I take Szymborska’s lead when I say the hardest sentence of an elegiac blog post is the first. Well, now that one’s behind me.

In many cases, when a poet passes a small part of the world mourns. This little world of poets and poetry readers feels a tingeing of their hope, but soon a this too shall pass sigh becomes a sort of resolution, and they (we) try to carry on. Szymborska, though, feels different. After decades of remarkable work that spoke both to the social issues many poems fear to enter and the weird wonderment that many poems fail to achieve, I realize, in a childish way, that I never thought Szymborska would ever leave the world, that she was too good, too smart, for anyone to pull a fast one on her. And part ...MORE]]> By Elizabeth Petersen

I take Szymborska’s lead when I say the hardest sentence of an elegiac blog post is the first. Well, now that one’s behind me.

In many cases, when a poet passes a small part of the world mourns. This little world of poets and poetry readers feels a tingeing of their hope, but soon a this too shall pass sigh becomes a sort of resolution, and they (we) try to carry on. Szymborska, though, feels different. After decades of remarkable work that spoke both to the social issues many poems fear to enter and the weird wonderment that many poems fail to achieve, I realize, in a childish way, that I never thought Szymborska would ever leave the world, that she was too good, too smart, for anyone to pull a fast one on her. And part of me thinks such thoughts would make her grin.

Coming from the movement of Polish postwar poets, Szymborska made a way for herself among the dark, the guilt-ridden, the exiled, and the reactionary to create poems that meant something to everyone who read them. Her poems grew to take up the whole world, and the world noticed, offering her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, a prize that was difficult for her to make sense of. Her translator Clare Cavanagh said in a recent interview, “Her friends called it the Nobel Tragedy…It was a few years before she wrote another poem.” Which I think just attests to what a genuine person she must have been.

From the title poem of her latest book, Here, she wrote, “I can’t speak for elsewhere, / but here on Earth we’ve got a fair supply everything.” And ain’t that the truth? Because that’s the thing with Szymborska, she says it before anybody else could—about pierogies and cultured microorganisms and the words we think we know. She was the best sort of riddler. As Charles Simic said, Szymborska was “[n]ot only one of the finest poets living today, but also one of the most readable.” Readable but layered, her images simple but expansive.

Which is why I am happy we got one last book, one last morsel to save in our cheek. Szymborska is the poet I save for bad weather—so that I can coop myself up and spend the day staring first at her words, then the ceiling, then the window.

In her book, Monologue of a Dog she has the line, “When I pronounce the word Nothing, / I make something no non-being can hold.” Give it to Szymborska to make nothing into something, literally, abstractly, literally. She inspires me to try and do the same.

By David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor

J. A. Tyler has quite an astonishing number of works out recently, including INCONCEIVABLE WILSON, which was recently excerpted in PANK magazine, In Love with a Ghost, and, among other works, two chapbooks, and has no fewer than three books due out this year.  What I’ve read of Wilson’s work focuses on the fragility of self, its parts, its dismantling.  His most recent book A Man of Glass & The Ways We Have Failed shares this theme.  “I remain, remainders,” the speaker in INCONCEIVABLE WILSON says, “the parts, pieces.  I am dismantled. Tools and instruments and me taken apart.”

Even the genre Tyler writes in—he terms his longer works novel(la)s—dovetails with that sense of fractured identity.  A Man of Glass… centers on one character’s point of view like a novella.  It has stanzas instead of paragraphs, ...MORE]]>

By David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor

J. A. Tyler has quite an astonishing number of works out recently, including INCONCEIVABLE WILSON, which was recently excerpted in PANK magazine, In Love with a Ghost, and, among other works, two chapbooks, and has no fewer than three books due out this year.  What I’ve read of Wilson’s work focuses on the fragility of self, its parts, its dismantling.  His most recent book A Man of Glass & The Ways We Have Failed shares this theme.  “I remain, remainders,” the speaker in INCONCEIVABLE WILSON says, “the parts, pieces.  I am dismantled. Tools and instruments and me taken apart.”

Even the genre Tyler writes in—he terms his longer works novel(la)s—dovetails with that sense of fractured identity.  A Man of Glass… centers on one character’s point of view like a novella.  It has stanzas instead of paragraphs, and is it lineated like poetry or not?  A Man of Glass… can be seen as a novel planted in the unsteady ground between novella and poetry.  It’s an interesting form that we’ve been seeing more of lately:  in addition to Tyler’s works, other works in this form include We Take Me Apart by Molly Gaudry and Culture of One, from the ever-prolific Alice Notley.  In all of these, identity never strays from the center of the frame.

In A Man of Glass…, something is wrong; the love’s gone sour between the unnamed man and woman. The man still loves but now, it seems, she does not.  She washes her hair with cherry shampoo up above him in her apartment while he stands there, dejected, in the street.  The stage, surprisingly, is then set for scenarios that remind me of the sonnet cycles of the 1600s. In fact, this book follows the same fever-chart course some of those poem sequences do, with rising and falling levels of desperation.  There is denial:  “You see now what you have done to me…how you have made me so different that I can’t even exist anymore.”  But has she done this?  The same accusation is leveled in Michael Drayton’s Idea, a sonnet cycle from 1593:  “My heart was slain…who should I think the murder should commit? …It slew itself…”

The tension ratchets higher.  The man alters himself to bring her back. She doesn’t speak.  He changes, again and again and again, to get her attention, to perhaps rekindle her attraction to him.  He becomes a string of beads, a spotted egg, a wineglass, a rainbow.  Through a bewildering series of changes, the main character tries to metamorphose to win her, and each metamorphosis is inadequate: “Mourning is a river that never changes, but always changes and never cries itself out.”  In many ways, the situation is more heartbreaking than that of the sonneteers who tried but never won. The speaker in Drayton’s sonnet cycle realizes his folly early:  “Upon your lips the scarlet drops are found/ And in your eye the boy who did the murder.”  In J. A. Tyler’s latest book, the main character teeters closer to the edge.  In off-kilter and lacerating language, Tyler’s A Man of Glass… follows the track of a man who had won but now has lost.

A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed

Fugue State Press

ISBN 978-1-879193-24-6

112 pp.

$12 paperback

My strange reading coincidences continue.  Wayne Miller’s wonderful poetry collection The City, Our City (a review of which appears in our most recent print issue) was part of an uncanny string of books I was reading that had to do with the formation and destruction of cities.  The very next two books I picked up after writing that review continued the trend.  It was a bit spooky, to be honest.

With a title like Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, it might at first blush appear as if the release date (at the beginning of November) of Alice Notley’s latest book might be part of a Halloween-themed publicity campaign.  But considering that few poetry books get a publicity campaign of any sort, and in spite of ghouls and blood-sacs (more on that anon) and scattered ...MORE]]> by David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor

My strange reading coincidences continue.  Wayne Miller’s wonderful poetry collection The City, Our City (a review of which appears in our most recent print issue) was part of an uncanny string of books I was reading that had to do with the formation and destruction of cities.  The very next two books I picked up after writing that review continued the trend.  It was a bit spooky, to be honest.

With a title like Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, it might at first blush appear as if the release date (at the beginning of November) of Alice Notley’s latest book might be part of a Halloween-themed publicity campaign.  But considering that few poetry books get a publicity campaign of any sort, and in spite of ghouls and blood-sacs (more on that anon) and scattered bones and such, we are dealing with something as epic—literally—as Notley’s other monumental works.

Derek Walcott, among others, noticed that Helen of Troy, the cause of the war in Iliad and Aeneid, is only a shadow in the famous story.  She doesn’t even have any direct dialogue—all of the words she supposedly said are spoken for her by men. Back in the late 80s, when she was working on her now-classic book-length poem The Descent of Alette, Notley saw the epic up to the present as a form exclusively in the purview of the Masculine.  She wanted to write a feminine epic.  The result was dazzling. What we have in Songs and Stories of the Ghouls is essentially a continuation of that work.  Here, she moves to women as they are portrayed in existing Classical texts—no less than Medea and Helen of Troy, one a murderess, the other portrayed as the cause of Troy’s fall. What’s at stake here is taking these stories back.   Regarding the accepted story of Medea, Notley makes it clear: “the purpose of the story: to establish as reality, that a woman of power can only be evil.”   “Nothing is unchangeable,” Notley says in the opening pages of the book’s second section, “except for a myth—let’s change that.”  In a combination of prose and poetry, the women of these long-established tales are brought forth and are given a voice.  They speak from their own mouths.

Notley said in a brief conversation with me after her recent reading at Notre Dame that she was tired of politics, that Alette was her overtly-political poem, that what she writes these days isn’t concerned so much with the political.  But much of this new work is political in various ways.  In the well-known story Medea has power, but always used it to help Jason. And why is the established story told in such a way—a woman of power who kills her brother and children and poisons another woman?  To “establish as reality that a woman of power can only be evil.”   “No one really believes in her power,” Notley writes, “She is only allowed it as an adjunct to her passion.  She can’t just have it.  No woman is as yet allowed that.” We move from gender politics to political demonstration:  “When you protest, you’re no/ longer a civilian: they can kill you.”  The ghouls here, reduced to sucking on blood sacs for sustenance, are the women suppressed in such a scheme.

Even more intriguing is the kinship this volume has with, not only Classical epics, but also with H.D., whose Helen in Egypt I just by chance happened to pick up next.  In both books we have a sense of a feminist retelling of the stories that concern women, but which have been only voiced by males. The two books could be considered sister texts; they resonate with each other in complex and astonishing ways; their aim is to reclaim the Feminine in these epics. There is quite a bit more here to explore than can be included in a book review, but suffice it to say that Notley’s oeuvre is a rich field for exploration, and—along with Descent of Alette—The Songs and Stories of the Ghouls is a wonderful place to start.

Songs and Stories of the Ghouls

Wesleyan University Press

205 pp.

ISBN 978-0-8195-6956-1

$24.95 Hardcover

Ron Padgett, poet, author of some twenty volumes, memoirist, collaborator, badass, septuagenarian, translator, Okie, grandfather, has earned himself the right to start a poem thusly:

There’s not a lot of time to think when one is assailed by activities and obligations and even less time to do it when one is free of them because then one spends one’s time thinking about how little time there is.

Sometimes, when talking about poems, poets, or recent collections with poet friends, I’ll try and distinguish between poets I like “as a writer of poems” (read: poets whose techniques I find “fresh,” whose “voice” I respect, whose “language” is “interesting”) and poets whose work I like “as a Jacob” (read: poets I want to drink for breakfast).  This is sometimes an unpopular (read: schizophrenic) perspective, but—for me—is the ...MORE]]> by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry

Ron Padgett, poet, author of some twenty volumes, memoirist, collaborator, badass, septuagenarian, translator, Okie, grandfather, has earned himself the right to start a poem thusly:

There’s not a lot of time to think
when one is assailed by activities and obligations
and even less time to do it
when one is free of them
because then one spends one’s time thinking
about how little time there is.

Sometimes, when talking about poems, poets, or recent collections with poet friends, I’ll try and distinguish between poets I like “as a writer of poems” (read: poets whose techniques I find “fresh,” whose “voice” I respect, whose “language” is “interesting”) and poets whose work I like “as a Jacob” (read: poets I want to drink for breakfast).  This is sometimes an unpopular (read: schizophrenic) perspective, but—for me—is the difference between Karen Volkman and Susan Wheeler, between C.D. Wright and Elaine Equi, between Alex Lemon and Zach Schomburg, between Ashbery and Koch, between—shit—between the Beatles and the Stones, Ghostface and Raekwon, Joni Mitchell and Townes Van Zandt.

Point being, Ron Padgett is in both categories, comfortably.  He takes a nap in one, wakes up, makes Earl Grey in the other, splatters brains on the wall, and goes back to sleep.  The poem above, titled “Thinking About a Cloud,” from his 2011 collection, How Long, continues: “That’s what it’s like to be in America / early in the twenty-first century” and I really believe it, because Padgett writes with the kind of innocent brilliance, the childlike wonder, at—brace yourself—“The Everyday” that we’ve become too cynical, too esoteric, and too distracted to appreciate in contemporary poems.  That poem is an existential conversation between the speaker and—yes—a cloud.

Like Johnny Cash, Padgett defeats irony.  The prevailing theme here is death, which strikes Padgett as funny, without cynicism—“The Death Deal,” a catalogue of possible options for the poet’s end, ends:

I’m oddly almost cheered
by the thought
that I might find out
in the not too distant future.
Now for lunch.

Are we allowed to have this much fun in a book of poems?  Who cares.  Read Ron Padgett, and age with such grace.

How Long (2011)
by Ron Padgett
Coffee House Press, 91 p.
$12.50

When I was seventeen, I ganked the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry from the public library and found three poems by David Trinidad anthologized between Bob Kaufman and Woody Guthrie.  This was—to my mind—pretty much the coolest thing ever.  In his newly-published and completely-addictive Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, Trinidad has given us a prismatic funhouse of contemporary poetry, full of Yardley Slicker lipgloss, NRFB (never removed from box) collectible Barbie outfits, and Sylvia Plath.  In this cultural detritus, Trinidad finds something thrilling, something human, and a poetry as formally unexpected and inventive as its subjects.  He was kind enough to speak with Sycamore Review recently and discuss some his most recent projects.

Sycamore Review: This was a big year for you—your selected poems were published, as well as the ...MORE]]> by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry