Tag Archives: Posit Journal

Editors’ Notes (Posit 41)

Posted on by

 

Welcome to Posit 41!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for supporting them.

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

Editors’ Notes (Posit 35)

Posted on by

 

Welcome to Posit 35!

It’s a new issue for a new year! This one is very special to us: marking not only Posit’s 10th anniversary, but our chance to welcome Barbara Tomash to our team. We have had the pleasure of working with Barbara before as a contributor – her brilliant poetry can be found in Posit 16, Posit 21, and Posit 31 — and we are honored and delighted for her to join us as a fellow editor.

And what a fantastic issue with which to celebrate! Characterized by both range and cohesion, this collection brings together artists many decades into their careers with others at the very beginning of their journeys, offering challenging work energized by biting social commentary alongside more contemplative poetry and painting, centered on the practice of observation and its restorative profundity. We hope you find the aesthetic conversation generated by their juxtaposition as satisfying and stimulating as we do.

Durell Carter’s poems bring linguistic music and warm-hearted grace to his own unique amalgam of morality tale, sermon, meditation, and blues. These poems reach for harmony, empathy, and stability in a world forever poised to “shift slightly to the left.” Although he feels at “home / anywhere something is at stake,” Carter’s narrators long to “envision the home of all your homes” and maintain “the strength . . . to carry one day to the next” even as they “can still smell the pain that isn’t [theirs].” In these poems, moral instruction comes from the more as well as less enlightened: from a grandma who “was the strongest person alive” to an entitled woman “throwing soul eaters / and verbal iodine / at the man reaching upwards / to God.” With admirable generosity, the narrator makes a point of empathizing with her by reminding himself of “whatever castle I had the audacity / to think was mine,” reminding us that we all need to “become resistant / to spiritual pneumonia.”

The light-hearted pop-culture iconography of Nancy Chunn’s phenomenal works is like sugar coating on chemotherapy, camouflaging as it conveys the challenging medicine our ailing society so direly needs. The scope and coherence of Chunn’s projects are as staggering as their prescience: the works from 1996 and 2001 excerpted here are distressingly apt. The painstaking nature of Chunn’s project is matched by its monumental scope: her series, “Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear” has 500 panels, while “Front Pages 1996” comprises 366 front pages from the New York Times that serve as physical and conceptual grounds for the artist’s graphic and verbal commentary on war, militarism, political corruption, gun violence, climate change, and more. Ultimately, Chunn’s humor sparks more terror than relief, leaving us with the uneasy feeling that the joke might be on us. Although Chicken Little might have been mistaken and her gullible followers fools, we would be fools not to respond to the alarm sounded by these deathly-serious works.

One can no more look away from Robert Feintuch’s paintings than from a miracle — or a shocking impropriety. In dialogue with Philip Guston and Samuel Beckett, Italian frescos and TV cartoons, Feintuch’s work unites and juxtaposes high and low, humor and dread, playfulness and gravitas. He may depict the ethereal pastel blue sky and glorious puffy white clouds of Renaissance paintings, but instead of Michelangelo’s heroically muscled divine Arm endowing Adam with life, Feintuch depicts one that is stick-like and dimpled, stretching down from on high like a rubber band to proffer us a fire bucket — or brandish a punitive cudgel. Instead of Adam’s human perfection, we must face our own embarrassingly exposed, inexorably aging, unglamorous and unglamorized physicality. Feintuch’s existential despair is leavened and sharpened by the witty bemusement of his visual and verbal puns, such as the scattering of tiny and shriveled mineral and anatomical “stones,” his pontificating Pontiff, or the mundane “line” being unglamorously “toed.” But Feintuch’s humor is humane as well as mordant, revealing the truth of our selves to ourselves with a wry, sorrowful, sympathetic grin.

Ed Go’s philosophical exploration of the meaning of words starts with “signifiers” but translates them and weaves a progressive structure of elements as varied and yet intriguing as a bower bird nest: history rewritten to a different timeline, imaginary literary and cultural myths, ideas about religion and the perspective of our own imaginations and memories. In “things that are not interesting and why and also things that are and why not,” Go begins by asking what are the questions that intrigue us, with surprising comparisons: “red rhinoceros is interesting not / because it is red red is not/interesting but because / rhinoceros like sea urchin is— / the ripe flowering fruit / apple pomegranate pear,” bringing these musings back to us and our singular and private imaginations: “the tree that grew in your backyard / whatever tree that is for me.” As the work progresses, witty and wild historical juxtapositions delight: what can we think about the possibility of “cool being birthed in the midst / of mccarthy & new england myths / i saw goody marilyn dancing naked / with the devil! / i saw ozzy osbourne live / in 83?” Go’s work amuses and provokes, but the observations at core remind us, with tenderness, of our humanity: “babies in cuddled bosoms breathing / also start in breath and blood / from tundra crust to overfarmed soil / to bleachers at your high school thing / where once with breath and tonguetips touching.”

Howard Good returns to Posit with five tales of a world terrifyingly out of balance. With restraint, compression, dark humor, and the voice of matter-of-fact reportage, he reveals tragically absurdist realities barely worse than our own. In these worlds, almost like in ours, “families brave oceans in paper boats,” “smoke from distant wildfires blots out the sky,” and “every street is a crime scene, every person both a suspect and a victim.” Worse yet, there, like here, “people [are] walking around … as if nothing terrible is happening” and “none of those responsible will be held liable” despite the crows crying, like this poet, “less as frantic warning and more as bitter recrimination or desolate testimony.”

Brian Henry’s spare and meaningful poems open a vast and quiet expanse to the reader, like standing on a hilltop and surveying a plain where the beauties of the landscape are almost visible but need the experience of a long view to be discerned. These poems, indeed, are so open that the reader can feel they are collaborating in the writing of them. The titles, too, are beautiful and far from explicatory. For instance, what might we find in “The Museum of Two Dimensions?” The inksplash denotes the silence between the line groupings; a necessary pause to explore, and sometimes point out what’s left unsaid: “Out of / an abundance of // *.” The riddling, aphoristic compression of these Koan-like poems is also wonderfully “open at all hours / and on all sides.”

To say John Howard’s poems are ekphrastic is to draw a stick figure of a symphony. The beauty of the imagery is only a part of the moving whole, portrayed first in a prose poem, whose series of unexpected questions begin, “If I said a sparrow was falling, would you look up or down?” and continue as an inquiry into death, culpability, and the evanescence of a life. In “Pyramide de crânes,” Howard responds to a still life of skulls by Paul Cezanne, seeing in these a continuing story, stretching through time. Howard directs us first to the resemblance of the skulls to “ the ancient masonry of the most holy / of trilogies: a mother & father with child,” / “rockpale when painted in ochre tones” then to the “dirt where the first great war dug itself in,” and “must now include the fields between each jaw & collarbone / absent ridges where no instruments can be placed, nor played, no music heard.” Although “we have worn these poems & paintings as robes, & as skin,” this familiarity, Howard reminds us, is, grimly, still part of our present and our future : “… there are always dead leaves to lament / always the wind shouldering so much dread for a future / in which there is no future, always the sounds to remind us / that wheeze & whisper as history, that little cough of bone grown / to an ocean-sized gullet of absence.”

With bespoke forms and sparkling language, Jill Jones’s poems remind us to, as E.M. Forster urged, “only connect.” Their wry tone and dire observations notwithstanding, these are in no small part love poems, addressed not only to an explicit or implicit beloved but to the chaotic rapture of being alive — despite our commercialized, technologically-mediated existence. The alienation of a mall-filled society in which “sirens line the road, plastics become / bedrock, streetview, the grand simulation” and we “loiter with powerpoint loyalty plans / bullet points with mercantile bang-bang” is contrasted with the organic pleasures of the natural world where “an almost-sweet & tangled smell lifts / from flowers, paths, the unknowable air” and “life is handsome, abundantly / strange . . . with every shining loaf / and complicated kiss.”

Burt Kimmelman’s poems celebrate the temporality of the material world to confront the mystery of the eternal. His adherence to formal restraints, such as the three, four, five, and six syllable lines that comprise each of these poems, instantiates his disciplined commitment to evoking “what was left unspoken” without letting the image stray from its concrete referents. His ekphrastic “Three Windows, Two Chairs” is typically faithful to its subject: a painting by Jessie Boswell which is all about people not portrayed within the frame. With deceptive simplicity and masterful grace, Kimmelman’s poem foregrounds human absence by carefully attending to and personifying its non-human presences, such as “a book / [which] lies open for any // breeze,” a tower which “paces the highest ridge,” and “windows [which] picture // the sea and sky as one.” All of these poems reveal the mysterious path by which attention to, and appreciation of “the waters of life, / our visible world” has the power to bring us closer to knowing the “unspoken” “absence” that “must become / of us all.”

In “Marginalia,” William Lessard’s darkly comical pandemic chronicle, the salience of the question, “do we have a plan B?” is demonstrated by the fragmented futility everywhere in evidence. In this Text + Image assemblage, paragraphs of complete, if not logically or narratively sequential sentences are interspersed with graphic panels whose gridded subdivisions call to mind the partitioned isolation of quarantine. Lessard’s monochromatic, self-enclosed cubicles resemble cells or cages in which even the quotidian monotony of “DRINK COFFEE DRINK COFFEE DRINK COFFEE” is walled off from ‘HUMAN RESOURCES” and “STAKEHOLDERS,” and the letters in “LOVE” are partitioned behind bars. Besides the coronavirus’s iconic spiked sphere, his dollar-sign motif suggests the overarching primacy of money — alongside death, brought to mind by somber blocks of solid black. In Lessard’s sardonic vision, we are “joyfully doomed” so long as “selfishness controls the means of production.” Although “now we are working together” on “another word to carry,” it is still “heavy with hatred at its center.” But perhaps there are glimmers of an alternative, such as “Melville in the breath & ripe / with seahorse in the evening.”

The mythical young women in Anna Meister’s poems retain their strength and exuberance in spite of the many calamities visited upon them, including disloyal followers and the Missouri River running dry. Meister’s wordplay is reminiscent of Stein: “give her citrus, citrus feels like / flying. She uses the rinds for / smiles— (there are no / wastelands here),” as are her unexpected turns: “Footstools they chant. // Stairs, they reply,” as well as touches of rhythm and song: “O Love, O Love, O Sweet O Love.” This young poet’s craft and originality are remarkable. In “Dustbowl Dreaming,” “invisible fences split into two-by-five / squares separate us only holding on / by the electricity between our collars.” Even though “we’re all in boxes again and i’m / yelling echo-location, i’m down in the / well! water’s at my ankles and my wrists / are blistered,” the reader can enjoy both the humor and the determination of personas making their way against the odds: “we are the generation of seaweed— / we maintain our shape when plucked for / flower bouquets.”

In her “Field Notes,” the emotional content of Carolyn Oliver’s observed nature that “resents root disturbance, a seed packet warns. In the garden bed where sorrel helped itself, a squirrel skull surfaces, with pinholes for missing teeth” contrasts with the object materiality of cigarette packs, silver trucks in the moonlight, and “headlights (that) smolder inside glassine envelopes.” Oliver notes the inevitable and ubiquitous intertwining of the two: “triumphant maple expels a rusted staple slowly, through eye-level moss and lichen.” The ostensibly journalistic title of this series belies the living breathingness with which she endows nature, but Oliver’s skill is such that we don’t see it. Rather, it feels to the reader “as if we see what the cold allows us to see. As if we are inside the snow. As if we are the cold.” Contrary to actual field notes, people make an oblique but necessary appearance, and a story takes shape in a few lines: “Abiding, a girl with green hair stands against a fresh gale.” “What is living? he asks at bedtime. (Only ever at bedtime.) What does this all mean? I feel that something is missing in my life.” But above all, Oliver’s images “follow a forked-tongue swallow-tail to a gold corner above the door to the cerulean house” and observances “like flexing knuckles, mornings straighten or crook back” richly reward the reader in a way that simple field notes can never do.

In “Six Poems from T O D A Y,” Stephen Ratcliffe’s project of daily poems might be called an observance in both the visual and ritual sense. The form, four daily sections of two lines each, is both a visual record taken from a single vantage point, and a work that deviates according to author’s choice. Like a ghazal, some lines and phrases change places. And as in any view, there are details that remain the same and others that change: the weather, the birds. Because of the form and the repetition, Ratcliffe’s “grey whiteness of fog,” “yellow and blue bed,” and “green leaves” take on a visual rhythm that almost transmutes the poems into paintings. The repetition of the same view is both hypnotic and compelling. Obviously, small changes are one contrast that makes this happen: “2 quails landing next to seeds on table below fence” becoming “4 pelicans flapping across horizon towards point.” But into this continuous painting (which could be called film, although it feels more fantastical) Ratcliffe adds statements/instructions that are impossible, ephemeral, and strangely attractive: “following cypress as subject in landscape translate sky color to language of long thin lines left blank;” “describe a certain grey of something or other visual element two straight lines equal or unequal length.” At the same time personal, locational, and universal, Ratcliffe puts into words the experience of time passing in a set of prayers in praise of the joining of the natural world and the human spirit.

Pablo Saborío’s poems sing with music and meaning, burning with “the fire / that only a human mouth // can ignite into language.” With stunning economy, his mellifluous words create worlds as intriguingly strange as they are resonantly familiar. Each of these poems is like a “house [that] hosts / an ecosystem of desires.” These poems of heart, hope, and subtle ideation expect the reader to be “writing / this by reading this” even as we embrace “uncertainty / as a tangible thing: // more actual than the mist / that blurs the horizon / after your thoughts arise.”

With nimble humor and a devastatingly sharp point, Jerome Sala skewers the vapidity of contemporary capitalist culture. The flattering mists of memory have no place in these wickedly funny poems, which gleefully dash any illusions we might hope to cherish for the superiority of some imagined alternative to the vulgar venality of “game show proletarians.” Neither one’s own “ethnic roots;” a French variation of Family Feud; the contemporary “art house crowd;” or last century’s asymmetrically-clad bohemians “heckling Diaghilev’s “decadent” Cleopatra” show any interest in rising above the lure of superheroes or “a brand new red car” to embrace aesthetic challenge. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose comes to mind as one savors these trenchant verses.

John Walker’s use of color, pattern and motif straddles the border between abstraction, symbology, and representation, referencing the landscape of coastal Maine as he carries on a dialogue with Matisse, Constable, and Australian Aboriginal bark painting. With the uncanny suggestiveness of asemic writing, his totemic canvases are like missives, bearing coherent if inexplicit messages to the viewer’s subconscious. A recurring fluid, rising dual shape brings to mind water currents as well as parted hair, wings (of bird or angel), and even Cezanne’s Montaigne Ste.-Victoire. Other recurring shapes suggest buoys, traps, shells, and pendant weights. Walker’s intense palette of cobalt and other blues, grounded and lined by cream, white, and black, evokes the awesome volatility of the sea and its dominion over nautical working life – not only fishing but painting. This is masterful work that reminds us of painting’s continuing potential for aesthetic pleasure at its most profound.

Thank you for reading!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editors’ Notes (Posit 34)

Posted on by

 

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

Editor’s Notes (Posit 33)

Posted on by

 

Hello, and welcome to the Spring, 2023 issue of Posit! In keeping with the season, this issue is alive with generative intensity. The work collected here manages, like alchemy, “to mix / transformation into transformation” until “from lead: gold’s blood // pulses” and “sequence becomes epiphany” (Elizabeth Robinson, “The Voynich Manuscript”). These accomplished and provocative pieces derive their energy from the determination to transform surprise into recognition, mystery into insight, and suffering into resolve. It is a pleasure and an honor to present innovative literature and art that can engage the pain and puzzlement of our lives with such grace and depth.

Carrie Bennett’s powerful poems move from descriptions of familiar objects and daily tasks to the deep secrets of our fears, our histories, and their embedment in our bodies. We “want words to grow into something / green with leaves and it is never so easy / for the wound to close. / When I say rain is it the sound / of a chainsaw or how a father can drink / until his eyes are lost in his face?” But, as painful as it is to be alive when “[e]ach house is encased in its own danger,” there is always more to uncover: “[a]ny moment can be a pointed flashlight.” A poem considering the difference between poetry generated by men and women ends up comparing poetry to life and exposing the gap: “my body isn’t a leaf or a thought though it did make another body,” one that “is full of milk and shit and spit-up.” Reality may be “nothing like an idea of something else,” but we need poetry like this to bring the idea to life.

Zoe Darsee’s intricate poetry builds and dismantles structures in our lives, both actual and emotional. The structure of the poems themselves models the emotional experience, beginning as a bleak observation, and building to a spiritual plane, as if the object has ignited the emotion. In “House of Dandelion,” the description of a house starts with the impossibility of description: the house is gone. But it’s not just the house, lies and promises are at stake: “To promise described house, let it quiver in mouth like frame of word. // If I have ever once lied, describe promised house I said to you.” As the poem progresses, the narrator describes another impossibility, a place where they are “trapped, in which I describe myself with the vocabulary of a construction site.” The end of the poem finally names the problem: “To describe said house is to trap a lie in four or more walls.” Another poem, slyly titled “This is not about you, love, or your bride,” contains a poem within a poem, and begins with actual disaster: “There’s a house on fire in the avenue.” Loss, of place, love, and life take the breath away, but the narrator reads the mind of the lover: “You love the tree because it breathes opposite air. You think, the tree is all that is left of me. . . // There’s truth and then there’s tree.”

Jasper Glen’s poems apply a unique and muscular lyricism to grapple with the ‘watershed’ between artifice and nature, whether embodied by poetry as opposed to “its / Absence, all earth and forgettable body,” or a florist’s attempt to “replicate an outcrop reaching natural capability” with a “fine mirage” as opposed to the “[i]intoxicating green complex” of a “[v]eridical / coniferous / rainforest.” Cartesian doubt (“If not at the skin does speculation end / Somewhere?”) and psychic pain (“But if the body is practice, / Do I love this place?”) lend breadth as well as depth to Glen’s quest to “[h]ave an open focus,” “[f]orget the body,” and “spar in a dark field” for poetry.

Kylie Hough returns to Posit with three prose poems about the dark side of conventionality and the falsity with which it represents itself with “[a] kiss, a hug, a dozen lies swallowed.” In these satirical, bracingly painful poems, the “monotony rampant in the suburbs” is contrasted with the “Disney endings” and “castles made from yellow bricks” that might make “high school sweethearts” expect “all we hoped for. Except it’s not.” Instead, the narrator entrapped by these false narratives is “an unrealised nobody moulded from midnight,” for whom “freedom looks like walking fully clothed into salted black water.” The angst at the heart of these pieces insures that Hough’s prose is “not akin to some field trip to the zoo. No, this is warfare. This is sculpting a tin man with gloved hands.” Her penetrating wit and pitch-perfect pacing not only confer meaning, but offer the possibility of a better alternative to the wasteland they confront.

In keeping with Jane Kent’s practice of layering her compositions from a foundation of what she calls “bland forms” in order to “uncover the oddness,” the prints featured in this issue take mirrors, frames, and windows as points of departure from which to explore the nature of reflection. These works cast light on the notion of “reflection” in multiple senses: not only the self-consideration of any self/viewer, or the self-reflectivity of the artist contemplating her own practice and its constituent elements like light, color, and the nature of the frame, but the contemplative thought inspired by these bold, pared-down, almost sculptural illuminations of the liminal zone between representation and abstraction. Just as mirroring entails alteration and reversal, these works invite the viewer to reverse the artist’s exploratory process, probing the deceptive simplicity of their graphic power to unpeel their layers of implication and insight. Even Kent’s transformation of reflected light into bands of solid, almost metallic-seeming color is a comment upon the transformative nature of the act of looking – a truth whose relevance extends from the human psyche to the building blocks of matter itself.

Returning to Posit with works of deceptive Dickinsonian simplicity, Kevin McLellan displays wit and pathos simultaneously in these new poems. Honest about himself, that to be “tired of /my own / company / also means / a deficit,” and that he might “kick-in / my defenses /so i don’t / hear / the good / explanation,” McLellan is no less blunt about his relationship with language: “more / truth / in hyphens / in / emphases: /please / let them / be.” There’s an intrinsic deepening of each observation, as cryptic as they may be. The very sparsity of language in these one- and two-word lines integrates silence, as well as one of their preoccupations, solitude, into their fabric. McLellan’s wry takes on the hard, sad things we discover/remember about others, and all too often, about ourselves, resonate. “[N]ot the same/people—were we?” “so now / the climb / must happen / again.”

David James Miller’s “Burn Accord” flows with tidal rhythms and the rhythms of breathing, combining elements of sea, sky and fire into a wondrous if “indistinct” whole. But what is indistinct? Images of light and dark in a controlled burn have the import of a vision. The elements exchange and re-exchange to become “an evening psalmic / accord a listening light” and remind us how even “an indistinct sign night / can articulate(s) in listening.” In a recurring lyrical field of language, Miller’s poem moves “as sea become grasses an un / knowing breath calls into / manifest shadows mnemic.” It’s as if we are standing on a vast hill in the night, listening, watching, both remembering earth’s history and experiencing it as “a horizon evening empties / of listening” and “become(s) skies.”

Pat Nolan’s poetry juggles the Gorgiasian conviction that “nothing exists” with what “Heraclitus reminds:” that “in the end all I can do is point / at the way things are.” Ranging in their inquiry from the nature and purpose of poetry itself (including “the poetry memo of poetry // “abbreviate” ) to the delicate everyday glory of “the steady glazing rain’s / constant splash murmur[ing] at the eaves” or the “setting sun’s rich / light buttering / an upturned face,” to the “fine white grains of information” that make up everything in a universe in which “information is physical” and the physical is information, Nolan’s “surprising / tangents and keen insights” offer “a travel in time” narrated by a dedicated, supremely thoughtful observer searching for meaning in the “incipient enigma” of existence.

Elizabeth Robinson returns to Posit with a transformative ‘translation’ of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, accompanied by original illustrations of its notorious asemic “script that will bear no translation.” These haunting verses make us believe in a magical book of origin written by “[w]e women with our tiny, upright nipples” that both explains the document’s imagined content and interweaves it with images of the manuscript as a made thing, yet one that we inhabit. Thus, after a history of “page after page of bloodletting and vowels” in a “[s]equence wandering without shoes, then without feet / To renege on delirium,” we find that “s]orcery says / what we shall never understand can, at least / be beautiful.” But the authors of this quasi-religious history/tale (which is very like the structure of the earliest histories in English) maintain that “[s]urely no evil can attend when magic / cannot be attributed to any source / that evil is only a salutation, a spell / in preparation” — a miracle most devoutly to be wished for our world as well as for this delightfully depicted one.

Jeanne Silverthorne’s sculpture concretizes her engagement with the impenetrable mystery at the core of the physical world, both animate and inanimate, organic and synthetic — dichotomies which are challenged and undermined by this provocative and playful work. With wry humor and deadly seriousness, Silverthorne’s sculptures devise concrete and tactile expression of the abstract, the subconscious, and the ineffable. Her spare, almost minimalistic depictions of humble, quotidian subjects like tennis shoes and wood planks, children’s books and bubble wrap, office chairs and dollies, plumb the depths of the psyche and the existential questions at the heart of mortality. For instance, Silverthorne reconstructs that almost trivializing icon of the unknown, the question mark, making it literally weighty and impossible to ignore, despite our laughable attempts to subdue it beneath layers of bubble wrap, or suspended from a meat hook. Challenging the viewer to contemplate the fleeting nature of the physical and the murky depths of the psyche (that is, to confront the known-unknown), Silverthorne, in the artist’s own description of Louise Bourgeois, “wants to rip off the lid of latency under which art boils and steams,” whose “desublimation, an art of personal risk, offers raw power as a way out of the present deadlocked, postformal situation,” using “drama or theatricality,” “viscerality,” and “startling juxtaposition” to disturbing and profound effect.

Grace Smith’s writing captures the tragicomedy of the human condition with both empathy and irony, mining the liminal zone in which sorrow and humor, disappointment and appreciation mingle. Smith’s language is as surprising in its formulations and juxtapositions as it is spare and direct, leaving much of the crux of the matter to emerge from the unspoken: that reality is “Sadder and Deeper” for all of us struggling to reconcile what we find and lose with what we hope for, the “new / Lives” planned while drinking “a 5 PM can in the shower.” The deep sadness in these works is warmed by admiration for the heart and grace of those with the courage to keep trying, like the people who “have a bright pail of blood balanced on / the air above them, always about to topple . . . [who] laugh so easily,” or the homeowner able to admire the family home being taken by the city, whose “beautiful eyes . . . were gold like fall and trying.”

Jeneva Burroughs Stone’s advocacy and personal experience with disability informs, but does not limit, the scope and depth of her poetry. The poems featured in this issue grapple with the nature of mortality and the intense drive for knowledge. “Rapture” reacts to a child’s photograph to mourn the fragility of life, in which “[b]reath, a fabric washed too many times, wears thin” and “[e]verything evaporates.” “MRI” evokes the ability of medical science to concretize the “imagistic jazz” and “dark areas, danger zones” of a son’s brain condition which the mother already knows all too well: “[m]y anticipation . . . itself a form of knowledge.” And “Numinous” wrestles with the relationship between divinity and scientific truth, the “clean clear talk of mathematics” and the “body of eternity encoded like a closed door. I, too, want to knock and come in.”

David Storey creates self-contained worlds that stand apart from what we know, or think we know, of our own exteriorities and interiorities, even as they echo with its resonances. This work makes a persuasive case for the abandonment of common distinctions between the abstract and the representational, the observed and the imagined, the mechanical and the biomorphic, the animal and the human. Semi-abstract forms weave in and out of these paintings; design tropes that are as simple as they are irreducible to any one referent, be they scissors, surgical clamps, or eyeglasses (“Regulator”); fish or visors (“Big Sunset”); dragonfly wings or leaves (“Revolver”); fingers or tentacles (“Aquapiper”). These works offer a mind-opening sense of possibility: post-reality worlds in which physical and perceptual boundaries are transcended, making new forms of flowering — and mutuality — possible. Storey’s sharply delineated forms in bold, complementary, primary colors depict an energetic coexistence of opposites. Their complex layering creates the impression of multiple two-dimensional planes clamoring for the foreground. But the energy of their competition suggests an effusion of exuberance rather than aggression. The viewer is tempted, like Jack in the fairytale, to climb the “Ladder” of Storey’s proto-beanstalks and explore these alternative worlds, to encounter his wondrous beings firsthand, and perhaps even learn a thing or two about how to collectively thrive.

In Myles Taylor’s beautifully observed poems, different personae address our complicity in navigating the complexity of modern life: the skill and grace of the labor we take for granted, the forced secrecy of some lives, and the way we try to subsume sorrow in getting and spending. In “Unskilled Labor,” we are asked to notice how “the house painter’s pants /match every few buildings he passes, as if the city / were trying to copy them.” We observe behind the scenes at a restaurant, where “[i]t looks nothing short of telepathy, the slide / through narrow spaces like wrong sides of magnets” by “unskilled” laborers who also “has(have) a paper / to write, who’s playing a show later, who was up / until 4 am at their other job.” With justifiable pride, the narrator declares: “I only dream of labor if I can make it beautiful, / so I slice every scallion like a gift-wrap ribbon,” challenging the privilege and emptiness of consumerism: “What do you do? You take. / And you hold what you take. What a skill, / being handed things.” “Ode to the Mirror” exposes the pain of having to hide: “I take selfies in bathrooms / I could die in and keep doing / my makeup on the train. I have to limit my futures / based on where the corners/are darkest. / No one can see me because no one is looking. / But you.” And in a reminder of the line between wanting and having, the Patron Saint of Retail mourns: “the people flock to me / like a possession / could hold their grief for them.”

Nam Tran has gleaned old biographies and science books to make found poems that mirror the human psyche. The yellowed pages and the fonts themselves indicate the age of his source materials, as well as the language and syntax; but Tran has mined these works to match contemporary thought. These Zen-like aphoristic observations of “the restless waters of babble” bring to mind John Cage’s brilliant musical experiments with listening and attention. In “Primal,” selections from a chapter on How Animals Develop cleverly take the “im” in “animals” to turn the direction from a so-called objective view of other species to something very personal: “I’m an animal constantly on the move, running, breathing, catching food, eating it and so on.” And in “Child Memories,” we find an inspired conundrum about the nature of both childhood and courage: “the importance of heroism was hand delivered neatly to me in a half-whisper.”

Thank you so much for being here!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann