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Editors’ Notes (Posit 41)

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Welcome to Posit 41!

In times like these, when innocent people are terrorized and even murdered in the streets by government goons, collective protections are eviscerated, disinformation is forced down our throats, and social contributions in science, education, and journalism are censored and censured, art-making is another act of resistance.

As the work in this issue reveals, that resistance includes, but is not limited to, patent expressions of defiance like Charles Bernstein’s structural challenges to the cultural status quo, Anne Waldman’s liberatory chants, Susan Bee’s apocalytic auguries, Julia Kunin’s queer transgressions, or the call-outs of injustice driving these texts by rob mclennan, Elina Kumra, or Alexandria Peary. The spirit of resistance also informs the challenge to persevere at the heart of Laura Mullen’s, Hank Lazer’s, linn meyers’, and Bai Juyi’s/Jaime Robles’ emphasis on balance and serenity.

Which is to say that every work in this issue brings its own courage to the challenge of carrying on in these troubling times.

Charles Bernstein’s poems featured here articulate and enact the (self-) reflective paradoxical traps that are a hallmark of Bernstein’s experiments in provocation. Their koan-like riddles and exercises in polemical frustration echo and interact to dismantle received ideas of “Aesthetic Theory,” theology, and lyric sincerity, even as they instantiate his continuing exploration, up to and including self-negation, of poetic plastic potential. Guiding us and then stranding us in black holes of signification like “the purposelessness / of no purpose doesn’t / have a / purpose,” Bernstein revels in the phonic possibilities of pronouncement and falsification, pirouetting atop the razor line between homily and jape. Sandwiched between wryly layered meta-puzzles, his brief but powerful double elegy to poetic confreres Régis Bonvicino and Pierre Joris delivers a blow to the emotional solar plexus with its bleak rebuttal of a common homily in favor of a starker, more accurate précis of mortality.

Vibrant and lush, teeming with form and color, Susan Bee’s canvases synthesize the disparate energies they ambitiously corral. Their narrative simplicity, popping color palettes, and lavish, naive ornamentation call to mind the folk art of South Asia and the Americas – the work of greats like Rivera and Kahlo, as well as of artists, mostly female, whose names we will never learn. At the same time, Bee’s tableaux bring to mind European Medieval painting, with its disturbing combination of childlike, two-dimensional, myth-laden narration and graphic violence. Like her forbears, Bee depicts the cheerful, fertile abundance of peaceful coexistence menaced by a cataclysmic violence that unites the eras and cultures from which she draws as surely as the timeless realities it threatens. Bee’s fecund canvases feature stars and suns, doves and trees, hands and houses and clouds, but most affectingly, they feature eyes: wide-open and often weeping as they refuse to turn away: from the living and the dead, fires and floods, monsters and angels and saints, but, also from us, the viewers. Their steadfast regard reminds us that fires and floods and monsters are not new, but they are real; they are coming for what we love, and they cannot be repelled unless we face them directly.

In the quiet spaciousness of Joanna Doxey’s poems, the mind describes itself. “I think through how I am opposite of fruit,” Doxey says, in apt and unusual contrast, but “[m]y thoughts are my body / yet disrupt my body, thread the missing, stitch un to fallow fields, to the beginning / of everything–.” In “Winter: Trying to Learn Sign Language,” the author illustrates the paradoxical mind/body connections of speech and movement: “The motion for failure is fingers sweeping / the palm – brushing away all I hold. / Still.        Still, the possibility that my palms can hold language.” The poems document both the mind thinking, and how that thinking ultimately leads back to the heart. “I hold I ask: tiny egg, why / are you not heart-centered, why do we not say by ova, by way of follicle / by bud and love.” In the silences of this beautiful work, mind, heart and hope converge: “In the end of love, for example, / . . . it’s enough to say not, / it’s enough to say / was and knew / and yesterday. / There is an end and you are there – / there will be a bird / whose name I don’t know / but whom I will love.”

Heikki Huotari’s prose poem series featured here is as uncannily beautiful as a flock of pink flamingoes lifting into swiftly changing patterns of flight known only to themselves. But what may appear enigmatic in these free-associative and exuberantly intelligent poems at the same time feels intuitively right and satisfying. We may not recognize the physics cited in the opening premise in Template 2, “Silence, if it has a magnitude, has a direction,” but the line allows us sensory access into the hidden dimensionality of sound’s absence. Sound is everywhere in these poems — in rhymes, word play, and repetitions. Double and triple meanings of words are concisely and often comically excavated. In the line, “Football, tenure and promotion lifted me and placed me on a post then, laughing drove away,” three meanings of the word “post” sneak up on each other and ring out. These poem “templates” of five stanzas each keep talking to each other — sometimes at cross purposes, but always with wit and curiosity about what language can and cannot do. In Template 4’s second stanza when “a saddle point” appears, it could be a saddle on the back of the horse briefly conjured in stanza one but, no, it is an area on a graph — maybe? When everything — science, mathematics, life experience, and above all language — is up for grabs, pinwheeling freely in the conscious and unconscious mind of the written word itself, isn’t this what we call poetry?

In this fraught and fearful time, where we are bombarded by news of cruelties and flagrant injustices in our world and in our country, the words of a poet from another time and place, Bai Juyi, as translated by Jaime Robles with Ma Chengyu, bring us a necessary moment of quiet, focusing on the minute daily events of weather and new wine. Far from the big picture, but perhaps in its way, an even bigger picture. In these lines, the poet invites a companionship between himself and reader; not only in the invitation to come and drink the wine in the glow of “the small clay pot ruddy with fire,” but in an invitation to slow down, to consider peace. Robles has carefully selected the images, and her expert timing, and the accompaniment of light bells and rhythms as the poem is read aloud create a calm and lovely space for the viewer. Especially effective is her voice reading the musical Chinese, with only the characters of the original poem visible. In “Flower not a flower,” the heartbeat rhythm in conjunction with the images reminds us of our connection with nature and how swiftly things can change, the mutability of our minds as well as our surroundings, and why such observable moments of renewal are to be cherished.

Caroline Kanner reports that the “Wikipedia page for suspension of disbelief says Coleridge coined it,” and Kanner deserves an admiring nod from Coleridge and a starred credit on his page for the ingenious blend of belief and disbelief that engages the reader in these poems. The settings are taken from a scene we know: “The neighbor rigged the flag rigid / so even windless it stands at attention / To void wind-noise of a worm on the lawn — / to plant turf in a desert,” but somehow this real/surreal is countered by an ecstatic suspension: “Somewhere we aren’t, we could see / all the layers of stars all the way back.” And sometimes a dream makes us believe it’s real and there is no suspension of disbelief: “nesting in roses, monster bird clamping its beak / over my foot — hardly able to believe / it’s real life and not a dream.” In these poems, Dickinson’s well-known definition of poetry resonates soundly for the reader in Kanner’s “A chandelier flickers, / something in the mind is hoisted upwards, / as if hooked to a pulley system. Not like trust; like / yielding.”

The presence in our lives of common objects — a sink, a key, an egg, a napkin, a chair — may seem simple, untroubled — but when Genevieve Kaplan puts these objects into the centrifuge of her surreal imagination, they become exhilarating, inspiring — “like a xylophone or rachet / music as dangerous as         gravity’s /         feathers.” Kaplan’s tender poem “Saturation” can be read as a love poem to “the breakfast table / lunch table, dinner table” where the speaker is “inspired to be enchantment” and asks the napkin “will you / miss me when I’ve gone/have you seen my face / how it sheens red with satisfaction, pink in agony.” Another poem focuses on the limits and anxieties of human consciousness in a world brimming with things — “what is a key, I wonder         and then / what is the field // if I were to point / at the sink in the breakroom, I’d forget / to ask         what makes it fill, what invites/ spillover, and worry // who I am.” We learn from these poems (and their caesura-filled forms) that reality may be full of jarring gaps “both tangible and daunting” but it is also possible that when we strive to hear how “on the prairie / wings startle to move the wind” or merely sit in a chair, we ourselves are objects of transcendence.

Elina Kumra’s short stories seem to hold novels within them; brilliant, balanced, perceptive, and subtle, they show how the possessions left behind by the dead evoke the memories of the living, and the forms that grief can take. In the first story, the narrator’s grandmother has been killed by a bomb, and the family, now living in Canada, returns to the house in Lebanon. “My grandmother. Who refused to leave. Who said they can destroy the walls but not the taste of pickled makdous on Thursday mornings.” As the family looks through the destroyed house, the narrator alludes to the never-ending wars: “My father collects shrapnel in a Carrefour bag labeled Evidence in three languages. For what court?” Kumra’s clear syntax also illuminates grief: “My mother stands in the doorway that no longer negotiates inside from outside… In the photo, she’s holding her mother’s tabbouleh bowl like a green planet.” In the second revelatory story, another narrator is called by her mother’s friend, one of the “aunties,” to say that her mother has died. She goes to the apartment building where her mother and friends have been playing mahjong on the roof. “Someone will have to tend it, Aunt says, nodding toward the tomato planter Mama hauled up here each May—”three floors closer to heaven,” she joked. The fruit are still green, fists clenched against ripening. Roof wind lifts the plastic name-stake: heirloom 禄丰早红.” In each story, the speaker finds an unexpected memento that speaks of the past and points to the future. “Dawn paints the sky aubergine. I carry the planter to the parapet. Wind smells of chlorophyll and siren residue. Someone will have to tend it.”

Suggestive and humorous, provocative and resonant, Julia M. Kunin’s high-gloss, iridescent ceramic sculptures defy conventional assumptions about the distinctions between the artificial and biomorphic, abstract and representational. Kunin’s towers and plaques, keyholes and boxes provocatively imbed sly references to the decontextualized female body and its fragmented erotic parts. Irony, frustration, and appreciation are conveyed by a glossy, glistening keyhole that evokes a vagina, or an x-shaped pair of crossbeams that suggests an x-rated peak between thighs. Breasts and buttocks are geometrically sectioned to be almost indistinguishable from one another, as well as some other artificial, mechanical form; while lips and crotches coyly echo and trade places. Kunin’s iterated references to the human body interrogate their persistent, elusive attraction, even as her glazed and undulating surface topographies reflect the viewer’s own warped and sectioned figure, generating a reiterative meta view of the mysteries of identity and desire.

These contemplative new poems by Hank Lazer radiate an elegant blend of serenity and energy, the medicine of their précis on identity and mortality polished to a reassuring glow by the gentle beauty of their reminder that “there is / light in the / world the light / is the world.” Not to be confused with anodyne optimism, Lazer’s iterative, incantatory reminders of the illusion of the “I,” “that meticulously crafted / thing that i / . . . / all / along believed i / was,” enact and demand both aesthetic and spiritual courage. Lazer’s stuttering, tide-like repetitions are gracefully layered over his complex manipulation of the line, exploring, most notably, a radical and resonant practice of enjambment in which words unmarked by hyphenation are not only severed across line breaks but implicit, similarly unmarked line breaks are absorbed within the line. This experimental practice builds dimensions of resonance far beyond what might be expected from such short poems. The net effect of these compressed and luminous meditations is transformative, requiring the reader’s focused attention to follow their progress towards the very dissolution of boundaries they contemplate.

In Alice Letowt’s world, color is radiant, sky is everywhere, and humans still hope for lessons from nature in how to live :“leaves sun-red / the mica on the beach / pine trees darker than the sky,” but the revelation isn’t forthcoming: “No inherent value makes the color /          
Blue held in a slant of light” and we have perhaps, “…confused change for something.” In “Stopping to pee in the desert,” while climbing along a ridge, “Ben and i’s torn-up hands        grasping at the wall / The rocks        rolling away” is a prelude to the poet’s thoughtful “Too late to live for utopia,” a realization that holds its own sadness, and its understanding of our own inevitable failures, even while beauty surrounds us. It’s a myriad world, and we have myriad minds: “Each point of contact is its own beginning / Out here there is nothing at the end of headlights,” but as well as light scattered in the dark, perhaps there is something left of us and around us that matters and creates its own renewal. “My mom sees me / Go into the woods / Not knowing she’s watching / Into beauty I turn.”

rob mclennan’s series “from dream logic” moves with spectacular restless energy. From sequence to sequence, form, theme, syntactic and sonic patterns —everything — undergoes change. We are forewarned of this peripatetic approach in the succinct and witty opening passage: “Must be said again, everything. Keep your radios on. For further announcements.” And the announcements keep coming. A philosophical meditation proceeding by means of anaphora worthy of the bible is followed by an (auto)biographical prose poem full of myth-like portents and sayings; a column of sentence fragments with the ghostly quality of an erasure is followed by a two-sentence short story that covers a vast territory of loss. mclennan proposes “where there is dissonance, resonance,” that the everything that must be said may be passionately evoked if we are willing to explore multiplicity: “the path         not taken, /offered. Where one might field        a purpose.” Within the handclasp of the poet’s openness, this series gathers force as it gathers difference, until “borders        , flounder/, within.” No matter the mode or form — “whether an object or an idea or a solar eclipse” — mclennan’s sure and flexible voice never loses its footing.

Reminiscent of Hanne Darboven’s grids in their possibilities, their paths leading to infinities, but at the same time projecting and breaking their own inventive patterns, linn meyers’ drawings resemble galaxies or maps to a place that we don’t know but want to go to: dimensions of light and space with the freedom that implies. These works remind us of our ancient belief that the sun revolved around the earth, not yet entirely dispelled by the evidence of our eyes. How can the earth be moving when it’s the sun that is clearly rising and setting, we ask. What we see is what we believe, and Meyers’ worlds and weather patterns, abstract yet intimate, make us believers. Worlds that bump and interrupt the grid. Colors that light it up. Dynamic and delicate, the expert hand of the artist and the haptic quality of the media itself make the viewing of these pieces a delight.

In Laura Mullen’s searching, heartening new poems, the speaker attends to the adaptive perseverance of live oak trees as models of patient generosity and the random occurrences of everyday life “as if it were music — / which it is.” In “Maritime (the Live Oaks),” the trees remind the speaker how to “grow always more open / Accepting what is while bearing / The heavy desire for what might yet / Come to be.” But, importantly, even the speaker’s “heavy desire” is motivated by unselfishness: her goal is to do her “absolute unremarkable best” to “shelter our loves” from life’s “high waves and the hard / Rush of the wind’s salt.” In “Could Be,” Mullen’s vision of art’s purpose is inspiring in its modesty, casting the poet as one of many in the grand ensemble, “Part genie in a bottle, part bumbling / Bee bzzt bzzt at the mysterious clear / Barrier, some shut window” blocking our access to that something-more we might call meaning or transcendence. Mullen’s non-individualistic vision is both moving in its humility and reassuring in its embrace of the fundamental reality and necessity of collectivity — that despite the “many bitterly sour notes” of life’s symphony, we are “lucky / To be in the ensemble, anyway: to be able / To appreciate, sometimes shape, our ongoing / Song—earsplitting, then suddenly inaudible.”

Alexandria Peary creates a dreamlike description of a romantic and time-bound European dreamscape as a place where one can read and muse, “A slice of 3-tiered building on a plate” with “Tilted balconies on a rococo fondant” but the dark contrast of real life is always there, even if disguised as a near pun of confectionery: “until the next person in line orders the Sackler torte: / a man facing the sky is turning blue / on a dirty blanket on the sidewalk.” In “Paradise,” Peary brings a vision of almost childlike happiness: “a scroll of clouds / when our days were horses / in a horse-shaped morning / …everyone had a parent” and “a home to return to,” but reality creeps in with the sardonic reminder of “a brook that drowned no one.” In a poetic rant rife with Peary’s gift of imagery, “Groundcover” uncovers a powerful and witty feminist and human anger with the world, using a writing critique as metaphor in which the writer, instructed to “’Prune clauses, Karen’ and he calls you Karen / though / that is not / your name” but “you’re not paying attention to him” and “you observe how in this rotting violent cruel immoral hateful polluted unhealthy unkind unjust wasteful world your lists of detail have been upcycled as trellises and on the trellises bloom fists.”

Anne Waldman’s all-too timely elegy to the late anarchist poet and activist Peter Lamborn Wilson invokes the transformative power of liberation. The freedom demanded by these ringing verses is for not only the titular enslaved spirit Ariel, but their “ally” “cursed brilliant sly Caliban,” as well as “we, girls, women, we votives” and all whose time has come to “break free.” True to her rousing and liberatory oeuvre, the Wilsonian “temporary autonomous zone” Waldman posits here promises to be more than temporary. A call to action and a paen to imagination, “Ariel in Minor Mode” synthesizes the shaman’s chant with the protester’s. With their staccato syntax and characteristic range of mytho-social references (including her own theory of “future memory”), these verses urge us to imagine – and create — a world transformed by the “radiant thot waves” of those whose time has come to “defeat / still the wrench of, cut cut // limb of devil tree.”

Thank you for supporting them.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash

Editors’ Notes (Posit 40)

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Welcome to Posit 40!

The literary and visual art in this issue shines a rich variety of “lamps of truth” (Brenda Coultas, “Untitled I”) on these dark and dangerous times. These works share the courage and ambition to tackle the deepest, most fundamental quandaries of “this glittery self-contained life” (Mia Malhotra, “Wave Organ II”) in which “it takes a lifetime to be born” (Ma Yongbo, “Sleeping on the Street”). Time, death, love, and loss loom large in this issue, set against a background in which “somewhere, lovers wait[] for bombs to explode in their rooms” (Emily Kingery, “Home Front”) while “the man in the blue suit pays his own audience in luxury flights, flattery, and fast-tracked passage through loopholes paved with false intentions, his wheezing laugh lingering long after the last plant is plucked and the last polar bear blasted through its hot skull” (Oz Hardwick, “Hustings in the Age of Uncertainty”). “Saying anything and everything” about how “we fall upon the thorns of life, we / bleed” (Joseph Lease, “Wake”), the literary and visual art gathered here manages to find transcendence — assuring us, in various and stunning ways, that despite everything, “the light keeps coming over the mountain” (Bryan Price, “Light Coming Over the Mountain”).

In Marine Bellen’s poems featured here, language itself is set free to dream. Spectacularly in tune with language as a natural force, Bellen allows words to flow idiosyncratically into form and meaning as water creates its own stream bed. In “Petrifying Jack Things,” we are invited to wade into the dream of a single word, “Our goose flesh bumps into Night’s knife, the heat of Night, the seat in Night’s sleigh. Shredded Wheat Night, watery milk we wade in to travel though Night and the Milky Way.” In the sonically exciting “Mountain,” the “never static mountain” does just about all and everything to remake the world “as first echoes of walking mountain unmoors the morning.” Both the actual mountain in the landscape, “mountain as earth’s primal tree,” and the sound net Bellen magically weaves of the word mountain “bellow[s] into a hallowed abyss of emptiness.” Bellen’s take on a family narrative, “The Older One Becomes, the More Out of Order Time Comes to Be,” sidesteps storytelling’s so-called realism to revel in its intrinsic surreality as we follow the poet’s sonic breadcrumb trails until “The family says it has run out of lines, the narrative thread / snipped. The family says it doesn’t know what happens next. They know // what will happen but cannot say without lines, and then the apparition of father manifests at the foot of mother’s bed.”

The focused attention of these chiseled lyrics by Brenda Coultas is energized by their understated discipline. These superbly lean, densely packed poems can be read as ars poeticas, mining the resonance embedded in fragments of ordinary life, such as holiday stockings sniffed by old dogs, and “clouds basketballs traffic cones cows,” to contemplate the utility and imperatives of poetry. Through stanzas like “ornaments / glistening / in the light,” these oracular poems highlight the provocative distinction between truth and reason. What’s more, they enact what they exhort: their “lamps of truth” “let the sky have it” even as they “pull away from reason.” As graceful and sober as the Dutch masters’ Vanitas paintings they invoke, these poems both rue and honor the fragile ephemerality of life and art, akin to the “silken parachute” of “the seed’s soft down.”

We’re not surprised when a sonnet takes the famous “turn” we all learned about in school, but we are riveted to the page when John Gallaher’s vastly pleasurable sonnets start out turning and never stop. Gallaher has fashioned double sonnets that are dizzy with turns, all made, one after the other, with odd, lovely, and humorous conviction. Instead of expanding upon lines of amazing, yet logical-seeming premises, such as “Life, like any fancy dinner, started with soup,” we are given a new idea, contradiction, or unrelated image in the following lines. “Forgive me for jumping around,” says the poet, and we do. Directly after the poem opens with life’s soupy origin story come the lines “And then an inflatable backyard night club/and terracotta army.” In another poem Gallaher proposes, “You’re a goldfish watching a feather. Maybe it’s ash. / You have a concept of ground and sea coming to a point.” Yet, in these sonnets Gallaher refuses to follow landscape’s prerogative and come to a fixed point. If you like your sonnets with rhymes, they are here, too, but you may have to look for them. As Gallaher says, “What gets you here won’t get you there, /unless it does, as things are both complicated/and redundant.”

With sharp and insightful wit, Oz Hardwick uncovers the present of our world deep in the ruins of ancient and recent history. Both warning and reminding us what our failings may lead to, Hardwick captures the shallowness of our political life: its banality, dishonesty, and even danger, as the mindless followers of future generations march on: “A man in a blue suit speaks in a whisper but carries a megaphone, tunes his preparatory breaths to the pitch of air raid sirens” as he “summon(s) the two-faced faithful to free lunches.” In the face of our present dangers, the poet cautions, “we are falling . . . into the machinery like nameless sweatshop drones.” Not only are we falling into the machinery, but the machinations as well; we think we are using the technology, but we are the ones being used. Our knowledge is incomplete (“two wings don’t make a plane”), and our labor serves only to build mansions that won’t last as we “walk with backs bent through a stately pile falling down.” In an imagined scientific study of snails, Hardwick wittily leaves open the question of whether our endeavors will yield any valuable insight into our future: “We send out scouts in the cool of morning to scour chewed stalks for our new Rosetta stone. . . . We know in our bones that this is important, but we don’t quite yet know why.”

Dennis Hinrichsen’s poignant new poems stitch together and unify the damage and suffering afflicting our world on every scale: from fireflies to synaptic sparks, clouds to turbines, rain to fallout, Whitman’s “thin red jellies” to chemotherapy, and tumors to radioactive waste. With these verses, he constructs a bleak and exquisite multi-part elegy for human and planetary destruction. Courageously and thoughtfully exploring what dementia has taken from a barely recognizable father and his son, up to and including either’s chance to grieve, and what our absorption in our present needs has taken from our earth and bodies, these poems confront the “collateral damage :: feelings” of the wreckage inflicted by our “lifestyle loaded to the edges // even now / with future.” In a climax of despair and transcendence, the narrator even voices the desire to lose himself in the anonymous fabric of the universe: “to ride the overwhelm / and let // quantum purring ingest / this better // Eucharist :: body / and blood // of me.”

In David Hornung’s loose but constructed compositions, akin in some respects to Paul Klee’s whimsical works, playfulness and a certain logic combine with subtle and striking colors. Hornung’s colors, indeed, have the nuance of dreams, where we know what we are seeing is unworldly: a mauve bird-shape, a blue-green reminiscent of darkness, but no darkness has that shade. The elements in the paintings partake of the same sensibility: the geometries and the subtly-edged patches of color, the shapes that almost resemble identifiable objects, as well as the shapes that definitely don’t. Hornung’s process is also intuitive, but with purpose. The artist says that he has to kill the “lovely thing so the unexpected can come into view.” The charm of the work is in that challenge; each stroke, area, or color is unexpected, and no two works are recognizably painted in the same style, although the unity of the work is like a poem spoken in another language, alive and transporting, if not completely understood.

The high-key colors and swirling forms animating Sharon Horvath’s extraordinary collages contribute to their dynamic complexity. Psychedelic and hyperreal, her vertiginous assemblages are studded with primal, collectively remembered iconography that integrates the real and the imagined, the physical and the psychological. Each opulent composition is not only a visual feast but a psychological treasure map, populated with an abundance of resonant references: fish bones and antlers, totems and mandalas, feathers and fronds, light rays and flames, amoebas and nuclei, and especially planets and galaxies, with the infinite mysteries they represent. Glowing and jewel-like, pulsing with energy and movement, these lush cornucopias of grand and tiny marvels teem with sparkling, sparking bits of light and energy. Horvath’s is a heartening, optimistic vision of a reality — an amalgam of our physical and psychic landscapes — that is overflowing with sensory delights, if only we can open our minds to perceive them.

Emily Kingery conjures the real nature of home and family, considering the subtle interplay of people and place against a larger social context. In “Homefront,” Kingery’s powerful imagery hints at fissures and ruptures at a wedding of friends. There is violence in the wings as well as beyond the borders: “God bless, our relatives crooned through the cake. They drove their forks like tanks through the roses,” as “we sucked in champagne like helium, and somewhere, lovers waited for bombs to explode in their rooms.” Indeed, Kingery’s double-sided impressions of domestic life begin early: “I was a daughter fond of families, unbodied. I would dunk my hands in paint and smear the legs and arms right from the heads. No stomachs, lungs – just heads.” In “The Shelly Disciples,” girlhood memories alternate with glimpses into another kind of freedom. “I stood at the arm of my grandfather’s lawn chair. . . . I breathed in beer, prettiness; I studied the float of ash in a half-drunk lemonade.” In the narrator’s observations, we see the flicker of creation in the disciples’ own club, created for survival. We feel a kinship with their secrets and their unbinding, even when it is infused with violence: “The Shelley disciples speak, unbound. We brutalize. Our pens turn blades in the knife games they play in dive-bar light.” In “A Made Place, That is Mine,” Kingery again makes the connection between freedom and violence as it extends even to the closest personal relationships, and makes clear the aching role love often plays in both: “For years, your threaded bird-heads have hung starry in the hall. At night, I run a finger in my mind across their backs. I make for them a thicket, and beyond that place, a field. It is featureless as an egg. I raise a shovel to it and break.”

Joseph Lease’s “Wake” takes on the varied meanings of its title: a wake for the dead, a desired reunion with the loved one, the longing to follow in their wake, and waking to a new reality when we realize that person is gone for good. The poem shifts between speakers in both the remembered words of the dead and the responses of the survivor, urgent to be understood: “daydreams in hand,” although “there’s less now, just, there are . . . fewer useable minutes.” The artifacts and memories left behind shimmer with meaning: “he just doubled down and tripled / down on knowing the names of flowers / he seemed to come out of nowhere / filling the page with light, the page / as slab of light.” The poet asks bedrock questions, like “how can / you leave me, how could you die,” before turning to comforting the dead: “read this and imagine me: in Berkeley / in Chicago, drinking tea, eating apples / walking slowly in the blustery day, the / day . . . full of talking animals.” In “Buried Life,” Lease continues the theme of death, but on an existential scale, with the questions that come to us in the face of danger or other moments of fear and despair, when “(we’re / waiting to / die (we’re / waiting to / pray (God / the rabbit / afraid.” How easily it can all disappear: our flimsy buildings, the forests full of trees and animals. The poet asks the questions whose answers we are afraid to confront as the sensations of present and future meld: “(are / we / extinct? / (colors burn / like garbage / on fire,” while the spacing in the poem brilliantly evokes the fragmentations of mind, and perhaps the rush and flash of fire at the world’s end.

In Ma Yongbo’s lyrical, melancholy English-language poems, modernity and tradition seamlessly coexist. Although situated in the modern world, these poems’ reliance on traditional imagery and symbolism reveals the relevance of historical culture to the timeless philosophical concerns these poems address: matters no less weighty than change, time, and death. Like the placid surface of a lake, the ostensibly simple events populating Ma’s verses cover depths of submerged resonance. “Night Stay by Gongchen Bridge” considers events on a canal in imagery both ancient (dowries, lanterns, poetry scrolls, and swords) and modern (white plastic boxes), making the case for the wisdom of acceptance in the face of the inexorable passage of time: “Don’t regret, just turn off the lights, / this is your night, this is the world’s way.” Acceptance is an aspiration in the other two poems as well. Although “it takes a lifetime to be born,” and we may dread being “engulfed by endless darkness,” Ma’s poems reveal the beauty of that eradication. In lyrical verses, the snow, like death itself, can ease life’s tension by erasing the self, transforming us “beyond the ancient struggle between being and nothingness” until we are “relaxed and nameless.”

Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s poems featured here are remarkable for their intimacy. The reader is drawn close not by way of personal revelation, but by an openness to possibility and suggestion, to uncertainty and imaginative collaboration. Malhotra’s syntax in “If With You” is of anaphora and incompletion, of thought being interrupted before it is fully expressed — “If we made our way     past lichens & bearded moss;” “If I followed you     to where the trees thin;” “If I lay myself among the bracken fern.” When the concluding “then clause” never arrives, we recognize a modality of wonder — “if we pause to listen — sound poured.” The radical openness of Malhotra’s lyricism is expressed formally in “Wave Organ II” and “V.” Here the initial blocks of text reopen into fragmentary, impressionist collage. We join the poet in the middle of an ongoing speculation of what “might” be, but which, despite vivid description, ultimately resides in the tender realm of imaginative proposal — “she might feel her own frequency slow to a steady whoosh &     the little one sensing this shift / might draw nearer     & they might find themselves entering into phase all around them.”

A sense of wonder is both elicited and expressed by the ethereal beauty of Shari Mendelson’s delicate, glowing sculptures crafted from discarded plastic bottles. Mendelson has spoken of her admiration for the craftsmanship of her artist forbears, and her own virtuosity makes her a worthy heir. The reverence of these delicately beautiful works recalls not only their ancient devotional inspirations but art’s stunning capacity to fashion sublimity from scraps. Mendelson’s re-imagined votive sculptures are also boundary-defying, bridging the gaps between cultures and faiths, eras and species, through their representations of animal-human as well as animal-vessel hybrids, and even a reimagined, literal “lamb of god” in the arms of a human-ewe Madonna. By painstakingly using detritus to reference ancient artifacts that have managed to outlive the civilizations that created them, Mendelson comments upon our apparent indifference to our own future. These works push back against a culture of disposability that is part and parcel of our insatiable appetite for the new, and which increasingly threatens our own survival.

At their tender, plain-spoken core, these new poems by Stephen Paul Miller are devotional. Imbued with his customary wry but gentle optimism, the open-hearted candor of their wide-ranging appreciation is part and parcel of the radical/ecstatic acceptance they model. Most if not all of these poems are anchored by the transcendent nature of the moments they capture: as the walls of paradise are lifted by the arrival of poet and friend David Shapiro; as, in a vision, the narrator’s deceased “Angel Boss” mother orders him “around your [god’s] / sonnet factory;” as the speaker is transformed “heart in hand over a new aura” (and new era) by holding the “Living Force Field” of his beloved’s hand; and as the speaker becomes one with everything and time itself recedes: “when I / become the cliff I hover over / and time goes out with the /tide.” The candor and open-heartedness of Miller’s ecstasy underscores the depth of its conviction. These are love poems in the most universal sense, whose breadth of affection is as irresistible as it is restorative.

Finely attuned to the strobing presences of light and darkness in our lives, Bryan Price’s poems are searing and beautiful depictions of human vulnerability and violence amid nature’s troubled yet inspired and inspiring persistence. Images of light and dark seesaw ecstatically through these poems accreting to a spare, mythological intensity — “and when/he gave us his teeth we sharpened them on / a landmine the shape and color of a new moon.” Price’s light and dark world is pierced by the poet’s recognition of the limits of art-marking and of our desire for transcendence — “one cannot wear black theoretical tightrope-walker’s shoes and just walk into the distance between hazel and hazelnut” — but also by a sustaining, flickering hope because “a lilac a little finger a grain of sand / dust into dust but the light / keeps coming over the mountain.”

Gary Sloboda’s city is a gift of transcription, perfectly depicted images translated into the transcendental. In this poet’s view, our lives are both fragile and decorative; we seem almost another species. we live in the shadow of “tall buildings’ windows once dazed by the river. . . . of pressed wood and carpenter’s glue. glitter paint job in the moonlight.” We’re imperfect: “we stumble with our bags. as the last days’ dark melodies unwind from passing cars. in the salt pinch of the waves that corrodes the metal railings. along the walls of rock where the ocean begins. and goes on forever,” unlike our impermanence. But how human we are, how alive and how aware: “hollering on the street like it’s the end of the world. and on the walkway of the bridge. how the form of our breath ascended. like the ghosts of pigeons. floating through the city. and the stars fetchingly arranged.” This hollering, the ascending form of our breath, blossoms into a kind of freedom, an exhilaration, and possibly a deep empathy with the stars. Or maybe, we’re irrevocably earthbound, interpreting our lives as best we can, “our belongings piled everywhere. as if we’re about to or will never leave.”

We’re immensely grateful for your time and attention. Please take care of each another.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash

Editors’ Notes (Posit 39)

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Welcome to Posit 39! And don’t forget the turn.

Because if this issue of Posit had a slogan, that might be it. Although these works offer our usual range of styles and forms and unconventional echoes of styles and forms — including fresh new iterations of the sonnet — all of them, both literary and visual, are united by the turn.

The works gathered here may “forc[e] us to see what was concealed from thought” — including, but not limited to, the current reality of “book banning followed by sweeps” (MK Francisco, “Narrative”) — but their dark trajectories are destabilized by dazzles of light as “bright as a bullet // stuck in a black cloak” (Julie Hanson, “The Span of a Driveway”). And it’s the energy, insight, and ingenuity of these turns that ultimately transforms and transcends what “the overwhelming presence // of all this nowness” (Daniel Biegelson, “from Tekiah Gedolah”) might otherwise suggest.

Plus, by “allowing / how / rupture / is / luck” (Randy Prunty, “At the Level of Story Sonnet”) and “stepping back going forward” (Denise Newman, “Who is Anyone”), we believe they can help. Help us see and feel more deeply. Help us confront where we are in these drastic and alarming times. And help us imagine going forward.

Joan Baranow writes into the reality of a serious illness, observing with precise and humorous detail, “The surgeon says tiny incisions / will unstick your tongue / but the robot needs to breathe.” With masterful irony, Baranow recounts repeated trips to the hospital: “The parking’s free but you pay / with phlebotomies. He says, / You want your body back, you mean / the one you walked in with?” Then in a cento as nearly perfect as can be, so gracefully does each line move into the next, beautifully responsive, Baranow’s poetry soars into the realm of the numinous, “consciousness / estranged from the body.” In this lyrical imagining, not bound by illness or necessity, we travel freely: “the sky / pouring itself over and over / though sometimes it is only gauze, unrolling / toward heaven still / . . . and you can imagine the face / all feathered out in clouds, / long thin arms stretched out / fence post to fence post.”

Daniel Biegelson’s dream-script sonnets are a series of profound questions to god. Composed of fragments of the natural and deeply loved world, as well as song lyrics, news, and art, the poet praises the sweetness of the earth in the crow who “names you. Rounded wings lengthening as your body/ slims. Incident light refracted into iridescence.” But the poet also asks, “Is it possible / or righteous / to remain / in a constant state/of praise,” when we see the terrible pain of our world: “look at our children eating fistfuls of grass. Ask. How can you live / with burning trees / burning bodies / smoke in our damaged cells.” Searching for understanding, we “read even the space / between each seed of rain” and wrestle with ourselves: “I believe in many of my own failings. Believe / them inexcusable.” The nature of both god and human remains a question: “Now and still now. Where are you. Are you / the punctum / the spirit / the accident / which ‘pricks’ / and ‘bruises.’” Still, beauty catches us up, ephemeral: “The plum blossoms falling / Of course. Flowing. Downstream on black water . . . Pink petal by white petal,” and perhaps like us, “Latchkeyed to wind.”

In these poems, Charles Borkhuis continues “trying to get another angle / on what it means to be human,” probing the paradox at reality’s heart with just a hint of his signature noir idiom and scientific fluency. Indeed, paradox saturates Borkhuis’s language, overpowering the received ideas on which we too often lean, even though the fact that “the clues are everywhere” is probably “why you can’t see them.” These new works are especially concerned with “the opening and closing / of the unknown with each breath,” the “psychic rhizomes snak[ing] through restless / folds of sleep / where you hide the life / you can’t control in the hollow of a tree.” One notion summarily dispatched by Borkhuis’s powerhouse lines is the singularity of identity – “the celebrated self no more / than a can of holes.” After all, “who hasn’t inhabited another body / while living in this one / who hasn’t wondered where to place the cut / between self and other.” In the midst of this grim dissection of illusion and its discontents, Borkhuis offers dazzling glimpses of love and beauty that transcend our stumbling and suffering — luminous moments when we “inhale the dry breath of a cactus / and exhale a sky-blue river of silk / flowing through a lover’s veins.”

In the manner of dreams, where the lyrical and poetic entwine with stark and fantastic image, Julie Carr manifests a world that is both poignantly surreal and recognizably our own. A chilling scene recalls our current moment: “The manifestation was to be held on the steps of the Capitol where people would demand the end of killing. As the words flew from their mouths like ghosts from out of graves, the killing continued. There is no time, said the people, in which there is no killing. And yet, they said, we oppose the killing.” Seeking a remedy for her (our) personal and collective pain, the narrator in the poem tries to account for her world’s violence. “What are the “ten new things” that signal a violent upheaval as they float out of her open mouth? First the eyes (for crying), then the hands (for touch), there is fruit (red, overripe), a hunk of concrete (the broken) and the salt.” Sometimes incantatory, “as a fish in a tank from wall to wall / as the grackle from one tree to the next/with its yellow eye in its cobalt head,” sometimes strikingly suggestive, Carr’s sensitive use of language depicts our human mystery, and our crimes. But there is reason for hope, although it may be a difficult and dubious task: “a backwards butchery through which/ she might re-stitch / the body of the father, the body of the mother? / Through which she might / re-fill / the well, the well, the well?”

Shou Jie Eng writes of things built and things torn down, things built in spite of. These poems subtly and skillfully borrow the language of architecture and real estate, evoking the body as “a kind of gathering:” “clavicular fossa/into shoulders / fit we / into spaces / folding ourselves / into place.” As well, they consider the earth itself, “terra fossa” as “a kind of ditch,” “surrounded/by an earth/of wants.” The connection between people is also full of want. In suburbia’s “stumps of landscape around a cul de sac,” hopes become frayed: “I nearly forget where it began/for us      for ou-topos / means no place / I remember growing into you / I grew into you / and found / only saplings where trees should be.” And in the strange story of Graz, architects build an experimental monument that pervades the town with poison gas that “sat, pooling, in the Mur,” leaving behind a kind of emptiness just short of despair in which “the people of Graz stayed indoors and wore sweaters, and the architects drifted above in a balloon.”

MK Francisco’s “Narratives” are concise and lyrical, as each separate word is a story, and as memories are stories. These particular stories recount kinds of escape. Escape from political danger, escape from personal constraint. After an eerily similar-to-present-day “book banning followed by sweeps,” the narrator continues to go about the domestic business of family “in a pale-yellow kitchen peeling potatoes with a knife. Lighting your son’s heater with a match before daybreak. Responsible /accountable. A dilemma reflecting / the larger dilemma,” leading to the memory of a secret escape, “Your mother sewed lipstick, photographs and cash into her fox fur stole. Forcing us to see what was concealed from thought.” In a second “Narrative,” the history of the land merges with personal history, each with its expansion and constriction. “A westward expansion drawn to stranger corners. The rotten egg scent of oil fields floating on the Pacific Ocean … Defiance in your jaw, the places that made you.” Francisco’s people, like all of us, are shaped by events and the “places that make us.” We have no answers. Sometimes the only and perhaps sanest thing to do is “call (ed) upon the innocence of trees. Skin-to-bones-to-brain. Curved-to-spiked-to-porous. A visual mantra asking us only to sit and look.”

Shawnan Ge’s poems are emotionally dynamic, bursting with images that double and triple in their meanings to create far-reaching and far-seeing associations. In “Swans in their laurels,” Daphne and Leda (and their God-tormentors) consort with a modern-day mother who “swaddles her china with cloth, bumpy and skin-like the yellow of running yolk,” and her daughter who “neuters her words fruitlessly.” The mother “speaks in dialect” and the daughter learns that “Corpora means Bodies, fields of deadness in her nativity.” How can we not think of the killing fields of war and oppression? How can we not feel the presence of the refugee pressing upon the mythological nymph, the “corporeal” mother, “salt encrusting skin” who must flee for her life and the life of her child: “And still she flees, her feet embalmed in the earth, coursing—.” Ge’s poetic world is one in which even innocuous backyard chives are tormented by loss: “They ripened, keeled over / like a father who fears for his son.” These are poems that “want to know us into being, to show softness, to disgorge gracefully.” The unsettled and beautifully unsettling poems featured here are Ge’s first in print.

It is as if two discrete dances take place at once in Dale Going and Marie Carbone’s text and image collaboration. The dancers — Going (poet) and Carbone (collagist) — may at times gesture toward each other, even lightly touch, but more often they cross paths while remaining in separate pools of light. Yet their shared presence creates “an intensity that seems to bend the atmosphere around them.” The conjunction of Going’s “beauty of the word season conjuring” and Carbone’s “Trance abstractions sans words. / Sans voice sans sound” illuminates these works. In “Deadscape” the drama lies not only in the depiction of a torn raven’s wing looming over a draped inert body, but also in the vertiginous effect of reading across the two parallel columns of text: “I was afraid I would swallow my tongue      and kept falling as into an abyss/someone suddenly dies      slashed by the fragmentarity /that each of us is.” In “Assiduous Trees,” a collaged satellite dish “performed as a silent /yes but also lusciously precise graphically etched image” becomes synonymous with a tree’s leafy canopy and its “electronic soundtrack of chirping birds.” Going and Carbone’s pieces offer the “dazzlement of skill” we hope to find in art, and then, because their art is open to the impulse and disruption of the collaborating other —“the almost luminous partner / yielding to a bewildering angularity”— who can and does “come in & / ruin it // tossing / a shirt /on the furniture”— we hear something rare and authentic — the sound of a “solo tête-à-tête.”

Steve Greene’s paintings carry forward his expertise as a draftsman, charting the conceivable if not realizable place where documentation meets imagination. As pleasurable as they are provocative and as various as they are cohesive, the paintings featured here offer a graceful abundance of precise, synchronized lines that tantalize the viewer with the explicatory promise of maps, diagrams, and navigational charts, even as they stretch that expectation with their suggestion of unidentifiable biomorphic and celestial forms. Greene’s elaborate, diagrammatic lineations pulse with the exponential energy of primordial cells dividing their way to embodiment as unpredictable life forms and celestial vistas as well as architectural schema. Their bold, primary colors and multifaceted, quasi-geometric shapes emphasize their suggestion of mechanical and biological blueprints for the human imagination. These remarkable pieces destabilize baked-in dichotomies between organism and mechanism, micro and macro, overview and close-up, transcending the distinction between public and personal, phenomenal and psychological with a sense of unforced ease as well as necessity.

The privations of isolation drive the dark intensity of these powerful, expertly constructed poems by Julie Hanson, each of them illuminated by flashes of light “bright as a bullet // stuck in a black cloak.” “Ode to Luck” opens with a grim parable of the human condition as imprisonment, whose only grace is as impossible as “Prison Yard Soup” for which there is no “recipe, or memory thereof,” “no fire” and “no pot.” But in a brilliant volta, Hanson’s prison allegory illuminates our self-defeating tendency to “become unchangeably distant and who knows why?” – opening a path towards empathy for the “fear unknown and untold” that may drive it. The same spare but brilliant glimmer of grace animates the gravity of all of the poems in this selection: a moment of shared understanding with a deer that convinces the narrator “that the eternal // clocks us on its watch, mute as that doe, / when, in actuality, / I know better;” or the precious flash of revelation leading to the martyrdom of prophets like the miller Menocchio and Michael Servetus, both burned at the stake for the heretical inclusivity of their faith. “Worry,” as Hanson reminds us, may be “the only work,” but there is inspiration to be gleaned from the fact that “everyone wants what they want and will not be discouraged.”

Elizabeth Hazan’s landscapes blend invention and memory in abstract fields, glades and skies rendered in free-flowing curvilinear shapes and glorious, sometimes almost neon, color. The artist’s intention, to give viewers the “experience of nature as it is pushed to extremes,” is realized through both the abstraction of the images and a brilliant command of color palette to depict her love for the environment, but also her concern for its endangerment. Is that remarkable crimson the ecstatic sunset we are sometimes lucky enough to see, or is it the one that makes us feel uneasy, wondering if there is fire nearby? Is it a sunset at all, or the shape and color of a memory, powerful but elusive? In these almost surreal paintings, line and color converge to create light and atmosphere, a free passage for the imagination.

Men are supremely busy creatures in Denise Newman’s crystalline prose poem series “Men I’ve Known.” Relentless as actors in a silent-era comedy—they fall on clouds and can’t get up, interview dogs about happiness, declaim God’s intentions for man and nature, call things by “their money names,” and despite themselves “speak in the dark…. mouthing sounds of gunfire.” Newman considers all this strangely confident activity with clear-eyed prescience: “Remember, I’m the traveler, I bring only happy things,” one man explains to a woman he intends to abandon. Whether father, philosopher, teacher, soldier, or young boy yearning to “run in an open field like an impala,” in a reflexively patriarchal world one thing is clear — “freedom falls apart.” With bold wit Newman unleashes the tragic in the comic. What is language, if not itself surreal, when a father whose name “means good genes” oversees “encoding and decoding” the “secret messages” we call meaning? One man, returning from war, “whose name means supplanter,” goes to work in a factory and “never blows a whistle, not even when his leg gets caught in a machine and he has to cut it off himself.” Newman shows us that in patriarchy “the gap between fantasy and reality is as good as a moat, that is, when your home is a castle.”

Both abstract and geometric, Sarah Peters’ sculptures partake of the ancient and the modern in almost equal parts. Throughout art history, the medium of bronze with its smooth and shining surfaces and its undeniable actual and visible weight has often been reserved for monuments to gods and statesmen. In Peters’ enigmatic and impressive work, many of the sculptures are of women who exude the spirit of a goddess or oracle; one who speaks power, one who will be /must be listened to. The artist has caught them at the moment before they speak; the inhale of the breath and the parted lips, a negative space that complements the textured and stylized hair and the geometry of the (beautiful) faces. Also adding depth are the deep-set eyes, a literal depth that accents the mystery and profundity of the work; and in one piece seen here, eyes that see through literally, and perhaps figuratively, to the other side. In “Augur” and “Pleasure Principle,” especially, the skillful artistry of curves and planes and the sensual playfulness of the back views are reminiscent of the oracle’s riddle that amuses, but contains a deeper meaning to discover.

Randy Prunty’s sonnets are emphatically conclusive in form — each of the fourteen lines begins and ends with a single word — one and done. Well, not exactly, because word by word, with little preparation or unnecessary elaboration the poems develop unusual depths that delight and amaze us. Reading these poems is like threading our way down a tower built from the top down out of thin air. Associations of sound and image work a kind of magic in Prunty’s surefooted navigation of his edgy, steep form, opening stunning, unpredictable views: “I /expected /you /as /spectral. // But /as /spectacle? //Still, / welcome / back.” Where do we land? The poems are anything but conclusive in meaning — they reverberate — Prunty’s narrow minarets of words shake with tiny quakes: “Every / grave / is / a / groin / at / night. // Gravity /catches / all /things.” In “Semiotic Sonnet” Prunty suggests, “if /you /see /a /tow /truck /towing /a /tow /truck //then there’s /your /poem.” We suggest, if you read these sonnets towing their few and spacious words down the page, then there’s your pleasure, and your revelation.

In ancient Greece a rhapsodist (rhapsōidos) was an inspired singer, a stitcher (rapis’tēs) who wove together songs (ōidē) to make a free flowing, exalted poem. If you wonder if there can yet be a rhapsodist singing in our benighted days just listen to Elizabeth Robinson’s “Archipelago Rhapsody:” “Divinity made of blue /who pierces — /a sliver // in skin. Sutures /sew gesture to new shape.” It’s moving to read Robinson’s spirited rhapsodies, thankful for their air of spontaneous inspiration, exultant in language’s free-roaming, untethered heart. Robinson revels in the music that abides (and hides) in the linkages and lineages between words: “Sing bones or bonds, sing / apophatic catalog of // un-monster. Sing broth / and sing stirring. Sing spoon // slapped against the back of your / thigh.” In these gaps, so often misheard as empty and soundless, Robinson calls forth the feminine oracular, a doubling presence of the human and divine: “Dense / mats in her dark // blue fur. Her abrasive /kinship, whose tongue // undoes, whose voice insists it has / my smell embedded in it.” These rhapsodies resist the gesture of a comforting hand — “Her roses- / and-cream throat scorches the / open neck of your shirt.” Instead, they claim for us something much better — the viscerally real, ineffable beauty of all we feel the presence of but cannot name.

A serene but potent energy powers Dan Rosenberg’s magical and mysterious verses, which both describe and create the kind of transcendent epiphanies that emerge from eschewing the “too-much” that is everywhere around us in our “low-Earth orbit with all the trash / we’re raising like a sloppy wall.” An alternative, as Rosenberg reminds us, emerges from contemplation — whether of Sappho’s verses, Richard Kegler’s collages, or the hummingbird’s alchemical magic, creating “with enough tongue nectar / with a furious flapping stillness.” That very redolent and resonant stillness is the special nectar found, and shared, by these elegant poems: those moments when “the streetlight paints the snow // bittersweet” as the narrator sits “alone with history,” and even the “bright, fibrous undoing” of death and decay that “exerts itself upon // the world” as the dead “loose their memories” so that “the generative thrust” may “find / its holster on the wall of the sea.”

Thank you for being here.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash

Editors’ Notes (Posit 38)

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Welcome to Posit 38!

Now more than ever, we are grateful to our contributors for the generative depth of their creations. In this fraught and perilous historical moment of “radiated oceans / redwoods burning” (Judy Halebsky, “Fwd: The Problem”) when “the rules of battle are not followed” so “massacre replaces battle” (Gillian Conoley, “It is just as hot as in the age of the great religious wars”), the art and literature in this issue offers wisdom and succor for our troubled psyches “spinning, pining / For nostalgia and ubiety” (Edward Mayes, “Say We’ve Reversed Ourselves for the Umpteenth Time”). Whether addressing the crisis of our despoiled and smoldering, hate- and war-ravaged planet, or the stumbling grace of our personal struggles, these works find new and beautiful ways to suggest that “we can begin again” (Gillian Conoley, “War 10”).

In Gillian Conoley’s poems featured here, everything perceivable and thinkable matters, and matters more passionately, more urgently as the poet arrays images and thoughts in unexpected combinations — because “the world does not say what to ignore.” These poems are chock full of the world we live in now. Conoley’s distinctive use of the page with long lines interrupted by caesuras reminds us of a banquet table — each phrase a separate dish — distinct images and patterns laid out beside each other in abundant variety — what a feast! As in this passage “A tinge of excitement in my feet      the brief ache / flu-like in my ankles / one of the not-covid viruses the allergy clinic says are / ‘very around’     The peonies      have blurred into beauty” where the exuberant thrill of perception is extended to the misery of a virus and in the same breath to the wonder of blossoming and living in a “light-filled” house. We are home with Conoley reading a New Yorker article, texting friends, until with a surefooted leap her next phrase takes us to a war zone, reminding us that “decay is a world where one is in demand / to bring oneself.”

In this excerpt from Capitals and Cranes, Matthew Cooperman returns to Posit with dueling prose poems whose counterpoint evokes the Anthropocene’s life-and-death battle between mammon and the natural world. These eponymous pieces offer vivid, evocative, elliptical vignettes — but their similarity ends there. The horizontal prose blocks of “Capitals” narrate the victories of, well, capital, such as the land’s sell-off to real estate developers and oil derricks, or the manipulation of an unsuspecting couple “sitting down to lunch . . . wonder[ing] what silly video to watch” who are incited, unconsciously, to “give . . . their money to the microphone” by privacy-invading targeted advertising. By contrast, the non-human world in which “no grace or flight goes finished” is “inviolate and supreme” in the lyrical, vertical columns of “Cranes,” which posit an enchanting, optimistic alternative to Capital’s despoilment, in which “cracks in the foundation, assumption” blessedly allow “the wetlands [to] rest, recover.” Cooperman’s juxtaposition of these alternative visions for our planet is bracing and, as in real life, unresolved. We cannot know which forces will prevail, but these poems won’t let us miss what’s at stake.

Loren Eiferman’s biomorphic sculptural assemblages emit a talismanic aura. Reminiscent of cultural artifacts revered for their healing or spiritual powers, her imaginatively generated forms draw from the structures, colors, and textures of nature on every scale, from the micro to the macro. Although they echo with resemblances to leaves and trees, rattles and head ornaments, spiders and fans, it is fitting that several of these works respond to the Voynich Manuscript, since all of Eiferman’s creations radiate a similarly magical amalgam of familiarity and strangeness. The viewer feels awakened to an ineffable combination of recognition and mystification — the slightly unnerving excitement of encountering the almost-knowable. Not only is Eiferman’s loving attention to the forms that make up both her inspiration and material happily contagious – there is a tactile magnetism to these sculptures which have been meticulously assembled in her uniquely iterated process of destruction and reconstruction. We wish to experience their balance and texture with our own hands, as if the artist’s intimate connection with her natural materials is contagious as well.

John Einarsen’s photographs are concise yet expansive emblems; clear, beautiful, composed, finely wrought, yet lived-in, or perhaps dwelled in, a deeper and more intimate term for finding the essence of an object and letting it enfold you. Einarsen credits his physical and metaphysical perspective, in large part, to his introduction to the Miksang technique, which asks the photographer to find the essential moment, what Einarsen calls the “gap in thinking.” The viewer first enjoys the abstract image through the filter of Keats’s familiar definition of negative capability: “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” which allows us to notice and more deeply appreciate the strangeness of reality. And yet there is delight in suddenly deciphering or discovering the shape of raindrop, leaf on asphalt, curtain, and window; all so daily, but newfound, newly seen. The double joy of the abstract image and the “real” image engenders its own poetic response in the viewer.

In Joanna Fuhrman’s new inventive and intimate video poems, the poet’s voice is anything but a detached “voice over.” The recited lines — sometimes brash, sometimes silken — are layered into the video images and music like bright threads at the shuttle. Every element is in motion — like the car with no driver described in “Cardinal” as “we veer through the leafy branches of a forest” and “the car keeps going.” The magic of Fuhrman’s video journals is that the sonic and visual multi-dimensionality comes together, finally, with simplicity and openness. In the spare and beautiful “Self-Portrait as Cloud,” the poet explains “I feel most myself / when — like today — / all of the sky is a single/ undifferentiated cloud.” Even when the images are blurred or only glimpsed at the edges of the frame, we feel our senses mysteriously lit like the sky from an unidentifiable source, or from many sources at once. By way of the surreal and the whimsical, dream and waking reality, Fuhrman invites us to trust that although the complexity of our lives is real, it is “mapped out in blue light/drawn in crayon on the topography /of a sleeping face.”

Judy Halebsky’s diaristic sequences embody a startling poetic paradox — honest and naked in reflecting on a brittle, yet tender domestic life, they hide little about the human condition, even as they leave out all explanation. The sad drama of “I’m naked with a sponge in the dark before dawn, cleaning the coffee while he tells me not to and cries,” is followed immediately by the examination of tiny snail shells — “he asks me to notice the coils, one flat and coiling outward, the other taller, coiling up / we need ways to tell different kinds of shells apart so we know which family of snails live here.” Don’t we all need ways to know and understand the family homo sapiens we belong to and what that belonging means? And so Halebsky looks not only at domesticity, but other structures we have wrought, examining the coils of money, time, and value. In one poem a friend comes to visit: “part of her illness means losing her job, no longer being able to put those two boys through school. so now there’s two unfurling. the one and then the other. a matter of accident, what we use as money, how we count and are counted.” But the art with which Halebsky shapes these brilliantly spare, non-self-sparing poems is no accident — they are translucent as shells.

Brian Johnson’s long lines meander and float through a dreamlike landscape that bridges the gaps and blurs the distinctions between dream and waking, place and time, reality and imagination. A ghostly, elusive aura of déjà vu hovers like early morning fog over these verses languidly “meandering in a city of squares, transfixing the old river, distancing the shoplights.” Johnson’s poems have the stillness and resonance of gelatin print photographs whose intimacy and focused attention manage to be turned inward and outward at once, showing us “the leagues between” a couple and their “late hesitations,” against the backdrop of “a wall, a bridge, a night, a city. The intersection of cries, smells and their evacuation. The neat forms of senselessness.” The cityscapes and intimate moments they conjure are the psychological artifacts of a narrator who “love[s], and lose[s] all bearing in the world.” Elegantly intriguing, these poems draw us into the quiet mystery of their contemplative spell, bringing us to consider and reconsider what we think we might have glimpsed.

Tony Kitt, somehow, deeply understands and appreciates the life of plants, as well as the foibles of humans. In the playful “Among Plants,” he defines the difference: “A tree is a hieroglyph; /a man, eighty pages of astronomy.“ Our own absurdity pointed out, the poet asks, “Who wears an itinerary to the feast of the non-calculable?” Obviously, we humans do. But Kitt also magics the reader into believing in a hybrid of human and plant. In “Yonder,” “This brook dancing you breathless… / Your paths are your veins; / your skull reveals your roots.” We are all dreamily connected through ”The feelings of a field; a colloquy / of farms…” Kitt has a way of getting under the skin, or perhaps the carapace, of nature’s creatures. In one characteristic surrealistic juxtaposition, he admonishes: “The bone thing: / be boneless (in a rigid way). / Don’t let your compound eyes / migrate south / or multiply in blending.” Possibly good advice? Through these surprising metamorphoses, this poet guides us to a different kind of understanding of living beings we usually only observe, even as he maintains a wary and humorous distance. As he says, “There’s always a two-finch gap / between a possibility / and an approach.”

In Peter Leight’s wry examinations of the stories we tell ourselves about our own disturbing vulnerability, “there isn’t anything / to conceal at the same time / there isn’t anything not concealed” even when the narrator (who of course claims to be “just as calm / as anybody else”) calms himself by covering his “head to cover up / what’s in [his] head.” Returning to Posit with hypnotic, rhythmic cadences and witty wordplay, Leight’s tender, humorous perseverations give voice to all of us wrangling our roiling stew of fear and yearning with awkward combinations of self-deception and oversharing. In these poems, Leight’s truths are, as ever, paradoxical. Self-examination is at once compulsion and slog, “a stress test” that requires “a couple / of aspirins first” in order to face the contradictory tangle of “so many things / we don’t know how to deal with.” Although, problematically, “people are a problem,” since “everybody wants to be needed,” the thought of turning away feels like “the end of the world.” Nonetheless, as these poems helpfully/unhelpfully suggest, “it’s important for people not to be unhappy / when they’re not happy,” so we might as well focus on “holding onto something / for as long as it takes / to let go.”

Edward Mayes’ sequence of playful, erudite poems seem to have been written in a trance-like euphoria of language and free-association — a tour de force that not only awes but welcomes us into its swift flow of ideas “since who of us can / Really draw a blank, who of us can really / Do without grace or some singular obeisance / To beauty and beauty only.” Mayes’ notes at the bottom of each poem further complicate and stretch the boundaries of the poetic line, inviting us to follow additional, related chains of language (and of thinking through language) that are personal yet tautly attuned to our reality as well as to the notions touched on in the “primary” verses: “vaccine, from cow, vacca, cowpox, smallpox; vacua/vacuum; vade mecum, go with me.” What a pleasure and enlightenment to roam the paths and thickets of these dense and cerebral abecedarians, following them down the page “as if we’re like vagabonds with a vascular / Bundle on a stick, beards of burnt cork, // Our heads full of rags and vol-au-vents, / Because we want to go somewhere where we // Haven’t been before or after.”

In these ghazals, Sheila Murphy foregrounds the evolution of the English language with bits of French, Latin, and Italian, alongside humorous play on words for a layered depth of both language and meaning. In addition, she evolves the language herself with words like “eventness” – an instantly understood and happy invention. Murphy returns to Posit with ghazals that retain the standard number of couplets and the idea of love that are the hallmarks of the genre, but the reader finds evidence of a love that is thoughtful and complicated. Although “Cantabile equals me when with you,” there is also the reality of “This moment of not wanting you / equals my not being wanted, losing myself.” In another poem, the passing of time lends its weight: “Autumn’s sadness resurrects feeling loss / School books fall to powder between my hands.” But still and happily present are the subtleties of new discovery: “I will sit with you and forget myself / to find a subtler self tucked in beneath,” as well as wry wit: “Oak leaves must not be left to dry on lawns / I would solo skate across that crispness.”

With line after declarative line of striking lucidity (reminiscent of a psychedelic Wallace Stevens), Jesse Nissim dares to dismantle the figures of everyday ordinariness and sense. The body, its sensations, thoughts, and perceptions are alive with the interpenetrations of the landscape as “a mind of trees streams voluminously” throughout the poems. Nissim offers a tantalizing surrealism, not of dreams and the unconscious, but rooted in the actuality of the body in the world. When the poet declares “I can’t split longing / from the water it moves in me, grieving the leaves’/ lost veins. Landscape is mind with persistent voice,” we feel ourselves transported on that moving water to strangely welcoming shores. Yet, with the poet, we take as our rule “keep moving.” Nissim’s work is that of a cartographer mapping a newly beheld reality by “plucking details from / what is, as if a sky could discard small portions/of itself aptly shaped for being lost.”

Gregory Rick’s tumultuous, dynamic, and explosive compositions reflect the stories in the artist’s life, offering striking portraits of people personal to the artist as well as historical and imagined personae. Many of these narratives are difficult: war, fear, and horror are portrayed; there are no happy flowers, but somehow one wants to look again and again. Because we do not know the details of the stories, we are drawn to interpret and re-interpret the context through Rick’s remarkable and unusual color choices, the balanced imbalance of his compositions, and his sometimes haunting, sometimes tender portraits of human beings (as well as significant and symbolic creatures) in impossible situations. Conjured by Rick’s powerful and energetic use of line, form, and color, these works, both narrative and abstract, burst with authentic feeling. Rick is truly, as he says, “painting on a shaky historical line cemented in humility and conviction,” with a passion that viewers can clearly recognize and meaningfully internalize.

Mikey Swanberg returns to Posit with tender, elegiac verses that grapple with the inevitability of loss. Everything in these chiseled, lyrical poems is ephemeral — not only love and its mementos, but the stable dailiness of life and even, in “mile marker,” life itself. “Iron Mountain” contrasts that eponymous secure-storage facility for the world’s most valuable information with the fragility of our actual lives, such as the photos of a former lover fed “into the narrow slit // of the confidential / recycling bin,” or the proximity of the “shaggy migrators” who “came and left / with the Halloween candy” like “Buy-one get-one Cormorants and Black Ducks. / An aisle of last season’s Herons.” As always, this poet’s vision is as gentle as it is courageous as he struggles to transcend the yearning “to make something / that preserved me” and accept, and even appreciate, “the short bruised / season we all get.” His epiphany may be achieved while picking wild berries rather than eating perfectly chilled plums, but it echoes Williams’s deep and graceful simplicity: “anyway      I am / coming home to you // anyway      the bag I brought / is getting full”.

There’s yearning and discontent in these poems by Martha Zweig, along with a dry and snappy pull-yourself-out-of-it attitude on the part of the narrator’s psyche. In “Ars Brevis,” a sparkling sculpture will only corrode to “fixed pits & crooked cramps just like your life.” In “Happy Return,” the narrator, coming home, describes herself: “Semiangelic, I descend / a measly sky through crisscross / layers of little untidy clouds.” Nothing in Zweig’s poems is quite perfect, quite tidy, or quite angelic. Even the sky is measly. And home is likely to be the same; the view is a “Long splashy drive, then all’s / gone fine back home. If I never left?” the narrator wryly asks, only to be answered, “Well I never” by “a chorus / of rural ladies exclaim[ing] / from their booth in my personality.” These poems take place in the memory, or even in the memory of a memory, where the minute details of where we were and what we were doing at the time — “Third jelly danish: home-sickening. / Sucking gooey fingers at age / forty-seven & counting” — are almost as important as the event remembered. The time passes, but we are captive to our memories, and the power they have of erasing years, if not feelings. “Do you love me still?” the narrator asks in “Hero,” ”You loved me once as if / I danced all night bravado in parachute silks.”

Thank you so much for reading, and please take care of one another.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash

Editors’ Notes (Posit 37)

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Welcome to Posit 37!

This issue showcases the generative energy of assemblage, juxtaposing a range of encounters with nature and culture, body and spirit, bringing humor and gravitas to bear on the human condition in a “world not long for this world” (Andrew Zawacki, “Droste Effect”).

On the literary side, we pursue our interest in the elasticity of poetic forms, including the prose poem, the cento, the sonnet, and a number of new approaches to the line and the field, while from the visual arts we bring together a text and photography amalgam, two radically disparate approaches to sculpture, and a set of drawings inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

These works revel in the “echo and bounce” of word and image (Karen Holman, “Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Marie”) to remind us how “the mote & motley” of our existence (Charles Byrne, “things could always be worse”) can “refreshen the void” (Mark DeCarteret, “The Year We Went Without Fables”). Enacting art’s capacity to descry “the fragrant invisible / at large / among the wheatfolds” (G.C. Waldrep, “Tye River”) these works turn “the power of the mind . . . that searches for links” (Susanne Dyckman, “&”) to the task of discovering how “the darkness at the center of darkness . . . may be another kind of light” (Jeff Friedman, “Done Time”).

Nancy Bowen’s sculptures recombine a range of organic, artificial, and cultural components to construct boundary-defying alternatives to our most basic assumptions. With wit and exuberance, Bowen’s totems juxtapose forms and materials, references and resonances that challenge the lines between abstract and representational, natural and crafted, ornamental and functional, sacred and profane. In organic constructions evocative of rocks and vines grafted onto utensils and shrines, Bowen generates an iconography rooted in the experiential qualities of the female body. Bowen’s incorporation of chairs and chains, beads and breasts, shells and glass ground the erudition and sensual energy of these assemblages, while her marriage of elements both ancient and modern, functional and sybaritic generate a uniquely synthetic vision.

Charles Byrne’s beautifully synced and variegated language draws on remembered poems, axioms, and slang, fascinating the reader with magnificent turns of thought and story, as if “borne aloft single-scruffed, limbs shimmering in wriggles, / a confusion of neuronal launches as from a McDonald’s / single-handled fry funnel to pentagonal prism packet.” Both philosophy and wit combine in ways we all might find familiar: “i would have given the shirt | off my back | had i ever been asked | but in truth | in fact | have i ever really | done anything for anyone?” Yet Byrne’s work, dense in imagery and meaning, encompasses an ironic honesty that reflects our human tenderness and vulnerability: “my body reacts in apocalyptic fashion to the loss of sense, as does my self. my efforts to anatomize leave only scatterings of atoms, akin to how my toothbrush simply breaks into bittier and bittier indivisible parts in the pacific garbage patch.” Still, the empathy and linguistic variety of this poet’s work helps to alleviate the despair it so vividly evokes.

Like the monumental inflatable sculptures for which she is renowned, Nancy Davidson’s new drawings pulsate with a vibrant simplicity that is manifoldly evocative and impossible to pin down. Pared down to essential biomorphic abstractions yet gesturally dynamic, these bilateral, braced, and weighted forms bring to mind inanimate figures like knots, balls and chains, and balloons, as well as cultural references such as the spread legs of cowgirls or ancient female idols. But above all, these works evoke the body: bringing to mind legs and heads, fallopian tubes and ovaries, testicles, nipples, and other erogenous knobs. As such, they evoke our life force: at once vulnerable and resilient, vibrant and comical, yet tinged with a whiff of the grotesque, as befits their inspiration by Beckett’s Happy Days. These energetic drawings speak not only to Davidson’s ground-breaking body of work, but to the absurd and valiant determination with which Winnie grasps at the fleeting imprisonment in a sinking body that is her only reprieve from the abyss.

Mark DeCarteret’s prose poem series featured here addresses “doing without” in a flurry of contexts, both personal and planetary — engaging retrospect, loss, deprivation, and necessity to identify what is essential and what is not. Like “a monster sun though not big on details” committed to “getting it right,” these irreverently witty meditations on a world in which “mighty oaths from little acrimonies grow” rant in staccato, rat-a-tat rhythms laden with an irony as thick as “dense winter fog.” Lyrical interludes (“colors slow-heated, steeping like tea, or cooled off and foolishly seen for themselves, charmed back to earth”) bring out the rhythmic zing of DeCarteret’s barbed insights into “this mess we’ve recreated” in which “there’s more than enough room for no one. What fun. O what fun.”

Sharon Dolin’s cento-sonnets are at once artful tributes and worthy heirs to the artistry of their source poets, offering all that those writers could hope for in these marvelously recombined fragments of their own voices. Dolin captures the spirit of each, and adds the fertile imagination of her own poetically “green green hands.” From Ruth Stone’s grief-tinged “ too much salt, burned edges” to a dangerous Plath, “Let there be snakes / rayed round a candle flame,” these poems brim with unforgettable images and lyric energy, offering a series of wondrous gifts in sonnet boxes like “some angel-shape worth wearing / with one tin eye.”

In Susanne Dyckman’s delightfully intelligent poems from After Affects, “the power and weight of the mind” resounds “as the joy of a forgotten treasure,” and, paradoxically, as “a study in weightlessness.” With the flexible, patterned, and weightless strength of a dancer, the poet wants to “push back the curtains and lay down embarrassed by so many dead flowers.” Repetitions abound — fascinating footwork that prepares us for italicized language fragments leaping across the bottom of the page — “left on the skin       the trick     of nature       I can almost hear.” While engaging head-on with the elemental — time, memory, nature, and the possibility of transformation — these poems, like our thoughts upon waking, are hushed and circular. Dyckman reminds us that limitation is also part and parcel with strength — “the mind that can change too little on its own, that cannot alter stone.”

Jeff Friedman’s prose poems conjure worlds in single paragraphs and individual characters in sentences. In these precisely observed and recounted micro-moments of an examined life, the physical detail conveys volumes. Enlisting defamiliarization to power perception and the manifest to reveal what lies beneath, Friedman casts his closely focused, unhurried gaze on the granularities of our deepest drive, to “let your mind raise its voice.” In their plain-spoken clarity, these poems are “done talking nonsense” and “done with the darkness at the center of darkness,” casting their lucid gaze on the ephemeral physicality of communication and what it means to lose it.

In his text and image series, Doug Hall yokes together meditations on time and memory with black and white photographs of the winter oaks of Olompali Valley. From “among the oaks,” Hall conjures the collapsing universe; the DNA of slugs, bananas, honeybees; the difference between “melodic memory” and “studied memory;” and our most distant star, Earendel. Hall has created a series of juxtaposing diptychs, each block of text chiming with the shape of the photographs. Framed centrally and filling the image with a single tree’s distinctive intricate branchings — some reaching for the sky, others heavily skimming the earth — the photographs dramatically accentuate each oak’s individuality. In his pairings, Hall suggests that the oaks have a way of approaching existence akin and parallel to our own. Hasn’t each tree responded to the forces of time and memory in an ongoing relationship to sky, sun, water, insects, nutrients? How else could the oaks persist, uniquely present in a changing landscape?

In Jeffrey Hecker’s Monopoly series, America, or perhaps its self-image, is reflected in a fun-house mirror warped by the quaintness of the game’s iconography as it dovetails with the harsh — and often comical — realities of 21st century America. Drawing upon the game’s association with wholesome American family bonds as well as its unfiltered capitalistic values, these poems render the absurd contradictions at the core of the American experiment, juxtaposing daycares and unemployment offices, luxury spas and homeless shelters, Truman Capote and Linda Ronstadt, Dodge Durangos and dust devils to drily comical effect. One poem even reminds us of the Ur-American utopianism of social experiments such as an “experimental village” in which an “empathy hierarchy” replaces those based on the materialistic metric at the foundation of the iconic game.

Karen Holman’s expert ear for sound — brief, abrupt, dazzling, and fulfillingly descriptive, excites the mind and invites the heart. In “Invoking the Inconsolable Divine,” she defines the divine as, among other things, the “ninety-nine named / and galaxy crowned / vaped, empty-bottle, recycled, / wretched, fetching, festering, / quotidian, misquoted and doting” as well as, wittily, the “crapshoot / radiant radical / sporadic and random / specific, fixer and fix.” In “Constellations,” she imagines the questions of our existence tangent to the stars: “chartreuse-new / seven sisters, veiled / in their own breath / opened and blinked / beating like my fist-wings / with a treasure in it.” The textures of earth are also invoked: “sleep is houndstooth / sky-forsythia / cemetery pinwheel flowers / animated, again / by air like us.” In Holman’s image-charged poems, the ineffable abides with the quotidian, the divine with the earthly, as if suspended together in our memories and dreams.

Marie de Quatrebarbes’ prose poems from The Vitals, translated by Aiden Farrell, interrogate language and its fraught relationship to the referents that we consider reality: the “fiction to which we can only respond with a nod when a vague idea, a very vague idea, vaporous even, comes to snatch it away.” These cerebral notes-to-self are like a diary written in radioactive ink, aiming their x-ray vision right through daily life to discover “The Vitals” — or expose what we assume them to be (“the afternoon, the children…”) as “a sort of ecstasy, delusion of ownership.” These linguistically packed and provocative poems favor disruption, applying the chosen uncertainty of their magic to put “on a drama of the abst. incompletion of a certain img” in order to “provoke uncert. fate.”

Judith Roitman’s spare, bold, and sometimes unnerving poems cut to the point immediately, asking without hesitation what we might hesitate to probe. Do you feel this? How can you not? Proceeding from the mysterious and somehow accurate description of birth, when we are “expelled from the body / like donuts / like trees,” Roitman asks, in the eerie “Shimmy:” “Do you come here often / Do you shimmy in darkness / Do you feed them,” capturing both a real and surreal human experience. Her brilliant response to an oft-asked question: “I asked poetry: what are you / and it slapped me in the face,” generates both more poetry and more questions for the reader. In “Language,” a view from a plane shows “midden upon midden below us,” and demands an important, perhaps profound, answer from us: “A whale is on the beach. / A crab reaches its destiny / Two dead seals on the sand — can you see this? / What language do you speak?”

Elise Siegel’s haunting sculptures evoke both airy modern portraits and heroic busts from an ancient culture, eroded by the rain and wind of centuries, as if rediscovered, but with no clue as to where they originated. These faces have the immediacy of selfies, but the psychological complexity of ritual masks, or the inner presence of oracles. Using clay as her material (perhaps the most historical of mediums) the artist imbues these gestural sculptures with individual lives and expressions even as we imagine a process of erosion gradually and minutely continuing the process of destruction. In these sculptures, we see our friends as well as our ancestors. It is as if these women are icons whose names are forgotten in history, but like a fleeting glimpse of a stranger’s smile on the street, or the felt dignity of a statue of a Jomon goddess, they have a timeless quality. Siegel’s powerful work compels us to believe that there is a life force particular to women’s spirit that survives the ages.

In these poems from Lost in Translation, Alison Stone has married the cento form with an iterated translation procedure to make collages not from others’ excerpted lines but from their repeatedly re-translated progeny. The resulting poems trouble and broaden our notions of authorship, reminding us of the range of choices it entails, even while offering a collectivized notion of creation that encompasses, with the poet’s use of Google Translate, more than human agency. At the same time, Stone’s aesthetics and sensibility unite these poems, permeating them with her sharp insight (“There are two types of disasters: women and men”), elegiac lyricism (“The world is your widow and she is still crying”), and warnings of our threat to our own planet: “The tide wave has opened, and everywhere.” As she drily observes, now that “the wind has been unhinged lately. / Alarm, and fire approaching. / When it comes, the landscape will listen” and “Twitter viewers swallow the sky.”

In these exquisitely worded poems, a powerful and invisible something is always behind, within, and surrounding the object of G. C. Waldrep’s nature-focused lens; a force made almost visible in “the pollen’s spark hidden in the air’s tongue” which is “anterior to the presence that commands begin” a force outside of us, but “not unobtainable.” In “Tye River,” the river reveals variants of its true nature, sometimes tragic; “a held motion” that “succors / debt’s visible passage / shoaled with all / the organs of mourning” but encompassing, pulsing, alive and beautiful, as “enlaced with hoarfrost / the zodiac glides / to your filament-feet.” This force also animates “the quince at dusk / expressing / its hitherto, its after—” and in “its brief for change” the bitter fruit may hold the “affirmation” or more subtly, and mysteriously, the “shadow” of affirmation, of a power that we sense, even if we cannot entirely grasp.

In these grave and erudite prose poems from These Late Eclipses, Andrew Zawacki considers the ways eclipses — that is, “figurations wherein a trace conceals, or cancels out, the whole” — characterize the threatened state of the nesting-doll-like layers of reality in which we live. From Vegas to Verkhoyansk, from family intimacies to the theoretical cloud of celestial bodies surrounding our solar system, Zawacki catalogues the iterated signs of distress everywhere in evidence, not least to our psyches, when “under a hematoma sun, everyone I know’s been broken down, like a cardboard box.” These brilliant poems urge us to recognize the grave danger in which we find ourselves, this 11th hour in which “dark is swooning in” to a “world not long for this world.”

We hope you love these as much as we do.

Thank you for being here!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash

Editors’ Notes (Posit 36)

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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

Barbara Tomash

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Of Spirit

what if I told you a wheel without axel is not a machine what if I told you a glassy skyscraper is not a vagrant spirit though it sways like one only flagella dung beetles tumbleweeds go forth by rolling by toe and by hoof pilgrims progress in the midst of this too much scatter not even our jet propellers black boxes sacred scraps of skin and bone will be accurately dated I don’t know if we are carried in a hand basket pushed in a cart or rolled on round logs but isn’t this next place paradise nothing stirs the fossilized wheel ruts in remote roads nothing stirs the scumbled brown background submerged in dried leaves what if I told you there is a peg in my center secured to the ground and yet I am freely spinning

Of Drowning

keeping afloat my thoughts encoded as innumerable sounds song of bird or wind isn’t it easier to lay down light burdens than heavy ones to speak something to be written as handfuls of rain not drowning heart tinged with fragmentary refrains shuffle of footsteps on water the soft parts of my body a lacy blouse buoyed in darkness isn’t it better to err on the side of the invisible than the visible a fine film of capillaries gathered into veins leads back to my heart on the far shore the growling of other animals intensifies

Of Lazarus

for generations didn’t we fear coming back to life in our coffins you try to keep a center of gravity within yourself but the new laid egg’s speckled shell the silver dandelion seed entrapped in a cube of plexiglass take you off guard if one could believe in mental processes floating in air a child found unconscious under icy water may survive if their face is kept continuously cold one could go on to believing in angels yes we poured vinegar and pepper into the mouth applied red hot pokers to the feet let it not come near me but cells that have been starved for more than five minutes die not from lack of oxygen but when their oxygen supply resumes let it not fold round or over me yes we flicker off on off on in Tibet the body is given a sky burial and left on a mountain top

Of Silence

we listen for melodic echoes of our parents and offspring crying speech is produced on the exhale it is invisible it is not eating it is not thinking it is not a moveable part of the body not fingers wrists or lungs not dreaming when released from the taboo against vocalization the women of our waterside switch back without sacrifice to pure sound narrating where they left off amid foliage in the dark and in the sea

Barbara Tomash is the author of five books of poetry including Her Scant State (Apogee) forthcoming in 2023 and PRE- (Black Radish). Recently released chapbooks are Of Residue (Drop Leaf) and A Woman Reflected (palabrosa). Her writing has been a finalist for The Dorset Prize, the Colorado Prize, The Test Site Poetry Prize, and the Black Box Poetry Prize. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 31)

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Welcome to Posit 31! We’re excited to offer another selection of poetry, video, visual art, and text + image that is as aesthetically innovative as it is emotionally resonant. The works in this issue deal with matters of the gravest collective hazard: war, climate change, injustice and inequality, as well as the personal suffering caused by loss, loneliness, aging, and mortality. They also explore the tenderness and exuberance of love, hope, and the joy of being alive. Formally, these works engage a particularly exciting range of original and experimental approaches to the realities of memory and experience.

As TJ Beitelman’s “Broken Sonnet as Epitaph for Straight Talk” declares and enacts, the art in this issue offers a much-needed alternative to linear approaches which do not suffice when “topography plate tectonics free market . . . killed children six times” and “the fourth estate is dead.” Since sometimes “the only way I’ve ever made meaning // is to pile it all together” (nicole v basta, “where to begin or what are you bringing”) these works eschew the temptation “to cover the hole over” (Ben Miller, “Re: Writing”) at the heart of our messy lives. In place of any such flimsy and misleading patches, these works offer a fascinating and insightful range of approaches to its irreducible topography.

nicole v basta’s poems wrestle with the necessity and problematics of hope in a society in which materialism is more cause than salve for the misery and alienation at its core. These poems confront an “america, [where] instead of tenderness, we use plastic as the counterweight to all the violence” and a child anticipates dollar store “consolation prizes” from a mother who “prays the rosary” without hope, “knowing, deep down, we are the product of the same familiar thieves.” Aspiring to a forgiveness which may be just out of emotional reach (“on the top of my throat . . . standing on a chair”) these poems manage to grasp a wise kind of hope uncoupled from illusion and find the courage to ask “where to begin and what are you bringing” – all the way to “the end of the world.”

TJ Beitleman’s innovative “broken” works free the reader by departing from the familiar forms of hymnbook lyrics, sonnets and abecedarians to suggest new ways to interpret and perceive the text. In the “Broken Hymn” series, Beitelman offers, and scrambles, lyrics one might see in a hymn book, suggesting that the poem be read both traditionally and as a mirror image that has slipped like a fault line off its axis. All of the poems are “broken” in form as well as content, concerned with fragments of regret, broken minds and broken marriages: “Words are terrible. Music is terrible. Minds jumble in them.” With its combination of science and politics, history and geology, “Broken Sonnet as Epitaph for Straight Talk” tries to make sense of our fragmentary knowledge: “(A) Here lies topography plate tectonics free market / (B) Graveyard. This graveyard killed children six times // (C) The ranking member of this or that / (D) The fourth estate (to suit the truth // (E) Up. It never happened. It never happened.” In Beitleman’s (and our) world with its unrelenting violence, these startling juxtapositions of form and content give us a choice to either “Piece it together” or “Explain it away” in light of the fact that “Aftermath is still life.”

In DPNY’s innovative and piercing short films, the concerns of the I are shown to be inextricable from the concerns of community. In recounting personal challenges, collective experiences of war, and what it means to be human, both now and for our future, DPNY explores the visual of the body, collaged with written and spoken word, recorded interview, and innovative cuts of images meaningful to the artist’s history. In “Androgynoire,” images of the artist and their voice show us a person “fully splintered,” honoring the strength of the word “No” to reiterate “I regulate myself now.” In “Testimony 1,” a visual map of Lagos and collaged written words accompany the spoken testimony of refugees from a civil war, recalling the violence and death. We are confronted with the physical and emotional devastation of ordinary people who “used to do well” but “will never have the capacity to do it again.” As DPNY says, “The Otodo Gbame are survivors speaking their truth in the court of human conscience, calling on international bystanders, like myself, to act.”

With her signature insight and wit, Elaine Equi’s tightly crafted new poems consider how we live now with a bemused empathy that brings out the tragic humor of the human condition. These pieces center on time — “the hours that fly” and “drink the last light,” in the context of a planet reeling from a pandemic and facing the prospect of environmental doom. Yet despite their observations on isolation, decline, immorality, and death (“sweet, sharp / spider’s liqueur”), these poems are as funny as we are, teetering on the brink of our self-inflicted demise. As Equi dryly observes: “Darkness is relative / where backlit screens abound.” But the distraction of our backlit screens cannot undo the mess we have made IRL, so the time has come for “Everyone [to get] into the Pyramid,” bringing not only our “altars . . . avatars / and alter egos” but our “iPads . . . sex toys and . . . almonds/ dusted with pink Himalayan salt.”

Peter Grandbois’ bleakly beautiful verses confront the challenge of continuing to “walk through the labyrinth of days” after the loss of a loved one. Unlike someone “depending / on the safe lies of memory” the bereaved narrator cannot forget “how you said / you’d take flight / from this blind dream” rather than “sit / counting drips / from the faucet.” Eschewing the comforts of faith or illusion, these poems express a pain as palpable as the truth at its core: “There is no mistaking / this haunted sky / for a field // where you might dig free / of this chosen / silence.” Nonetheless, the narrator chooses to “walk through the soughing wind / into the dimming light” because “life hums with almost / blossoms” – thereby offering the hope of hope, if not yet the thing itself.

In another kind of sonnet, Justin La Cour writes detailed and fantastic stories for his lover’s delectation with the ease of intimacy, to “surprise / you w/a story of how a bird swooped down / & swallowed a venus flytrap, but the flytrap / gnawed a hole in the bird’s belly midair til /they both crashed by the orthodontics place.” These sonnets contemplate day to day incidents with the pathos of loneliness: “This day will disappear & / I won’t get to talk to you. /… (But if I wanted you to feel sorry /for me, I’d say I’m reading novels alone in the sarcastic/afternoon.)” Then, in an original and moving compliment to the loved one, “When you speak it’s like an animal breathing /deep inside an ice sculpture of the same animal. Even the / way you shake your umbrella is completely arthouse.”

Donna McCullough works with steel, bronze, wire, and mesh to reimagine iconic forms of feminine adornment such as ball gowns and tutus. As lovely and beguiling as they are bold and witty, McCullough’s armored bodices sculpted from vintage motor oil cans and skirts of metal mesh handily upend female stereotypes of helplessness and fragility. In their stead, these sculptures decisively enact an alternative physical and psychological narrative of fortitude and capability in which feminine strength and practicality is part and parcel of its grace and beauty.

Like maps of thought itself, Ben Miller’s graffiti-like gestures and faux-naïve doodles wander through a cornucupia of textual meditations on life, memory, and art-making. Branching and winding, traveling backwards and upside-down, Miller’s combination of abstract and representational images, sensorial memory fragments, and essayistic cogitations create a world in which Keith Haring meets James Joyce. These works explore the artist’s choice to “walk . . . out on the constructions of the page” in order “to allow the piece to have shoots like a plant” rather than “cover the hole over and hope it stayed covered.” The sheer profusion and intricacy of marks and text presented in such deliberate and exuberant defiance of conventional directionality enact Miller’s commitment to “remain enmeshed in the intent to get fully lost / in the trusted atmosphere of being,” richly rewarding the reader/viewer willing to surrender to their riches.

Soledad Salamé has created a wide-ranging body of work honoring the beauty of the natural world and the radiance of its life-giving elements while warning us of its vulnerability to our abuse— as well as our own vulnerability to the increasingly catastrophic consequences of our recklessness. The depth and scope of her investigations into our impact on our environment encompasses drawing, painting, photography, print-making, stage design, and life-sized installation, featuring dynamic, living elements such as water and plants. Salamé’s explorations of light, water, and time are as meticulously researched and executed as they are wide-ranging and inventive, featuring painstaking re-creations of natural phenomena like ice, water, and resin-interred life forms, as well as technological elements like barcodes. Salamé’s precision-crafted worlds mirror and comment upon our own with a balance, and serenity made all the more disturbing by their implications.

Mara Adamitz Scrupe finds the core connection of human spirit in the procreation and decay of nature and the beauty in the commingling of animal and vegetable as well as the human passion to be the thing, as well as admire it: “& here I am /an enterprise flawed & wounded in amalgamates /of shame & hubris / ambition & my own private /hungers / something creamed off as in /scoop the topmost richest layer as in /smash the glass door to get inside.” Scrupe’s ornate imagery binds the feminine to the life of plants: “do not think I don’t know the important /element of any fabric /landscape / wild ginger on the precipice the down /slope the true side soft /pubescent & tender.” And in “Rope,” another kind of human passion possesses a modern Leda in the hubris of youth: “I was / I know I thought I knew / enough to let go of the rope.”

In Ashley Somwaru’s brilliant poems, the speaker interrogates her own fear and shame as a witness to her mother’s life. In “Eh Gyal,Yuh Nah Get Shame” the first shocking line (“You /want / to be bludgeoned /don’t you?”) plunges the reader into a depiction of a terrible beating and the speaker’s fear and shame projected as disdain of the victim. The vivid imagery of despair and the language of remembered childhood show the inevitability of this abuse: “Spine arched /like the leather belt used for beatings. / Slicked with soap and Black / Label. Pata stink. / Your body /as boulders breaking / sea waves.” The poem-as-interview “Dear Little One” speaks with a wrenching honesty that both blames and tries to understand a child’s abandonment of, and distancing from, her mother’s failure to resist brutality. “You didn’t understand before your mother became who she was, she was a motorcycle rider, a woman who could hold her head under water long enough to show you what breathing means. You should’ve said, Mother, I’ll stop feeding off your arms. Mother, I’ll let you stop slipping yourself into the pot.”

Barbara Tomash’s sensuous imagery and serious questioning are lyrically and intellectually bonded in a modern and fantastical philosopher’s treatise, a little sacred and a little profane. The form of the poems, reminiscent of incunabula, enshrines beauty in the natural and spiritual worlds: “isn’t it better to err on the side of / the invisible than the visible a / fine film of capillaries gathered / into veins leads back to my heart / on the far shore the growling of / other animals intensifies.” But the poems are also a history of the deadliness of our human attempts at science, and our mixed prayers to be defended from our own experiments: “yes we poured vinegar / and pepper into the mouth / applied red hot pokers to the feet /let it not come near me but cells / that have been starved for more / than five minutes die not from / lack of oxygen but when their / oxygen supply resumes let it not fold round or over me.” What if this poetic history of humanity is the foundation of a new way to think about the world? “What if I told you there is a peg in my center secured to the ground and yet I am freely spinning.”

In John Walser’s lyrical descriptions of music, an afternoon, or a word, each further search he makes deepens the feel of the described object, which also turns out not to be the subject of the poem, but rather the unnamable feeling behind that object: “But then something lets loose just a little /some shell, some husk, some bark /some pod, some rind, some hull /some skin, some chaff, some crust /some peel, some case, some carapace;” and “Joe Williams’s voice / is candle wax / swallow snuffing /another flame / into loose smoke.” And in as beautiful a love poem as ever we’ve read, the word slough is defined, refined, and redefined into another word for love: “I love the word slough: always have: /its dryness: the way in my throat: /a chrysalis: it gets left behind /like a jacket on a bench…”

In considering the process of aging, Donald Zirilli’s poems are both witty (“Imagine how cool I look lying on landscaping bricks, wondering when the ants will reach me, / considering I might be in a Tai Chi position called Unable to Get Up”) and disorienting, as poetry itself is disorienting and yet centers us in truth: “I have a warning / about the poems I sent you. They’re not done. The poems that you asked for / are not quite written. Whatever you saw in them is not entirely out of me.” Some realizations can only come later, as the poet remembers his childhood numbness in the face of a grandmother’s death: “but I believe I heard her long ago forgiving me /already for today /for the wintry / blankness of my head / the dull abandoned / fireplace of my heart / in a house burned down /that she would answer /to whom I would not speak.”

In Martha Zweig’s compressed poetics, wordplay and prosody are not ornaments or highlights but the very stuff of the poem’s construction. There are as many levels of irony and pathos in these lines as there are layers of assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme, all delivered in snappy staccato rhythms underscoring the sharpness of the poet’s vision. Zweig’s punchy, high-friction linking of ending and beginning, creation and destruction, and ultimately, life and death throw off sparks of insight at gleeful risk of bursting into flame – not, perhaps, an altogether unappealing outcome for the narrator of “Gloaming” who prefers to “take another flirt at the world” rather than let herself get “suckered & sapped” by the “bluedevil dirty earth” with its “gory locks of lice / & beggary, strategy, calculus, scrapheap / scrubbed & pricked to glitter.”

Thank you so much for being here.

With love and gratitude,

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Barbara Tomash

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Five poems from Her Scant State

—an erasure of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady
 
 

a smile of welcome        a zone of fine June weather
a territorial fact        native land        a character
a queer country across the sea        the rosebud in a buttonhole
these words of not perfect        loose thinker
fell in love with novel’s fancy phrase        in a windless place
I offer myself to you        light turned into exhalation
caught in a vast cage

————————————————————————————————
Her ambiguities composed all of the same flower. Fertile. Flourished. A fault of her own. It might feed her. Like a small hand. A kind of coercive. Not neglect. A negative, imaginatively, already existing. Her eyes prettiest. The day that I speak of. The short grass. A shorter undulation. A handful put into water—an image. “To bring you to this house.” Isabel listened to this.

 
 
 
 
 

a need        to be easily renounced
hampered at every        neither father        nor mother
poor and of a serious        not pretty        hundreds of miles of
“I’ll go home”        the masses of furniture        hid her face
in her arms        like the payment for a stamped receipt
aspiring murmur        a threat refused        three times
conceals from you        America diverted by a novel

————————————————————————————————
“A marriage,” said Isabel, “is not at all large.” In her lucidity, no light to spare.

 
 
 
 
 

a witness        not struck with       smooth woman
the fluttered flapping quality        of the sadness now settling
empty; but        no one invited her       not the least little child

————————————————————————————————
Meager synthesis, impossible dinner. Inviting “them”—as something so literal, stupid. To be honest as most people, equally honest, flattering herself. Irresistible need living in the upper air, up a steep staircase perpendicular to husband. Wishes as good as straps and buckles. Devoted evening—“I’ve never given anyone else a mistake as perfect.”

 
 
 
 
 

drifting

take care        heart        take care

do you know where you are drifting?

————————————————————————————————
Under the influence of to marry, hands laid on. “Lay them on yourself.” A woman thinks she may doubt time. It came over her in uttering. A wounded face expresses nothing. The master; the mistress.

 
 
 
 
 

ah, don’t say that
fresh        cheerful
facetious
the most charming        young
only proves        she wants
she wants        proposition
obliterated

————————————————————————————————
Her dresses, her falsehoods. “What do you mean by ‘people’?” “Servants whom you pay?” “They’re human beings.” “Are there any women?” “You can buy me off.” “Take care of me.” “I submit.” And this was the only conversation, unpleasantly perverse, like the stricken deer.

 
 
 
 
 

Her Scant State is a book-length erasure of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Entering James’s text as source material, I have, of course, been grappling with America, my native place, as a landscape carved by floods of competing ideologies including that of a hopeful, aspiring, and often violent capitalism. My inquiry focuses on women, but my point of view must shift in this novelized America made of many erasures. Perhaps home can never be described if a personal and aesthetic dislocation is not risked. In terms of the form on the page, the first half of The Portrait of a Lady runs across the top of each page of Her Scant State and the second half of the novel runs across the bottom of each page, beneath the line.
Barbara Tomash is the author of four books of poetry, PRE- (Black Radish Books 2018), Arboreal (Apogee 2014), Flying in Water, which won the 2005 Winnow First Poetry Award, and The Secret of White (Spuyten Duyvil 2009). An earlier version of PRE- was a finalist for the Colorado Prize and the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, New American Writing and numerous other journals.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 21)

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Happy Spring, and welcome to Posit 21!

It is with equal parts pride and delight that we offer the freshness and breadth of poetry, prose, and visual art in this issue: its capacity to match aesthetic delight with insight, emotion, and critique. Book-ended by poignant treatments of mother and home by Emily Blair and Karolina Zapal, the writings featured here are distinguished either by the bold frankness of their voice, the restraint of their meditative lyricism, or the exuberance of their experimentation and play. And the visual art collected here has a comparable depth and breadth, from painting to assemblage, collage to textile.

All of this, of course, against the ever-more disconcerting backdrop of our real-world “collective failing, a planet / boiling” about which “how frighteningly / beautiful those words / about the slouching and /the beast, another matter / when it is at the door” (Gary Sokolow, The Darkness, The Knocking).

Yet even now, when what the narrator of Blair’s A Boy Named Rooster Tries to Kiss Me calls “the craziest thing she ever heard” makes more sense than what we’re asked to accept on a daily basis by the most powerful man in the world, these works remind us how “the moment / is still music” (Mark Truscott, Rain) and help us appreciate “windfall as artifact of storm.” (F. Daniel Rzicznek, from Leafmold).

Which is why you won’t want to miss these wise and beautiful windfalls of our stormy times.

Azadeh Ardalan’s painted-from-memory portraits utilize eye-poppingly vivid, non-naturalistic colors and broad, gestural, brushstrokes to peer beneath the surface of how we live now. The heightened colors and lush textures with which she depicts contemporary characters seated in simplified interiors is more than reminiscent of the Fauves (and especially Henri Matisse): it brings their revolutionary prioritization of form and color effortlessly forward into the 21st century. The velvety saturation of Ardalan’s palette infuses these paintings’ static compositions with an intense energy, so that their depiction of the isolation of contemporary life delights the eye, refreshing the viewer’s appreciation for the beauty of the everyday.

Emily Blair writes in a powerful voice rich with mastered emotion and an indelible connection to a home left as far behind as it is ever-present. These lyrical poems evoke a “back-home” to which, to paraphrase Thomas Wolfe, the narrator can never truly return: a back-home of laundromats and Ms. Pac-Man and eighteen-wheelers and a boy named Rooster “with a lip full of mint Skoal and his thumbs in his belt loops,” as well as seraphs that are “beasts of fire” and a “toothy” mother “everything about [whom] turns inside out, a body of prolapse, liters of bile, and blaming [her] for the trouble.”

In Thomas Cook’s prose poems we are treated to language at serious play, a gestural yet sly resort to the atomized energy and unpredictable harmony of words and phrases in a world where “origin stories are difficult,” the “best has less to do with extraction than survival, especially in the case of cortexes.” In the world of these poems, lying to yourself is a shortcut the poet must eschew, even if, or perhaps especially because, it would create “a poem for the millennium in which you were found.”

In Janis Butler Holm’s sound poems from Rabelaisian Play Station, we’re treated to another vision of language cavorting on the fertile ground “between sense and nonsense.” In keeping with their Dadaist heritage, these humorous mash-ups ring deliciously with the surprising sting of critique. Dripping with satire, and propelled by a driving trochaic beat, these collages focused on fabrication and falsification lampoon the absurdity of an all-too-recognizable political status quo, one in which “peevishly adulterated, crackerjacks rigidify,” “percolating anthrax hoaxes falsify their logic genes,” and “double-dealing slumber parties oxidize fake news.”

Susan Leary studies the emotional complications, more and less beautiful, in the unknowable spaces between body and soul, as well as bodies and souls; “the world consumed by the vast invisibility of its histories.” In the first poem, that “the babies have a designated space in the cemetery” underscores that “only death would disguise in such beautifully-cut grass a field of complex abductions.” In another, the narrator wonders “how a fish becomes a body, & through this how a body becomes a boy that survives. Knowing only to flail and calm.” Yet another poem asks, “if science is the body’s ability to know something the world cannot, what then of the world?” And, further: “how should it come to recognize itself if all but gloaming & accidental recklessness?”

Returning to Posit with more virtuosic thought experiments, Peter Leight offers a number of understated meditations which cast “the kind of sensitive light that only shines when there’s something to see” — even, or perhaps especially, when it is “the business of shadows.” This poet’s probing work has the courage to “see how far away you are / from what you’re close to,” and the wisdom to know that it “takes all our strength just to give in to the weakness.”

Fabricated out of numerous pieces of wood “puzzled” together into abstract and architectural forms, Helen O’Leary’s sculptures are miraculous in their meticulous fabrication and transcendental beauty. They travel simultaneously between the worlds of painting and sculpture. The surfaces move literally and figuratively, their unlikely undulations carrying the eye across their painted surfaces, around to their backs, through their openings and back. These visual journeys are a surprise and delight. O’Leary is a master of abstract narrative. Each of these constructions has a story to tell. They hint of history, memory and experience. O’Leary presents the clues so that we can finish each narrative in our personal way.

F. Daniel Rzicznek returns to Posit as well, with more lush and meditative prose pieces from Leafmold. In these poems, living in the wild reveals that when there is “trouble with the bugs, trouble with thirst, trouble with desire,” “gratitude must be endless if you want to survive.” In a vivid tableau of “two towels, rust-orange and aquamarine, flap[ping] on the clothesline” the narrator sees “capes worn by invisible spirits, maybe your guardians, your watchers.” Considering what he has “left . . . on the mainland,” he concludes it is “that certain noise,” the “noise of certainty.” In the wild, by contrast, “the season puts white on the pines but inside them: always green, always green.”

Gary Sokolow’s poems find solace in the memory of a time when “it was cheaper to be going nowhere” and “nothing mattered but to stand by the last great jukebox” even if “maybe I was simply crazy believing I was stopping time, nursing a beer.” Yet, despite the fact that life is “a bracelet tight around (our) ankles” and “the shadows stay like the outline of the names of the builders on the ovens of Auschwitz,” these poems manage to balance despair with hope: that “a want there is to make it kinder” despite “the thirteen billion light years that would take.”

In Eternal Relations, hiromi suzuki collages black and white images with words from a variety of languages to consider our “eternal relations” with nature, animals, and human society. Her use of the Japanese interpretation of Chinese kanji evokes the “eternal relation” of letters and visual images – the essence of the ideogram. In River and Forest, a parallel is drawn between the branching structures of tributaries and tree limbs, and the visual connotations of their kanji. Town, on the other hand, highlights the witty juxtaposition of its component characters, which translate, in English, as “orange chocolate almond.” Yet again, in Bird, the lack of easily discernable hints keeps us guessing – beyond the charming image of the kanji itself, perched like a bird on the back of a calf.

The astoundingly detailed collage work of Maritta Tapanainen delights and toys with the viewer. They are so precisely assembled that it is, at first glance, difficult to be sure if they are constructed rather than drawn. These transcendent collages are assembled out of hundreds of pieces of found paper. Working within the palate of black and white, she draws out scores of subtle and rich tones. The soft patina of vintage papers and multiple shades of black ink reveal the rich variety of colors that that we tend to think of as “monochromatic.” Her pieces draw from natural history, science and music, creating a world that is lyrical and lively. Her ability to weave together these disparate elements is no less than masterful.

In these lovely and profound poems, Adam Tedesco offers a persona who “stayed who I was as if I had an option” even with a “feeding tube filled with … dreams, sadness & Swiss omelets, this Rickroll of numb gums and dumb love.” These fine poems do not cease probing, even though “anything you try to understand owns you. The light you bend towards owns you. Your lover’s point of view owns you.” Even when “to weep is to ask what is in us,” this poet is not afraid to forge ahead until “cleared smoke & human patience reveal” poetry’s essence, the intersection of the mundane and the magical: “commonness, a plate & glass, the tablecloth pulled.”

With these poems from Her Scant State, Barbara Tomash returns to Posit with a sample of her own novel approach to erasure, constructing two-part poems extracted from the first and second halves of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. In the complexity of this conversion from novel to poetry and conversation between novelist and poet (as well as between the novel and itself), Tomash reweaves James’ inimitable and exquisite prose through the loom of her own prosody, giving rise to a lively juxtaposition of paired and pared-down questions and images. What Tomash questions here is no less than James’ imagination of feminity: that “queer country across the sea” which he recognized as “caught in a vast cage” – a vision lovingly reimagined by Tomash, “in her lucidity” via “ambiguities composed all of the same flower.”

The quiet gravitas of Mark Truscott’s conceptual meditations contemplate the materials of existence: the tension between seems and is, the transience of matter, light, water, and breath in their progress towards to drift and diffusion. These poems ask “what can it mean / that what is / has arisen already? / And then it will change.” Truscott manages this heavy lifting with a light and graceful touch, “placing / word after word / before coating their / succession in / colours of interior / sound.” The placid surface of his prosody is “like / a surface of water, / vulnerable to ripples, / real, now / momentarily /expressing its /potential for stillness” even as its “slow-beat ringing / continues,” with understated elegance, in the reader’s ear.

Altered States is an apt name for this body of work by Kit Warren. Painted in a variety of media, and made over a long period of time, they have an intoxicating quality. Warren uses a rich and elegant palette that draws us deeply into the work. Rhythmically moving across the page, her shimmering marks invite you into their world. They present a meditative, calm universe in which we can relax and enjoy the luxury of this work.

Marie Watt makes contemporary sculptures out of memory and tradition, tweaked with a distinctly contemporary sensibility. She often uses materials common to all of us, if full of potent meaning personal to the artist. Using many traditional fabrication techniques, she presents a fully developed body of artwork that is deeply moving. Fusing storytelling, politics, and a graceful aesthetic, she presents narratives that cross time and place to touch us all. Her desire to create community and engage with women “makers” adds unique social resonance and depth to her lovely work.

And, finally, in language as frank as it is vivid, in which “a gut feeling is just a gut job,” Karolina Zapal evokes a piercing yearning for mother and home inflected by “a sprig of jealousy a pinch of gratitude a handful of reserve.” The wisdom of this poet’s treatment of those emotional touchstones lies in her recognition of their limitations, that “what she has is not / enough and what she can have is no more.” With poignant lyricism we learn that “when Baby returns home home breaks / into a whisper” even while “a cheek of moonlight / on the road breaks off / in my eye.”

Thank you, as ever, for reading and viewing.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Melissa Stern