no sadder thing than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.” Things have changed in this section; both in the world around the speaker, but also the speaker himself. He’s aged, has an urgency to his observations now. In the final section, “A Certain Age”, assisted living, doctors, and antiques are now his regular vocabulary. This is met with a quiet bewilderment at the pace of change, but also an acceptance.
While at times this felt too neat of a narrative, I appreciated the full circle of the speaker’s life. What other writers encapsulate an entire life in one poetic text?
Buddha, Proof by Su Smallen (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013)
I first encountered this book at a reading by Su Smallen for Red Dragonfly Press. A MN Book Award finalist, Red Dragonfly Press republished this expanded version with double the number of poems, which is what Smallen was reading from. Smallen is a calm and charming reader, with a voice full of wonder. The emotional response I had to her reading style was further echoed by the tone of the poetry collection itself.
Buddha explores our contemporary world, with Barbie as a frequent companion as he encounters Facebook, Cheerios, Target, and baseball, and goes to Vegas, New York City, and Paris. He finds moments of inner peace in the most unlikely of our world’s places: in Barbie’s snap purse, Facebook, and even a toaster, as in the poem, “Buddha, Toast”:
If Buddha had a favorite appliance
It would be the toaster.
Buddha puts his slice in the slot
Marked “single.”
He presses the lever down
With mindful anticipation.
The toaster makes toast
And in the other slot
The one that is not labeled
The toaster makes not-toast.
A complete meal, most satisfying.
Buddha takes his time drinking in these small wonders and everyday situations. His adventures are always tinged with whimsy and the innocence of discovery. We see this pure innocence in such poems as “Buddha, Lily”, which begins: “Buddha, bathing, contemplates the island his tummy makes / on the island is a lake his belly button makes / in the lake is Buddha, bathing, contemplating the island his tummy makes”. He looks at the world as a child would, yet he also does so with a knowing tone. He’s funny and good-natured for the most part, as we expect him to be.
Yet our more human emotions rub off on Buddha, too, with all the time he’s spending in our world. He suffers externally, not just in his mind, as in “Buddha, Release”:
“Buddha, Release”
Buddha is suffering
not the traditional wail of distress
but wracking, screaming, thrashing cries.
He is breaking up with the world, again.The muscles of the entire world contract,
release. She develops curves in her axis
so that she may support the swaying
weights of all those souls.
This heaviness is contrasted with the lightness and humor we see in other poems about Buddha. His human moments even show him getting testy with Barbie (an vice versa) in “Buddha, Barbie”:
“Buddha, Barbie”
Buddha takes aerobics class from Barbia
and hates it.[…]
He even grows to dislike Barbie herself
(“only during class”)
her cheery stamina and the way nothing
of hers jostles, just her hair.
Buddha prefers his suffering to be the mental kind.
Later in the same poem, Barbie takes a meditation class from Buddha and is equally frustrated. Yet in these moments, they are joined by the fact that they are both vulnerable and outside of their comfort zones. And somehow, by the end of the poem, they come together to find each other’s complementary spot in the messy world as it is.
Smallen uses clipped phrasing and compound words throughout the poems to demonstrate the duality and the slowing-down of the world as Buddha observes. This jolted speak gives us pause, and can sometimes be hard to follow or digest. But perhaps that’s the point, to stop and become more aware of our breath and pause to ponder. One such instance where this clipped phrasing works both ways is in the poem “Buddha, Big Sur”:
Buddha is a lens
Buddha prisms
West, East
Cliff, ocean
Within, beyond
Body, not-body
Quake, accelerate, smash
Quarks fall-rising as mist
(Up, down, bottom
Top, charm, strange)
The duality of the lines “Body, not-body” are echoed throughout with contrasting visuals of full and empty bowls, and being and not-being. With these lines, we become more aware of the philosophies behind Buddhism.
One of the main themes of Buddhism that we find in the collection is laughter (such as the ending of the poem, “Buddha, Roller Coaster”: “[…] tuned by laughing, / laughing the entire time / and a good time after that.”). Buddha is amused by our human-ness too, such as in “Buddha, Mona Lisa”:
Buddha was at first bemused
When he went to see the Mona Lisa.
All the people stood with their backs go her
For photos, sure(….)When people made it up to the guard rope,
Buddha saw each one turn, then lean back a bitAs if they had been hiking and she was
The tree named “As far as we’ll go”
When it’s time to touch and turn for home
He observes our world of dualities, quirky social norms, heartache, and lightness, but in the end, meets all of these things with laughter.
This is a very contemporary and loose interpretation of Buddhism, of course — but that’s the beautiful thing. It makes Buddhism accessible and approachable. As Smallen says in her preface, “The sense I make of Buddhism makes sense to me; this is an American embrace, of course. There is much more about Buddhism I don’t know or understand than I do. Buddhism at its core holds compassion for human existence and expresses from that compassion a sense of humor. This compassion and humor have often encouraged me.” This collection of poems melds this compassion and humor with our human vulnerabilities to create something honest.
What other poets (or authors in general) take on a deity of some sort? Do you think making deities more human helps or hurts your understanding of them?
Empty-handed by Scott Lowery (Red Dragonfly Press 2013)
Previously unpublished aside from journals, Scott Lowery’s poetry chapbook Empty-handed was the 2013 Emergence Chapbook prize winner for Red Dragonfly Press. I attended a reading at the Anderson Center (where Red Dragonfly Press is press-in-residence), and heard Lowery’s work for the first time there. Lowery has an unassuming, kind demeanor with a natural awe of the world about him. I picked up the chapbook at that reading and have been mulling it over since.
A public school teacher for many years, Lowery has an inquisitive and genuine approach to daily life in his work. His subjects vary from softball, a high school school janitor, a deer hit on the side of the road, to the heart-aching poem about a student of his who was shot later in life. All of these moments, some seemingly mundane until Lowery gets his hands on them, find levity and insight through Lowery’s eyes. He finds the poetry in daily life, as witnessed in this poem, “You’ve Been Here Too”:
Wind shifts the maple’s perforated shade.
Tired out from mowing, I turn to find
the day doing something simple at the end:
a cold breath lifts from the cut grass,
indigo pooling beneath the bushes.
Lowery is also conscious of his reader, and in fact, many of the poems have a conversational voice, in which the reader can imagine Lowery telling them about this personally. His colloquial, plainly spoken language is what makes his moments of insight and poetic surprise even better, such as in this excerpt of “Christmas Eve Morning, 1950”:
Gas pops into flame beneath the lead pot.
You stub out your Lucky, liking how
the copper from the tank cuts through
the smoke and stings your face awake,
liking the sweet smell of benzene,
the shine of grease on the floor-boards
as you flick on the work-light,
liking it all.What you don’t know
can’t hurt you yet: sulfuric dew
on the roof of your steel lunchbox,
the voices in the bedroom walls
your wife will keep to herself for now.
The moments of clarity sneak up on the reader after falling into the rhythm of Lowery’s internal conversation. I could actually see some of these poems as prose, because of the conversational tone. The lines tend to run into the next, and part of me wishes to see them as a block of text.
Another way Lowery is conscious of his reader is seen through his humble approach to his writing, as seen in the opening poem “Warning”:
This poem is not what you think,
these sharp-edged lines and loose turns,
the drum of its gallops and stops
as it winds down through the scrub.
You think you’re a deer and the poem
is a clear stream in the blue dusk.
then the water turns to sand
in your mouth, and the story
you wanted erases itself,
leaves a glittering, dead-end trail.
Lowery puts this poem first in the collection of sixteen poems, warning the reader to not have preconceived expectations for this chapbook, to not try too hard to find meaning, but to instead, enjoy the work naturally as it unfolds.
Are there other presses that support emerging, previously unpublished writers? How does the juxtaposition of plainly spoken language against poetic insights change the way you read those turns and surprises in poetry?
Sleepwalks by Michael Walsh (Red Dragonfly Press 2012) with illustrations by David Bernardy
This letterpress chapbook is one I have many personal ties to. I say that not only as a disclaimer, but more so because I think it gives me a unique perspective on the work inside that is worth sharing with you. To start with, Michael Walsh was my instructor for my undergraduate thesis, a poetry chapbook. After learning and getting feedback from him, it was wonderful to read his poetry and see how his teachings were put into practice (I haven’t read any of his other poetry other than this chapbook thus far). Even more, I helped to set a few poems of this chapbook during my apprenticeship at Minnesota letterpress publisher, Red Dragonfly Press. That was almost two years ago now, giving you an idea of the time it takes for letterpress to happen, for chapbooks like this to come together. While setting type for a poem, and putting type away, you learn the innards of a poem intimately; letter by letter, line by line, space by space. Because of the nature of printing, through the process of setting type, you set it backwards, and upside down. When putting a poem away, you start from the bottom up, and at the end of the line, working your way towards the start. Through this slow process of reading a poem this way, backwards, upside down, and word by word, the poem slowly reveals itself to you, and works its way into your bones and consciousness. This was an especially great way to encounter this chapbook, as each word is a chewy morsel of gritty energy. Lines unearth a deeper, dreamy, yet visceral sense of the body.
The chapbook contains twelve poems, each of which is tightly wound around the theme of sleepwalking. Walsh makes the journey accessible for the reader by making us feel as if our bodies, too, are slumbering through the night. They feel very grounded, despite the dreamy sequences through the poems. These poems are the cut, lean athletic type. There are no superlative connectors or flowery language to carry us along. Instead, carefully chosen, action-filled words to the heavy leg lifting, moving us along with their physicality.
Despite the heaviness present in the poems, there are funny moments to bring a touch of lightness, such as in the title poem “Sleepwalks”: “With a sigh of relief, he pees / into the rows of shoes of all his relatives / staying overnight for the holiday,” and also “In tighty-whiteys, he paces / aisles of the corner store, billfold / in hand. The clerk rings up another raincoat.”
An excerpt from my favorite poem in the chapbook, “Asleep, My Lover’s Body Leaves Him,” bring a sleeping body to life in all the ways Walsh knows how:
One rib is a cedar branch falling
to root in the floor boards.
A vein releases dragonflies mating, rising
from a window into the dark.
This miracle tears his double helix down
while he dreams at high speed of wet gnats
and silver. He rises to sleepwalk
and his tracks shift from cat to fox
to fossil furiously beating
Its wing-bones, big as kites.
Walsh’s debut collection of poems, Dirt Riddles, was published in Miller Williams Prize in Poetry from the University of Arkansas Press. He has also had another letterpress chapbook of poems printed from Red Dragonfly press, in 2004. Additionally, his fiction has been anthologized in Milkweed Edition‘s Fiction on a Stick.
How does having a personal connection to an author, book, or press change your reading? Does it make your understanding less valid then someone approaching it brand new? Have you read poetry that exudes a lean, gritty physicality?
