Happy Spring, and welcome to Posit 36! We are honored and excited to bring you this issue, filled with the luminous poetry, visual art, and collaboration of so many writers and artists we admire.
In keeping with this season of birth and regeneration, the work in this issue contemplates and demonstrates transformation and transcendence: considering trauma and damage, whether on a personal or collective level, to offer creations filled with insight, beauty, and hope. Even in this “ruined civilization, what we call the present” (John Yau, “Documentary Cinema”) in which “calm is wafer-thin, a filament of agreement” (Maxine Chernoff, “Diary”), “the firelight of meaning” in these remarkable works helps make “the chilly vacuum / inhabitable” (ash good, “a woman i love wonders if the lights are the departed floating around her crown each morning”).
Dennis Barone’s poems employ the concrete sensory vividness of the image to explore the organic relationship between past, present, and future as revealed by memory and perception. These poems offer a forward-looking optimism on the personal and societal level, even in the face of mortality, social violence, and climate change. Declaring “apocalypse an ancient mistake,” Barone urges us to take a lesson from our own ability “to / relinquish “I” and gather together as / “we,” as we do “waiting patient and kind” in an amusement park line while “each / greets the other one-hundred languages; / none, misunderstood.” Riffing with jazz-like linguistic freedom on childhood memories of the “Double or Nothing” gamble of the immigrant experience counting on “air-conditioned time coming / and days like vacations,” Barone encourages us to embrace the future with the same hope and courage.
Maxine Chernoff’s “Diary” series encompasses past and present, the delights of memory and the larger dark histories that have been pushed aside. “We lit sparklers and ran in joyous circles. Bedtime came and went. While in the world, napalm ravaged a jungle, and in our own South, dogs and water cannons spread their hate: that too, your childhood.” Indeed, this country was “no paradise” in spite of what many of our countrymen continue to believe. Chernoff’s vivid and lyrical imagery gives us peonies, but ants invade them; “Cassiopeia winks on the evening” but “we watch passively,” our privileged lives so completely “unlike the man who digs with his hands for his family lost in the rubble of war.” These poems survey our universe from constellation to earthworm, with the scent of daily sweetness: “The man who sells dahlias and always says merde lets her leash drop as she samples the neighboring vegetable booth’s sweet, earthy carrots,” but is bitterly honest about the silenced voices “of those whose place on earth has no migratory rights, just the bone-white stillness of harm beyond seasons.”
Ed Friedman’s deceptively casual and conversational poetry manages to be hilarious, tender, and profound all at once. Friedman unmasks the eerie in the personal, both mentally: “ I remember myself alone in / darkness with the faintest vertical green line, an uneven touch” and physically: “Blood is great. So is hair. I squeeze them closed, flat” and then makes it into a koan for us to ponder: “Squeeze anything closed about risk to make it bigger.” In a friendly exchange with his postal carrier, the poet lyrically confesses “deep love for pole vaulters who ready themselves by / visualizing a plush river of stars dividing darker cosmic quarters / themselves in that flow.” And, improbably, he receives “a postcard for me with a Rancho Palos Verdes return address / date-time stamped September, I-can’t-read-the-day, 1971 / written in 11th century Japanese ‘lady’s hand.'” Friedman also offers us some tongue-in-cheek (and perhaps true) philosophical advice when he counsels: “Bottles break / in the alley, but no one listens endlessly / to what they already know. Be glad of that.”
The exuberant linguistic energy of ash good’s poems animates the poet’s juxtaposition of the concrete and the figurative with the warmth and vitality of the living things they analogize to grapple with the inexplicable. In the process, they reveal the interconnectedness at the core of existence, celebrating the sensual pulse of a personified summer (whose “face is clean / & shameless” and who “can fit the moon in her mouth”); comparing the narrator’s ability to encompass the ambivalent effects of family relationships (“the horror family can be”) to cartoon Transformers; equating the tenacious patience of an unusual seed to the narrator’s determination to “take small temperatures with unanswerable questions” to “hear what i cannot hear;” and comparing the complexity of the multiplicit self to snakes slithering “in & out of our own understanding.”
In these searching, painful, poems, Mara Lee Grayson explores the psychic repercussions of a violent tragedy resulting in a lover’s coma that is “kind / of an umbrella, / after / all– / tobacco / smear and vodka, / vengefulness / and butterfly / tattoos / can fit / under / its canopy.” With love, anger, and frustration, these elegant verses capture the liminal state of the victim “who thinks himself afloat” and that of his caregivers: the lover, “the figured / stick // who isn’t / sitting still” and the mother with her figurative “sugar / spoonful set.” We feel the particular torture of a person who is at once present and absent, a victim of violence frozen into the unnatural stasis of a photograph, forced by violence to abandon those he loves and trap them in their attending roles until they are desperate to “shake the numbness,” much as he might wish for “a butterfly / to give her wings, two / weeks to / gaze upon the sea.” At least there is hope, if no certainty in the narrator’s restless limbo, counting off the months of the beloved’s suspended animation: “most / of May, all June, / July, if August.”
In the mesmerizing and absolute vividness of Catherine Howe’s self-named “blooms,” we see the vine-like growth of shapes and their blossoming as if we were watching them grow before our eyes, our impossibly slow vision transcended. Resembling no real flora, they tap into our lifelong inner experience of flowers and plants. Their bells and umbels, stars and coils, are an archetype for the hope of profusion and abundance that we wish for ourselves and our planet. The striking and ever-shifting colors add the dimensional movement of a vital and organic force, recalling the living interconnections of fungi or the state-sized stand of aspen we have so recently realized communicates on a different, and we hope, wiser level. These paintings speak in the language of color and form and movement, joyfully and wildly alive.
Drawing on the contrasts between the preservation of art and the despoiling of nature, John Isles’s beautiful imagery and deep vision lay bare the range of contradictions in ourselves and our surroundings: what we choose to preserve, what we have lost sight of in the process. In the museum, “each room [is] empty except for all / the things, immaculate in permanent / dusk of museum light,” but the human history behind the objects is darker and more complex: “some old / Da Da Conk drunk in the basement / granddaughters watching him / beaten by their uncles.” In “Wildfire,” Isles asks, “who set the fires, who sparked / who left a trail of accelerants?” And though “grass blames itself, its dry wish / for immolation,“ it may be “the incombustible in us—heat without ability to burn.” Still, the poet asks us, as poets and as humans, to seek the meaningful even in the detritus: “If each tree is introspection / an elegant gift, then so must be / telephone poles, birds on wires / streets and culverts draining into the bay / the shoreline littered / with gifts no one asked for—/ tampon applicators / lighters / vape pens…”
This collaborative visual and textual series by Alex Mattraw & Adam Thorman evokes a historical vision of earth and sky together; that is, our perceived whole. All our observations, fears and joys live in it. From beneath the ground, where water rises, to the constellations, and on to the further expansion of particle waves that permeate the universe, these pieces turn the “VOID” ( “I name OVID”) back around to our world, its myths and lore, its creatures, human and animal, and, as both texts and photographs reveal, its frightening beauty. “Wonder demands a tiny terror,” says the poem, and sometimes the vastness of the landscape does just that. But we hold the beauty cognate with our very real fears. In “Bombogenesis,” a new and extra-powerful manifestation of climate change, the poet says “in this terra, I am/ tracking every loop / Store, flood, wake. / Store, fret, wake / Store, wept, wake, flood, / store.” In “VOID,” our recent experience has brought newer fears: “The sun isn’t even big enough to make a black hole but/ [in the dark] all exists, pandemic.” Mattraw’s love of language finds a new and appropriate coinage to express both our hubris and how it might end: “How important we think/ we are ablyss.” Still, we have for our pleasure, “the Whiskey Way,” and hawks “cawing petals.” In the end, we can agree with Mattraw about poetry and perhaps about our future: “I argue she never names the bird because / hope is [never singular.]”
With an eye like a sharp and dangerous object, Rod Val Moore gives the reader a retrospective glimpse of a peripatetic childhood; if it’s true that all happy families are alike, others conjure the specifics of more bitter emotions. “Younger and older brother rotated /declined, took form in anger and sphere. / One was weaker, hair tipped with cold flame / one larger & dancing, thick with lumpen rage.” As often in recollections, actual events blend with emotional atmosphere to create a surreal truth. When a horsefly bites the narrator on a car ride, “What I had in my eye was just a tear / not the clear water of self. Mother / slept but held me on her lap, until she / dreamed I was a snake / and screamed and threw me to the car floor.” Even so, sometimes we are compelled to recall our memories in order to revisit our own place in them: “Tonight I need to remember this more clearly / There’s a tall green vodka bottle on a table in / Milpitas. My eyes focus on the not yet dead / Cigarettes pass from monster to monster to me.”
Luke Munson’s existential parables in verse are good natured in their ironic bleakness. The poems featured here are populated by characters who want to forget what they have built, retrace the steps that brought them to the present from the irretrievable past, or remain frozen in the impossible world of an artwork, pleading with those of us in the “real” world not to “break the spell.” As one narrator of these marvelously compressed, enigmatic, mournful meditations wonders, “How do you do it? How / is anyone still alive?” Yet there is a gentle absurdity to the Cervantes-like humor of this unique and imaginative work, as when a befuddled narrator offers cat food to an armor-clad stray from a centuries-past battlefield “wearing a battle-skirt /of leather strips, and when he paces, I can // see his balls,” who has “saved up years’ worth // of nail clippings” to help him find his way back to his own time.
In these pieces from The Monogamist, Ann Pedone’s blunt perceptions and sardonic sense of humor stand in defiance of conventional understandings of women’s relationships to sexual desire. Tilting at the presumed equivalency between women’s sexual experience and their victimization while continuing to focus on the depth of their trauma, these poems enact the very struggle for autonomous self-realization which they examine. When “hic, haec, hoc won’t stop fucking me” and the narrator has “run out of sugar to stop it,” we can appreciate why she is as calmed by “pouring someone / else’s hot soup all the way down the drain” as she is bolstered in her determination to move “the entire prehistory of my sex / life counter-clockwise.”
Rona Pondick’s beautiful and disturbing chimeras feature human heads cast from the artist’s own, integrated into plant, animal, and inanimate forms that embody, or perhaps re-body, the psychological interiority of life’s double-edged sword. The refinement of these creations recalls the polished perfection of classical Greek as well as Renaissance sculpture, while their disturbing, thought-provoking conception brings to mind the syntheses of Kafka, Ovid, classical mythology, and other religious iconographies. The sinuous curves of the woman-tree hybrid in “Dwarfed White Jack,” for instance, suggest a female leg and torso; in place of pinecones, its branches cradle heads, which look, from a distance, like fists, evoking the phoenix-like Jack Pine, whose resistant cones are opened by fire. This being may be trapped, like her mythological predecessors, in arboreal immobility, as well as twisted and dwarfed like a bonsai in her shallow tray, but she is also endowed with the power of creation after devastation, enhanced by the multiple perspectives of her numerous points of view. The eponymous emerging “Pillow Head’s” straining posture and pained expression suggest an arduous process of differentiation, as if the mind were trying to emancipate itself from the body at the very site of its independence. Pondick’s materials evoke her themes of metamorphosis and transcendence, like the bronze painted to a glossy sheen to suggest the pliant fragility of inflated rubber in “Pillow Head” and “Navel,” and the counterpoint between the animacy of her forms and the sterile ethereality of their pure white polish. The struggles of these human hybrids enact both the ordeal of mortal limitation and the possibility of transcendence.
With deep and detailed personal understanding, Lisa Sewell captures both the solace and the sadness of our desire for a deeper connection to the natural world. Standing on the shore, the poet watches as seals “slide into the surf and vanish,” “trusting the body can be held / as if in a hammock, free of burden, free of weight.” Her own wish, “I too must give myself over / forget the drone strikes / reported to have killed 200 civilians,” is perhaps reflected in the seal’s gaze, “ I am here on a rocky shore and I linger there to dissipate.” In “Field Notes on the Toroweap Formation,” Sewell’s literary companion on the 16 day journey is John Wesley Powell, and she lovingly catalogs the names of the rocks and side canyons, —Native American, scientific, and those that Powell himself used: Cocochino Shale, Vishnu Schist, Marble Canyon, Flaming Gorge. With her husband, John, part of the rafting party, Sewell details the mishaps that correspond to Powell’s own expedition: “I kept company with his dreams which were vivid / and made him scream or cry out, fuck you you fucks.” Though the trip is beautiful, the poet, like Powell, finds she has “brought back only scraps of what the expedition taught: names and profiles / of ghosts, all the riverine shrubs and grasses that no longer thrive.”
Zazu Swistel’s “Spatial Portraits” depict the desolation and disintegration of our psychic landscapes in a world ravaged by human control. Although there is a surrealistic, fertile freedom reminiscent of Escher and Dalí in this artist’s concrete realization of abstract, ineffable emotional and conceptual states, these coercive, cage-like enclosures are inhabited by damage, detritus, and death. The literal and figurative interiority of Swistel’s charted realities are at once foreign, impossible, and deeply familiar, in which everything is graphically and structurally interrelated. These works are graphic exposés of the damage, both internal (to the human psyche) and external (to the natural world) inflicted by our impulse towards restriction and control.
This selection of John Yau’s poems reveals the range and depth of this poet’s dynamic, delving restlessness. In these poems, everything, including our questions, is called into question. For instance, the haunting, contemplative lyricism of “Last Painting’s” parable of a final “pilgrimage to the incomprehensible” (i.e. death) undermines its own trope: although the artist becomes the “pigment on a surface” of her art, she does “not fit into the folds of the painting releasing her.” A similar question/answer dialectic is structurally embedded in the contrapuntal dialogue between telegraphically curt micro-narratives and aphoristic ‘morals’ of “Diary of Discontents,” just as linguistic and conceptual instability are enacted by the Ashberian collages of “Aging Elfin Blues” and “Documentary Cinema.” Each poem is a world in itself, even as Yau’s recurring subjects make appearances, such as painting, cinema, and the interplay of identity and society (“you cannot change history even after it changes you”). Rich in wordplay (“soon to be a major emotional picture”) and contrapuntal juxtapositions (“Tender bellow mortified by fat. Postcard gargoyle in need of a second bath”) these tightly crafted excursions expose the “pauses in leaky silence” and “station changes” with which we “climb into latest examples of a ruined civilization, what we call the present.”
We hope you, too, find pleasure and provocation in these wonderful works.
Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash
