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
