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
