Welcome to Posit 38!
Now more than ever, we are grateful to our contributors for the generative depth of their creations. In this fraught and perilous historical moment of “radiated oceans / redwoods burning” (Judy Halebsky, “Fwd: The Problem”) when “the rules of battle are not followed” so “massacre replaces battle” (Gillian Conoley, “It is just as hot as in the age of the great religious wars”), the art and literature in this issue offers wisdom and succor for our troubled psyches “spinning, pining / For nostalgia and ubiety” (Edward Mayes, “Say We’ve Reversed Ourselves for the Umpteenth Time”). Whether addressing the crisis of our despoiled and smoldering, hate- and war-ravaged planet, or the stumbling grace of our personal struggles, these works find new and beautiful ways to suggest that “we can begin again” (Gillian Conoley, “War 10”).
In Gillian Conoley’s poems featured here, everything perceivable and thinkable matters, and matters more passionately, more urgently as the poet arrays images and thoughts in unexpected combinations — because “the world does not say what to ignore.” These poems are chock full of the world we live in now. Conoley’s distinctive use of the page with long lines interrupted by caesuras reminds us of a banquet table — each phrase a separate dish — distinct images and patterns laid out beside each other in abundant variety — what a feast! As in this passage “A tinge of excitement in my feet the brief ache / flu-like in my ankles / one of the not-covid viruses the allergy clinic says are / ‘very around’ The peonies have blurred into beauty” where the exuberant thrill of perception is extended to the misery of a virus and in the same breath to the wonder of blossoming and living in a “light-filled” house. We are home with Conoley reading a New Yorker article, texting friends, until with a surefooted leap her next phrase takes us to a war zone, reminding us that “decay is a world where one is in demand / to bring oneself.”
In this excerpt from Capitals and Cranes, Matthew Cooperman returns to Posit with dueling prose poems whose counterpoint evokes the Anthropocene’s life-and-death battle between mammon and the natural world. These eponymous pieces offer vivid, evocative, elliptical vignettes — but their similarity ends there. The horizontal prose blocks of “Capitals” narrate the victories of, well, capital, such as the land’s sell-off to real estate developers and oil derricks, or the manipulation of an unsuspecting couple “sitting down to lunch . . . wonder[ing] what silly video to watch” who are incited, unconsciously, to “give . . . their money to the microphone” by privacy-invading targeted advertising. By contrast, the non-human world in which “no grace or flight goes finished” is “inviolate and supreme” in the lyrical, vertical columns of “Cranes,” which posit an enchanting, optimistic alternative to Capital’s despoilment, in which “cracks in the foundation, assumption” blessedly allow “the wetlands [to] rest, recover.” Cooperman’s juxtaposition of these alternative visions for our planet is bracing and, as in real life, unresolved. We cannot know which forces will prevail, but these poems won’t let us miss what’s at stake.
Loren Eiferman’s biomorphic sculptural assemblages emit a talismanic aura. Reminiscent of cultural artifacts revered for their healing or spiritual powers, her imaginatively generated forms draw from the structures, colors, and textures of nature on every scale, from the micro to the macro. Although they echo with resemblances to leaves and trees, rattles and head ornaments, spiders and fans, it is fitting that several of these works respond to the Voynich Manuscript, since all of Eiferman’s creations radiate a similarly magical amalgam of familiarity and strangeness. The viewer feels awakened to an ineffable combination of recognition and mystification — the slightly unnerving excitement of encountering the almost-knowable. Not only is Eiferman’s loving attention to the forms that make up both her inspiration and material happily contagious – there is a tactile magnetism to these sculptures which have been meticulously assembled in her uniquely iterated process of destruction and reconstruction. We wish to experience their balance and texture with our own hands, as if the artist’s intimate connection with her natural materials is contagious as well.
John Einarsen’s photographs are concise yet expansive emblems; clear, beautiful, composed, finely wrought, yet lived-in, or perhaps dwelled in, a deeper and more intimate term for finding the essence of an object and letting it enfold you. Einarsen credits his physical and metaphysical perspective, in large part, to his introduction to the Miksang technique, which asks the photographer to find the essential moment, what Einarsen calls the “gap in thinking.” The viewer first enjoys the abstract image through the filter of Keats’s familiar definition of negative capability: “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” which allows us to notice and more deeply appreciate the strangeness of reality. And yet there is delight in suddenly deciphering or discovering the shape of raindrop, leaf on asphalt, curtain, and window; all so daily, but newfound, newly seen. The double joy of the abstract image and the “real” image engenders its own poetic response in the viewer.
In Joanna Fuhrman’s new inventive and intimate video poems, the poet’s voice is anything but a detached “voice over.” The recited lines — sometimes brash, sometimes silken — are layered into the video images and music like bright threads at the shuttle. Every element is in motion — like the car with no driver described in “Cardinal” as “we veer through the leafy branches of a forest” and “the car keeps going.” The magic of Fuhrman’s video journals is that the sonic and visual multi-dimensionality comes together, finally, with simplicity and openness. In the spare and beautiful “Self-Portrait as Cloud,” the poet explains “I feel most myself / when — like today — / all of the sky is a single/ undifferentiated cloud.” Even when the images are blurred or only glimpsed at the edges of the frame, we feel our senses mysteriously lit like the sky from an unidentifiable source, or from many sources at once. By way of the surreal and the whimsical, dream and waking reality, Fuhrman invites us to trust that although the complexity of our lives is real, it is “mapped out in blue light/drawn in crayon on the topography /of a sleeping face.”
Judy Halebsky’s diaristic sequences embody a startling poetic paradox — honest and naked in reflecting on a brittle, yet tender domestic life, they hide little about the human condition, even as they leave out all explanation. The sad drama of “I’m naked with a sponge in the dark before dawn, cleaning the coffee while he tells me not to and cries,” is followed immediately by the examination of tiny snail shells — “he asks me to notice the coils, one flat and coiling outward, the other taller, coiling up / we need ways to tell different kinds of shells apart so we know which family of snails live here.” Don’t we all need ways to know and understand the family homo sapiens we belong to and what that belonging means? And so Halebsky looks not only at domesticity, but other structures we have wrought, examining the coils of money, time, and value. In one poem a friend comes to visit: “part of her illness means losing her job, no longer being able to put those two boys through school. so now there’s two unfurling. the one and then the other. a matter of accident, what we use as money, how we count and are counted.” But the art with which Halebsky shapes these brilliantly spare, non-self-sparing poems is no accident — they are translucent as shells.
Brian Johnson’s long lines meander and float through a dreamlike landscape that bridges the gaps and blurs the distinctions between dream and waking, place and time, reality and imagination. A ghostly, elusive aura of déjà vu hovers like early morning fog over these verses languidly “meandering in a city of squares, transfixing the old river, distancing the shoplights.” Johnson’s poems have the stillness and resonance of gelatin print photographs whose intimacy and focused attention manage to be turned inward and outward at once, showing us “the leagues between” a couple and their “late hesitations,” against the backdrop of “a wall, a bridge, a night, a city. The intersection of cries, smells and their evacuation. The neat forms of senselessness.” The cityscapes and intimate moments they conjure are the psychological artifacts of a narrator who “love[s], and lose[s] all bearing in the world.” Elegantly intriguing, these poems draw us into the quiet mystery of their contemplative spell, bringing us to consider and reconsider what we think we might have glimpsed.
Tony Kitt, somehow, deeply understands and appreciates the life of plants, as well as the foibles of humans. In the playful “Among Plants,” he defines the difference: “A tree is a hieroglyph; /a man, eighty pages of astronomy.“ Our own absurdity pointed out, the poet asks, “Who wears an itinerary to the feast of the non-calculable?” Obviously, we humans do. But Kitt also magics the reader into believing in a hybrid of human and plant. In “Yonder,” “This brook dancing you breathless… / Your paths are your veins; / your skull reveals your roots.” We are all dreamily connected through ”The feelings of a field; a colloquy / of farms…” Kitt has a way of getting under the skin, or perhaps the carapace, of nature’s creatures. In one characteristic surrealistic juxtaposition, he admonishes: “The bone thing: / be boneless (in a rigid way). / Don’t let your compound eyes / migrate south / or multiply in blending.” Possibly good advice? Through these surprising metamorphoses, this poet guides us to a different kind of understanding of living beings we usually only observe, even as he maintains a wary and humorous distance. As he says, “There’s always a two-finch gap / between a possibility / and an approach.”
In Peter Leight’s wry examinations of the stories we tell ourselves about our own disturbing vulnerability, “there isn’t anything / to conceal at the same time / there isn’t anything not concealed” even when the narrator (who of course claims to be “just as calm / as anybody else”) calms himself by covering his “head to cover up / what’s in [his] head.” Returning to Posit with hypnotic, rhythmic cadences and witty wordplay, Leight’s tender, humorous perseverations give voice to all of us wrangling our roiling stew of fear and yearning with awkward combinations of self-deception and oversharing. In these poems, Leight’s truths are, as ever, paradoxical. Self-examination is at once compulsion and slog, “a stress test” that requires “a couple / of aspirins first” in order to face the contradictory tangle of “so many things / we don’t know how to deal with.” Although, problematically, “people are a problem,” since “everybody wants to be needed,” the thought of turning away feels like “the end of the world.” Nonetheless, as these poems helpfully/unhelpfully suggest, “it’s important for people not to be unhappy / when they’re not happy,” so we might as well focus on “holding onto something / for as long as it takes / to let go.”
Edward Mayes’ sequence of playful, erudite poems seem to have been written in a trance-like euphoria of language and free-association — a tour de force that not only awes but welcomes us into its swift flow of ideas “since who of us can / Really draw a blank, who of us can really / Do without grace or some singular obeisance / To beauty and beauty only.” Mayes’ notes at the bottom of each poem further complicate and stretch the boundaries of the poetic line, inviting us to follow additional, related chains of language (and of thinking through language) that are personal yet tautly attuned to our reality as well as to the notions touched on in the “primary” verses: “vaccine, from cow, vacca, cowpox, smallpox; vacua/vacuum; vade mecum, go with me.” What a pleasure and enlightenment to roam the paths and thickets of these dense and cerebral abecedarians, following them down the page “as if we’re like vagabonds with a vascular / Bundle on a stick, beards of burnt cork, // Our heads full of rags and vol-au-vents, / Because we want to go somewhere where we // Haven’t been before or after.”
In these ghazals, Sheila Murphy foregrounds the evolution of the English language with bits of French, Latin, and Italian, alongside humorous play on words for a layered depth of both language and meaning. In addition, she evolves the language herself with words like “eventness” – an instantly understood and happy invention. Murphy returns to Posit with ghazals that retain the standard number of couplets and the idea of love that are the hallmarks of the genre, but the reader finds evidence of a love that is thoughtful and complicated. Although “Cantabile equals me when with you,” there is also the reality of “This moment of not wanting you / equals my not being wanted, losing myself.” In another poem, the passing of time lends its weight: “Autumn’s sadness resurrects feeling loss / School books fall to powder between my hands.” But still and happily present are the subtleties of new discovery: “I will sit with you and forget myself / to find a subtler self tucked in beneath,” as well as wry wit: “Oak leaves must not be left to dry on lawns / I would solo skate across that crispness.”
With line after declarative line of striking lucidity (reminiscent of a psychedelic Wallace Stevens), Jesse Nissim dares to dismantle the figures of everyday ordinariness and sense. The body, its sensations, thoughts, and perceptions are alive with the interpenetrations of the landscape as “a mind of trees streams voluminously” throughout the poems. Nissim offers a tantalizing surrealism, not of dreams and the unconscious, but rooted in the actuality of the body in the world. When the poet declares “I can’t split longing / from the water it moves in me, grieving the leaves’/ lost veins. Landscape is mind with persistent voice,” we feel ourselves transported on that moving water to strangely welcoming shores. Yet, with the poet, we take as our rule “keep moving.” Nissim’s work is that of a cartographer mapping a newly beheld reality by “plucking details from / what is, as if a sky could discard small portions/of itself aptly shaped for being lost.”
Gregory Rick’s tumultuous, dynamic, and explosive compositions reflect the stories in the artist’s life, offering striking portraits of people personal to the artist as well as historical and imagined personae. Many of these narratives are difficult: war, fear, and horror are portrayed; there are no happy flowers, but somehow one wants to look again and again. Because we do not know the details of the stories, we are drawn to interpret and re-interpret the context through Rick’s remarkable and unusual color choices, the balanced imbalance of his compositions, and his sometimes haunting, sometimes tender portraits of human beings (as well as significant and symbolic creatures) in impossible situations. Conjured by Rick’s powerful and energetic use of line, form, and color, these works, both narrative and abstract, burst with authentic feeling. Rick is truly, as he says, “painting on a shaky historical line cemented in humility and conviction,” with a passion that viewers can clearly recognize and meaningfully internalize.
Mikey Swanberg returns to Posit with tender, elegiac verses that grapple with the inevitability of loss. Everything in these chiseled, lyrical poems is ephemeral — not only love and its mementos, but the stable dailiness of life and even, in “mile marker,” life itself. “Iron Mountain” contrasts that eponymous secure-storage facility for the world’s most valuable information with the fragility of our actual lives, such as the photos of a former lover fed “into the narrow slit // of the confidential / recycling bin,” or the proximity of the “shaggy migrators” who “came and left / with the Halloween candy” like “Buy-one get-one Cormorants and Black Ducks. / An aisle of last season’s Herons.” As always, this poet’s vision is as gentle as it is courageous as he struggles to transcend the yearning “to make something / that preserved me” and accept, and even appreciate, “the short bruised / season we all get.” His epiphany may be achieved while picking wild berries rather than eating perfectly chilled plums, but it echoes Williams’s deep and graceful simplicity: “anyway I am / coming home to you // anyway the bag I brought / is getting full”.
There’s yearning and discontent in these poems by Martha Zweig, along with a dry and snappy pull-yourself-out-of-it attitude on the part of the narrator’s psyche. In “Ars Brevis,” a sparkling sculpture will only corrode to “fixed pits & crooked cramps just like your life.” In “Happy Return,” the narrator, coming home, describes herself: “Semiangelic, I descend / a measly sky through crisscross / layers of little untidy clouds.” Nothing in Zweig’s poems is quite perfect, quite tidy, or quite angelic. Even the sky is measly. And home is likely to be the same; the view is a “Long splashy drive, then all’s / gone fine back home. If I never left?” the narrator wryly asks, only to be answered, “Well I never” by “a chorus / of rural ladies exclaim[ing] / from their booth in my personality.” These poems take place in the memory, or even in the memory of a memory, where the minute details of where we were and what we were doing at the time — “Third jelly danish: home-sickening. / Sucking gooey fingers at age / forty-seven & counting” — are almost as important as the event remembered. The time passes, but we are captive to our memories, and the power they have of erasing years, if not feelings. “Do you love me still?” the narrator asks in “Hero,” ”You loved me once as if / I danced all night bravado in parachute silks.”
Thank you so much for reading, and please take care of one another.
Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash
