Tag Archives: Heikki Huotari

Heikki Huotari

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Template 2

Silence, if it has a magnitude, has a direction. In the mirror image of my mirror image I was made. Another day another litmus test, if I’m not pink I’m blue and blue only for you.

Consider the tectonic plates as yet unnamed, the tentacles as yet untwisted in their conduits of cloth, the vertigo of worship and arousal, the subconsciousness to amortize the savoir-faire.

The perpetrators of refraction populate a prism. Two constituents may share a chair. As one is just and one is merciful I’m timing my arrival. A soupcon of angst enlivens a dark day. To never bubble up one doubles down on thou-shalt-not.

My hero’s a generic patriot. An orbit goes elliptical due to a lazy eye. Without a dispensation there’d be no betrothal. Football, tenure and promotion lifted me and placed me on a post then, laughing, drove away. All arms and legs,

I’m swimming in the air. A walking null hypothesis, my road is long and winding, short and winding, long and straight or short and straight. That’s one small step for one great ape. The null hypothesis says nothing can be done.

Template 3

Forgive them for they are amused but know it not. Their cartilage connected to their ligament, their camouflage connected to their testament, they may not get the message or may not repent in time.

But on a scale of one to ten, how stable is the equilibrium? Knowing, we’d be velociraptors even in our sleep. On hearing that the signal to noise ratio has been trending down, what real or artificial heart would skip no beat?

As in a church that took three hundred years to build, as those three hundred years can’t be brought back, as God without my guidance can’t but stray, the innocent bystander and the butterfly affect each other and the spinning lily stands alone, i.e., apart, i.e.,

the lily finally has it all. Now nature disdains both high and low pressure. Each such creature, each such übermensch is either not invented yet or out to pasture. Which came first, the cosmos? No extraterrestrials are harmed. I’m one of three creatives waiting

to be lauded. When I see a Gulf-of-Mexico sized crater, I’ll know there’s a crater maker. On removing the removable discontinuity, I’m driving through the twilight to the night. I’m not a placeholder, is just what we expect a placeholder to say.

Template 4

I’ve identified the flying object, now what, what, what’s that in horses’ hands, what’s that in tinkers’ damns, what’s that in sinners’ angry tears. The pixilation averages the twisted bits and dear.

It’s not prehensile so it’s not my atavism and my null hypothesis is, it’s the fall. It’s at a saddle point I’ll minimize my loss and maximize my gain. I’ll emulate the incidental attributes of influencers fluently.

I’ll double-clutch to Doppler shift and grind no gears. The purity of the experience will not be dulled. Spontaneous combustion presupposes a spontaneous combustor, a spontaneous combustor of sound mind.

A universe for every big bang, every big bang in its universe, pursuant to peace treaties my position relative to certain entities is fixed. If it’s not charity when I vend pencils, a ray emanates as from a non-binary star.

It must have been at midnight when the power went out or so the clock says when the clock says I’m alive. The butterfly will see me now. The butterfly will see me now, it’s only been two thousand years.

Heikki Huotari wrote his first poem the morning after the major died in the adjacent bed. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published more than 500 poems in literary journals, including Pleiades, Florida Review and The Journal, and in six chapbooks and six collections. He has won one book prize (Star 82 Press) and two chapbook prizes (Gambling The Aisle and Survision Press). His Erdős number is two.

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

Heikki Huotari

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Feedback

Reality is flowing and reality is ebbing on an oblique mile-wide boundary of
misinformation. As it’s spring I’ll be as antithetical an umbra as an umbra ever
was, i.e., I’m not just throwing shade, i.e., my flights of fancy seek to serve. I’m
reaping all of my rewards at once. To make of nothing a production, data mine
and damn the data to eternal bliss. The bliss kicks in, the worms crawl out, from
virtuosity ten thousand hours of winding down, the ice to slide on as by accident
then by injunction. No one sees it for more than three minutes; is the tour de
France in fact of all of France? I hereby sing the feedback loop into existence.

The Shibboleth Of Theseus

One if via virtue, two if via vice. If Muzak be the comfort food of idle preference,
play or not see if I care. If sunk cost is to white noise as white noise is to el
corazón, i.e., an interesting impediment, the menace meets the mailbox so the
menace is unmade, and information enters the misinformation bubble. On the
interactive star chart, hover over any planet and you’ll know that planet’s name.
Three hundred thousand of us jointly own the three-by-three outdoor enclosure
but choose not to use it because we have everything we need.

Remote Sensing

Be honest. Which contains the other, the idea or the thing? Which guarantees the
other a soft landing? Jealously I guard my wave state. Once per postulate to
sudden-change the wave state waits. The ends of tentacles but touch. Get used to
being a pariah. They may worship you but they won’t let you in the house. I do
not run with scissors, scissors run with me. The butterfly’s surprise is nullified by
whispering or surreptitious signing or the butterfly reads lips. The butterfly and I,
we always pay the asking price so we don’t have to bargain. Are you
extrasensory-perceiving what I’m extrasensory-perceiving? To be fair it is my
pirouette.

Linear Accelerator 2

As I was blind but now I’m innocent and I need kill nor eat no goat so this
scenario is going to a cinema far far away. This quicksand packs, as once, no
punch. The ship of Theseus is in the chop shop, less than the sum of its parts. The
faith of my great great great grandfather is clam-shell packaged, i.e., what I see is
what I get. The frequency of epilepsy is the perfect crime of crows. The ABD will
see you now, course work completed. Expectation is updated daily. What one
knows with 90% certainty is 95% cliché. Adverbially modifying an inaction, I’ll
be independent of what chickens have on offer when truncated cones of
styrofoam in chain-link spell out messages of maybe love and maybe loss.
Attenuated logarithmically, I’ll notice nothing strange. As latitude to wiggle room
so longitude to sudden change.

Wave Collapse

Plato’s chair collapses to hilarious effect and dogs evolving pave the way to outer
space. Where curvature is certain, in earth’s umbra we may take no rest. They also
serve who don’t exist. Depending on which axis my head rotates I might answer
yes or no. Astronomy and personality go separate ways. The village willing but
the boy who cried wolf weak, I’m quite requited thank you. Prison A and Prison B
may swap their convicts. I’ll escape acceleration and acceleration’s rate of change.
We’re looking at a grand piano and a spiral staircase and the skeptics need be on
guard always, the believers need believe but once.

Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published poems in numerous journals and in five poetry collections. His manuscript, To Justify The Butterfly, won second prize, and publication, in the 2022 James Tate Chapbook Competition. His Erdős number is two.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 34)

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Welcome to Posit 34!

The singularly powerful literature and art in this issue challenges conventional dualities of appropriate and inappropriate, beautiful and unbeautiful – as well as the props of avoidance and aversion on which they lean. These ingenious and accomplished artists and writers find the through-line from body to beauty by celebrating the glory of unglorified physicality. It is a privilege and a pleasure to offer works of courage, conviction and love that are as profound as they are liberating.

What happens when a terrifically charismatic personage walks into a room? Galen Cheney’s dynamic paintings are that personage. These large and intricate abstractions of color and energy combine past with present as the artist reuses, rediscovers and recombines materials from past works to make new and exciting compositions. Her life-long interest in graffiti and other works that show the hand of the artist is reflected in the exhilarating movement and sure and brilliant color work in these passionate pieces. Her process involves collage, “fragments and strips of paintings that I have ripped or cut up” woven and painted into new compositions with a seize-the-day attitude that reminds us, as she says, “there is no time to make anything that is not true.”

Derek Coulombe’s musical and wildly imaginative ekphrastic poems are an exuberant and pointedly unglorified celebration of materiality. The graphic detail of his poetic reportage challenges standard notions of nature and artifice, beauty and disgust. Umberto Boccioni’s bronze sculptures (among other influences) come joyously to life in a very bronze way: “Three bronze-all-the-way-through runners running at speed under heavy sun and all atop these extremely green lawns. Bronze-all-the-way-through means bronze outers and bronze inners, bronze skin, blood, mucus, bronzy organs, bronze lungs blowing in and out all heavy under all the running, bronze colon moves bronze stool, and bronze urine comes out wet in bronze jets.” Coulombe invents a surprising, almost exhilarating moment in imaginary time: shrieking bronze runners “running heavy beneath a smiling and hot sunshine smile widely too, all three smile with smiles of bronze too, big and wide, toothy, with bronze tongues, bronze teeth and gums, and all with shrieks ringing out and upwards always.” To go further, some of the sculptures are torsoless, “and so every low roundness of every soft bronze part is a sort of smiling line, a big torsoless grin from all the hard running parts and all three times over.” Coulombe, too, details the bronze “meatuses” and “feces, mucus, spittle, wax;” in short, every anatomical organ and its concurrent actions and reactions that are strangely, yet familiarly, human. This delightful and joyous tour-de-force all takes place “under the big warmth of the sun and the kind color of the powdered blue sky.”

The queerness of Steve DeFrank’s painting defies assimilation into the stale dichotomies of conventional aesthetics in favor of a joyful and ambitious syncretism. With their orifices flowering, melting, and exploding in cartoon shapes, toy-like textures, and colors reminiscent of neon, play-dough, and bubblegum, these works combine the irreverent humor of a Shakespearian fool with a surrealistic visual vocabulary reminiscent of Dali’s dripping clocks and a graphic eroticism that brings to mind O’Keefe’s flowering genitalia. This is joyful work that challenges received ideas of beauty and humor with graceful and accomplished painterly technique.

The aural, visual, and conceptual elements of Jared Fagen’s poems operate in concert. His short, frequently one-word lines are austere in their spareness yet breathlessly urgent, enacting, in the poet’s words, “delay, deferral, suddenness, and respiratory performance” in order to reach and utter “the essential.” The “lapidary lilt” of Fagen’s prosody not only offers “a viaduct / to an / interior” via an “aria / of waves” but it operates on a visual level as well: these long, narrow poems lead the reader’s eye headlong down the (virtual) page like plumblines searching the metaphysical depths. Engaging the multiplicity (or non-existence) of identity, art’s quest for “agape” and “Tarkovsky’s gold,” and the ineluctable pre-eminence of time (“we lose / to what passes” until “we / shatter abruptly”) — these chiseled verses decline facile notions of closure with disciplined attention.

Thomas Fink’s “Yinglish Strophes” invoke the back-and-forth flow of the ancient Greek chorus to and from a point of origin to enact a dialogue with the poet’s immigrant roots. The “yinglish” of these poems channels the wry irreverence and blunt, evaluative stance of their Yiddish-speaking narrators, capturing the tension between the Old and New Country generations with humor but not condescension — or romanticization. These verses capture the economy and inspiration of their speakers’ admonitions, despite and because of their imperfect grasp of their adopted tongue: “Is brisket / shopping this?” captures every ogled woman’s sentiment in four words as efficiently as “[f]inds / the take with the / give” captures a realistic attitude towards marriage. These narrators may be dispensing advice in a new world, but their old world wisdom is clearly applicable, whether it be to love or politics, social trends or the manipulations of our market system (“would fib lots stores / from label truth”), poetry (“[t]o make / a living doesn’t flow // that river”), or popular culture. With unmistakable fondness and a poet’s ear, these verses take up the challenge: “Why not / of your origin be civil?”

Maxwell Gontarek’s intricate vision reacts to Vallejo and Lorca, language and “the stippling of science” through “lattices” that explore the idea of envelopes, and question what “envelopes” us, including history and politics, guns and antelopes; a history of the Americas where “my godmother worked at the envelope factory for 50 years + she still wakes up at 3:00 AM / you asked if she liked it I said I didn’t think it crossed her mind.” In this poet’s clear-eyed view, we may be living in “a hemisphere that is actually an envelope.” And Gontarek says outright what all poets sometimes think: that even “after the revolutionists stop for orangeade / . . . the most your poem can do to support a movement is to give someone a papercut.” Thankfully, Gontarek perseveres, giving us verses that show us hidden layers of the world we live in, slightly askew and loved: “It is such a cool night / No matter what our heads will remain cow-shaped and we will try not to tip.”

Jessica Grim looks through a green lens, sometimes dark, always compassionate, at our relationship with language, the natural world, and ultimately ourselves. We have little real control and sometimes great sadness: “west of here where / sun rises later you / could weep for the dark / compression of your thoughts.” Grim suggests we share this kinship with nature: “tiny bird / dislodging dessicated / leaves from the / smallest branch // as might become / a past we / have little relation to / outside / of having lived it.” Our own lived experience is narrow, but the vastness of our unknowing is compensated by this realization, and in unlooked for, unexpected joy: “Sky through shades / of green / defining color / screed / as it finally wanders into song.”

Heikki Huotari’s prose poems interweave internal references as well as concepts from science, mythology, philosophy, contemporary politics, and popular culture. Individually and as a group, these poems highlight the absurd yet melodious music of existence. At the same time, these “flights of fancy seek to serve.” With erudition, grace, and humor, they offer an incisive commentary on the complexities and contradictions of our lives. This work is concerned with the relationship between reality and our account of it, in which “reality is flowing and reality is ebbing on an oblique mile-wide boundary of misinformation,” and “what one knows with 90% certainty is 95% cliché.” Facing such a mismatch with our shibboleths, the speaker is sensible to “jealously . . . guard my wave state,” even as he undertakes to “sing the feedback loop into existence.”

In R.J. Lambert’s alchemical ekphrastic poems, the work of an unknown artist is addressed in the language of art criticism reminiscent of the 19th century writing of John Ruskin. But it’s as if Ruskin has been transported to a strange new realm where the membrane between poetry and art is transcended: “The draw of broken art, domi—— / The vitality. His p—— / his color—transcen——.” The work itself transforms during the course of the poem to an ecstatic and unexpected embodiment: “Minor color, L’art ancien / reports no brown ink. / Also, a mixture closer / to feathered time / which, in print / the bodily structure reveals.” The poet asks us to reflect on these marvels induced by art (“The future’s graphic/drawing of drawings / impacts the personal”) with sober joy, even wonder: “An artist playing artist, / filling out the forms / All of this is mine? / Even the cobwebbed moth / Even the flattened lizard.”

Brendan Lorber’s militant poems about the “not normal times” of the pandemic train a sharp eye and attentive ear on the exploitive underlying logic of capitalism, which makes us hope “that the economy / might not be totally over . . . despite / only ever having been a chasm we participate in by screaming.” The distress informing Lorber’s verses is balanced by the spirit of resistance animating his witty but urgent warning against the “oligarchs’ dark arts” tricking us into “driving [ourselves] down / a boulevard of faschy schemes.” These poems offer a wake-up call against the “self-lethality” of complicity. “Like someone full of sparkle in the form of batteries / and marbles they ought not to have swallowed,” we are urged not to surrender to the dominant narrative and let “ulterior neglect” become “a principle come to life within its victims.”

Suzanne Maxson’s poems are full-throated celebrations of life, even as they cast an unflinching eye on the artist’s struggle to “savor / life on two feet” and access “the catalog we call myself” after devastating damage to “those / neural threads where in the pons perception, attention, / and memory entangle.” Astoundingly, these poems find meaning even at the moment of loss: while a stroke renders “the air a bright translucent dimensional density / of motion,” the speaker finds herself “distracted and absorbed / by every beauty even in the form and utility / of that green plastic hospital mug.” These poems celebrate “the visible the tangible and the intangible / . . . this impermanent placement on the ground / called home” — the “sufficiency of beauty and feeling” of “what is.” Although “the day is only white noise / to which we dance a jerky jig // while above the birds that day / pours into itself as night,” Maxson proves that “everything is all right . . . even in the unjust / and violent world unfurling always into / chaos” because everywhere there is beauty to be found, if we know how to look: in those birds and that jig, in Rothko’s silence and Frankenthaler’s “fifty-one colors,” in a Welsh farmer’s “broken / brown teeth” and a mother calling “out to my children / Here I am for you, imperfect / but present,” and above all, in these powerful elegies to the gift of existence.

Mikey Swanberg’s poems can make you cry. They are full of humility, joy, and love serendipitously found in the details of the dailiness of life. “I knew I knew nothing / The dog of kindness / pressed her paw hard / on my hip / Wild blackberries / scratched the shit / out of my arms, but later / I couldn’t find a mark.” There’s a Frank O’Hara spontaneity and sweetness to these poems: “did birds once fly in and out of you / or was that me.” Swanberg has abundant love for the past in all of us: “my god I liked to stay up late / in the kitchen talking shit / being sweet and noisy / in those blue cat hours,” and old loves are not forgotten: “I’ve been wearing as a winter coat / what someone I love once said to me.” Along with love and life, these poems celebrate art, including poetry: “only half of the calls the birds make come with a purpose / the experts all agree / that they just really like to sing.”

Ken Taylor’s richly allusive poems combine echoes of Benjamin’s aesthetic theory, the nostalgic Americana of Western player pianos and tintypes, and Tintoretto’s “gay” depiction of Maundy Thursday, with a more personal evocation of the unsatisfying fragility of modern life, especially during the pandemic, “when the calendars quit” and “the sun rose and fell but nothing advanced.” Taylor exposes a hollow repetitiveness underlying the tales we tell ourselves, “framed as a constant stickup,” and the need to believe otherwise, “tightly bound in the chords of a pitched belief that i’d escape the lassoing abyss.” But he also celebrates defiance of stale norms, suggesting an overlap between the Holy Trinity and an anonymous, nonbinary protagonist, X (“the many unfolding as one”) who wants “to say what it is not what it means,” and “aims to make fibrous smooth — / returning to the grid of viscous promise” in the hopes of “moving closer to a feast they can almost taste.”

Kukuli Velarde’s ceramic sculptures contain multitudes and span millennia. With fertile imagination and impressive technique, she undertakes an ambitious investigation of, in the artist’s own words, “aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance . . . revolv[ing] around the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture.” These works bring humor, anger, love, joie de vivre, and aesthetic pleasure to the complexities of “colonization and coloniality, contemporary history, social injustice and racism” – capturing and exploring colonialism’s generative as well as destructive impact on aesthetic expression. Velarde combines indigenous and Christian, ancient and contemporary iconographies to invent an oeuvre as organically rooted as it is original.

Mary Wilson blends lyrical images with a stunning and sensitive clarity about our response to the political and natural world. “It’s raining in the news / a storm or congress of box / jellies on the artificial reef / where some “they” sank / ships, planes and concrete.” In striking metaphors, Wilson notes some machine-like qualities in us, “Before the house stands a small girl / whose face, obscured in the rubble of / the foreground has been blurred / by some precision. It’s like, “look / here, you’re a tense lens mounted / to a vehicle.” Behind these original and somewhat disconcerting perceptions where “we get the very weight of looking,” there’s a deep understanding of who we are and what we could be, “[w]hen at last we’re hopeful / Secure from our want.”

We hope you enjoy these as much as we have!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Heikki Huotari

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Meditation On Matthew 6:28

a million lilies will be stilled
—Heather McHugh

God stopped the lilies spinning with consideration not with pheromones. The lilies had anomalies/anatomies to sing but didn’t care to. Prophecy was self-fulfilling and a molecule from Aristotle’s former body floated; thumbs on scales precluded cataclysms and three other kinds of kindness; spanning one caesura nonchalantly, nature spawned another, even wider, like an absence, like a sum of wants.

The Feedback Loop

The last full moon was fuller. Now the boundary of necessity is porous. I don’t need that pigment – I have wings. When in a sea of leaves and needles I need only brandish an imagination. Every word I speak is channeled back to me a seventh of a second later. Bite me, I say to the deity, You might have spent the morning watching hummingbirds extracting nectar but you didn’t. In your stead I did.

Peripheral

To distinguish infrared from ultraviolet, I’ve interposed a wavelength even I can see. If you are not a trick of light, try flying, like me, in alignment. Memories are made of this not that. Resemblances are tenuous. A second second of elation may just bust the bank. So mind your manners demon, mine’s the only voice you have, and on a moment’s notice I’d disown you.

In a past century, Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower, is now a retired math professor, and has published one collection, Fractal Idyll (A..P Press), and three chapbooks, one of which won the Gambling The Aisle prize. Another collection (from Lynx House) is in press.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 22)

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Describing the state of the world when the I Ching was written, Z.L. Zhou writes of a time “so distant from ours that some of its aspects are approachable only through inexact science, science that verges on divination itself.” Hopefully, we can all be forgiven for noting the relevance of this formulation to our own mystifying times — with its “scrappy few / . . . scraped-up many;” its “imagined nation in ruination” (Kristen Hanlon, This Week Can Go To Hell) — so “difficult to see       explain / impossible to nail down” (Benjamin Landry, It Walked Through the Clearing). Varied and diverse as the work in this issue may be, all of it “grapple[s] / toward / [a] present / understanding” of our world (Landry, Shaft of Light), and the past that brought us to this point, although “the boundary of / necessity is porous” (Heikki Huotari, The Feedback Loop).

We’re proud to include a potent selection of works strongly inflected by voice (see, e.g., Behm-Steinberg, Hanlon, Lawry, Seidenberg, and Wright) and undaunted by silence (Huotari, Landry, Zhou); laced with aphoristic gems and unforgettable lines (Behm-Steinberg, Hanlon, Huotari, Lawry, Lurssen, Price, Yakovlev, Wright). Here are dissimilar but equally accomplished takes on the sonnet (Lawry, Wright) as well as intriguing excerpts from book-length works (Behm-Steinberg, Seidenberg, Zhou, and Lurssen). These poems grapple with demons (Behm-Steinberg, Huotari, Yakovlev); the fate of our planet (Hanlon, Lawry); mortality (Landry, Wright); the past (Landry, Price, Zhou); and the present — not only its dark side, but “our rich, noble trying, our Now” (Adrian Lurssen, Alabama).

In short, here is nothing less than required reading, sweetened by copious amounts of wit, craft, humor, and beauty. Whether delivering good news or bad, these works will surely salve your spirits, as they have ours.

The incantatory ten-line sections excerpted here from Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s an end is the towards to whet our appetites, deliciously, for the rest of this longer work. Laced with allusions to popular culture and music, and song-like in their resonant repetitions, these verses, like the “next door devil” of which they sing, “put a spell on you, put a spell on you.” “Counting every never come again,” Behm-Steinberg turns phrases inside out and back again, interweaving mystery and colloquialism by way of a unique and persuasive alchemy which has “figured out // how to divide your life into little slots one bird long.”

“Why not wear your rubber Donald Trump mask to a crowded theatre and flail your octopi limbs at the screen?” asks the narrator in one of Joanna Fuhrman’s new video poems. These sharp and funny pieces blend satire with fey lyricism, confronting the viewer with questions designed to bring home the urgency and absurdity of the current political climate and the existential crises of our age. “Did you mean to wake up with your nerves dangling like sneakers from suburban trees?” “Have you ever shaken hands with the bodhisattva of bitterness?” Fuhrman also captures the outsized influence of popular culture, where the reckless movie hero “is naked all the time” so that “even when he’s clothed, his dick swings unsheathed.” “The 21st century,” as Fuhrman captures it, with her light but devastating touch, “is riding a bloodshot Ferrari into the mouth of climate change, and it needs pure vodka to make it ok.”

Landing zinger after jaw-dropping zinger, Kristen Hanlon wows us with her linguistic agility and razor wit, even while compelling us to confront the gravest of questions: “What if the last chance to set things right / came and went without our noticing?” In this “backwater of nuts-and-dolts,” as she forces us to admit, our “heart’s a bag of frozen peas / closing in on irrelevance & irretrievability.” Hanlon’s vision of the status quo may not be encouraging, but it is persuasive: “If something’s gone rotten, cut it out.”

In Heikki Huotari’s small gems of meditation on the scientific and spiritual essence of nature, the deity is tweaked for indifference to the effects of its actions: Although “God stopped the lilies spinning with consideration, not pheromones,” that “consideration” included “thumbs on scales (that) precluded cataclysms and three other kinds of kindness.” “Bite me,” these poems say to the deity. “You might have spent the morning watching hummingbirds extracting nectar but you didn’t. In your stead, I did.” For Huotari, “the boundary of nature is porous.” “When in a sea of leaves and needles,” this poet “need only brandish an imagination.”

“Space it turns out is a brightness” in Benjamin Landry‘s poems, illuminating our experience of nature and contrasting it with our compulsion for measurement: “how to square a thing that cascades.” This urge, Landry shows us, may be “why we loved the topo maps/girded in concentrics /a ridge we know to its limit” — a limit that edges into the ineffable. We may think we believe that things we measure and make have to be “level true / and watertight,” but “a dowser / with a wishbone stick” (so unlike an engineer with her maps) can also find a source — while sometimes “winged things peer… down nervous and hungry.”

Mercedes Lawry’s sonnets are grim and gorgeous in equal parts, slaying us with the beauty of their music and the urgency of their alarm about the precarious fate of our planet. These are exemplary sonnets — contemplative, compressed, capped with stunning and stunningly prepared voltas. In language at once direct and artful, the imminence of winter becomes more broadly ominous, bringing with it: “the voice / of sabotage, the skin of denial . . . the mess of symmetry wriggling / in the gloved sky’s hiss.” By not privileging a human perspective, these poems bring home all the more viscerally “the ways the human / can evaporate.”

Adrian Lurssen’s Landscape No Longer In a Mother Tongue leads with an epigraph by Paul Celan, whose power and compression, intensity and transcendence resonate through the unique timbre of these finely crafted poems — along with the voice of the narrator’s mother, who “could will her // self into his dreams,” as well as that of his mother culture. These poems consider heritage as gift and shackle — or perhaps, as shackle and key to one’s escape, or at least appreciation: “Meaning formed // in the darker shades / of an uncovered continent.” That “there is no explaining / It is all part of the explanation” does not vitiate the hope saturating this poet’s vision of this “brief American moment, an attempt at affirmation . . . a flood of trying, a flight toward the innocent . . . a future engineered to be unerring.”

From the vantage point of a stark future/present, Bryan Price details how we will inscribe our species history on the Tree of Life: “Everything turned itself out broken: windows, curses, cures, cymbals, the edge of your cheekbone — a dumping ground for unspeakable horrors.” Caught in our present global catastrophes, “we can flee no further nor stay in this place ahold of the wolf this way.” However, in images that bring to mind a pre-Raphaelite painting of the mythic, we are granted a small but sparkling hope: “only ether remains as green as Night rising naked from Chaos.”

In this excerpt from Steven Seidenberg’s plain sight, the narrator’s wry humor and aphoristic morbidity are voiced in a direct address which could not be more indirect in terms of information divulged. Who is declaring that “A destiny destroyed is a destiny fulfilled?” Whose “mood clots quickly?” Who has “the patience to give voice to an illimitable silence?” Readers of Seidenberg’s book, Situ, might recognize the archaic diction and Beckettian stasis emitted by this persona, as well as the way these pieces bring us face to face with our own elemental quandary, the tension between the impulse to act and the reluctance to do so — between repulsion and attraction, the desire to know ‘what happens’ and the certainty that it will, as always, be ‘nothing’ — that we can’t read on, but we must read on.

The exuberant ease of Jeffrey Cyphers Wright’s playful, tragic sonnets belies their extraordinary craft and control. These meditations on our fate as the butt of “Laughing Matter’s” joke are no laughing matter. Wright’s virtuosic turns remind us that no matter how humorous the spectacle of our lives might be, “the gladiators are not all glad.” These missives from “the pang fortress” are sent by this profound trickster to demonstrate, if not explain, “how to draw a word out of a sword” and delight us with their inimitable display.

Anton Yakovlev’s confident voice and capacious imagination mine the fertile ground of reality’s bitter ironies to reveal ourselves to ourselves. The mirror held up to our gaze by these poems is not a flattering one, although for fleeting moments we might be forgiven for believing we have spied some bit that sparkles. In a world in which “contrails cross each other / like denial” and “thieves swarm every intersection,” we can only hope that “low-hanging fruit falls through [our] moon roof.” When this thoughtful and inventive poet considers “the architecture of love: steeples of inattention, pits of catharsis, coffins of hurry” a universal “fear touches [us] like a bouncing night.”

In Z.I. Zhou’s innovative and beautifully reinterpreted hexagrams, the ancient past is reanimated by the present, as lyrical prescriptions from the I Ching are conjoined with contemporary life and language, opening new vistas of insight and understanding. Images from “the ends of the world, the traditional fields, the\\pillars chaotic with birds. Here, mist; there, din, missed and\\empty” resound with and against the vividness of now, when “on yet another first date, when my foot brushes his, I am forced to wonder if I should withdraw the advantage.”

Happy reading and viewing!
Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

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Jaynie Crimmins is a magician. Her work transforms the ordinary paper detritus from modern life — catalogues, glossy mailers, and paper – and repurposes them into gloriously beautiful art objects. On first glance, her pieces appear to be graceful organic forms, based on the patterning and structure of the natural world. Second glace reveals that these complex pieces comprise a paper trail of capitalism. One can sometimes make out the ad copy, but generally the words and images melt into pattern and color. They are both clever and smart. Her craftsmanship — tearing, rolling, folding and sewing paper into 3 dimensional objects — is superb.

Scott Kahn paints lush landscapes full of color and pattern that, to me, often hearken to the rich tradition of Indian miniatures. He documents his life and the places he’s been with a delicate touch and a deep and vibrant palette. There is a rigorous discipline to Kahn’s paintings. He works within a traditional flat structure sometimes associated with American folk art. His subjects, whether they are landscapes or portraits, are full frontal — often with a somewhat flattened perspective. Their rich surfaces convey a sense of calm introspection.

Alison Lowry processes not only a profound technical and visual talent, but also a fierce commitment to social justice. Her cast and fabricated glass pieces commemorate some of the terrible crimes committed against women and children by the Irish State and the Catholic Church. Even while we are wincing from the unblinking portrayal of betrayal and abuse, we can’t help bu marvel at the sparkling beauty of her work. Her use of humble domestic forms- an apron, a christening gown, scissors — underscores the banality of evil. Her glass pieces are often exhibited in tandem with audio and text interviews with survivors who continue to bear witness to the past. Her work is urgent, powerful and transcendent.

The fun and funny paintings of Fran Shalom are full of both a “pop” sensibility and a deep commitment to the portrayal of form and color. Her brilliantly hued paintings are fundamentally abstract, but often make sly reference to figurative form. Elegantly constructed and quite precise, they seem to marry a kind of mid-century modern aesthetic with a philosophical investigation into the lyrical relationship between figure and ground. Shapes are pared down to their essence, yet the work is never austere. The juxtaposition of bright color balanced by neutral tones keeps this work alive and lively.

The visual and performative message of W.A. Erhen Tool’s cup project is deeply moving. Tool, a veteran of Gulf War I, has taken the humble craft of cup making and elevated it to something extraordinary. Tool makes usable ceramic cups that commemorate veterans and the horror of war. Using ceramic decals of real photographs, military imagery, and the beauty of glaze, he has fabricated and given away over 21,000 cups to the public. The cups themselves convey a dry sense of dark humor and a razor sharp vision of the destruction of war. At the same time they are simply beautiful.

Enjoy!
Melissa Stern