Welcome to Posit 40!
The literary and visual art in this issue shines a rich variety of “lamps of truth” (Brenda Coultas, “Untitled I”) on these dark and dangerous times. These works share the courage and ambition to tackle the deepest, most fundamental quandaries of “this glittery self-contained life” (Mia Malhotra, “Wave Organ II”) in which “it takes a lifetime to be born” (Ma Yongbo, “Sleeping on the Street”). Time, death, love, and loss loom large in this issue, set against a background in which “somewhere, lovers wait[] for bombs to explode in their rooms” (Emily Kingery, “Home Front”) while “the man in the blue suit pays his own audience in luxury flights, flattery, and fast-tracked passage through loopholes paved with false intentions, his wheezing laugh lingering long after the last plant is plucked and the last polar bear blasted through its hot skull” (Oz Hardwick, “Hustings in the Age of Uncertainty”). “Saying anything and everything” about how “we fall upon the thorns of life, we / bleed” (Joseph Lease, “Wake”), the literary and visual art gathered here manages to find transcendence — assuring us, in various and stunning ways, that despite everything, “the light keeps coming over the mountain” (Bryan Price, “Light Coming Over the Mountain”).
In Marine Bellen’s poems featured here, language itself is set free to dream. Spectacularly in tune with language as a natural force, Bellen allows words to flow idiosyncratically into form and meaning as water creates its own stream bed. In “Petrifying Jack Things,” we are invited to wade into the dream of a single word, “Our goose flesh bumps into Night’s knife, the heat of Night, the seat in Night’s sleigh. Shredded Wheat Night, watery milk we wade in to travel though Night and the Milky Way.” In the sonically exciting “Mountain,” the “never static mountain” does just about all and everything to remake the world “as first echoes of walking mountain unmoors the morning.” Both the actual mountain in the landscape, “mountain as earth’s primal tree,” and the sound net Bellen magically weaves of the word mountain “bellow[s] into a hallowed abyss of emptiness.” Bellen’s take on a family narrative, “The Older One Becomes, the More Out of Order Time Comes to Be,” sidesteps storytelling’s so-called realism to revel in its intrinsic surreality as we follow the poet’s sonic breadcrumb trails until “The family says it has run out of lines, the narrative thread / snipped. The family says it doesn’t know what happens next. They know // what will happen but cannot say without lines, and then the apparition of father manifests at the foot of mother’s bed.”
The focused attention of these chiseled lyrics by Brenda Coultas is energized by their understated discipline. These superbly lean, densely packed poems can be read as ars poeticas, mining the resonance embedded in fragments of ordinary life, such as holiday stockings sniffed by old dogs, and “clouds basketballs traffic cones cows,” to contemplate the utility and imperatives of poetry. Through stanzas like “ornaments / glistening / in the light,” these oracular poems highlight the provocative distinction between truth and reason. What’s more, they enact what they exhort: their “lamps of truth” “let the sky have it” even as they “pull away from reason.” As graceful and sober as the Dutch masters’ Vanitas paintings they invoke, these poems both rue and honor the fragile ephemerality of life and art, akin to the “silken parachute” of “the seed’s soft down.”
We’re not surprised when a sonnet takes the famous “turn” we all learned about in school, but we are riveted to the page when John Gallaher’s vastly pleasurable sonnets start out turning and never stop. Gallaher has fashioned double sonnets that are dizzy with turns, all made, one after the other, with odd, lovely, and humorous conviction. Instead of expanding upon lines of amazing, yet logical-seeming premises, such as “Life, like any fancy dinner, started with soup,” we are given a new idea, contradiction, or unrelated image in the following lines. “Forgive me for jumping around,” says the poet, and we do. Directly after the poem opens with life’s soupy origin story come the lines “And then an inflatable backyard night club/and terracotta army.” In another poem Gallaher proposes, “You’re a goldfish watching a feather. Maybe it’s ash. / You have a concept of ground and sea coming to a point.” Yet, in these sonnets Gallaher refuses to follow landscape’s prerogative and come to a fixed point. If you like your sonnets with rhymes, they are here, too, but you may have to look for them. As Gallaher says, “What gets you here won’t get you there, /unless it does, as things are both complicated/and redundant.”
With sharp and insightful wit, Oz Hardwick uncovers the present of our world deep in the ruins of ancient and recent history. Both warning and reminding us what our failings may lead to, Hardwick captures the shallowness of our political life: its banality, dishonesty, and even danger, as the mindless followers of future generations march on: “A man in a blue suit speaks in a whisper but carries a megaphone, tunes his preparatory breaths to the pitch of air raid sirens” as he “summon(s) the two-faced faithful to free lunches.” In the face of our present dangers, the poet cautions, “we are falling . . . into the machinery like nameless sweatshop drones.” Not only are we falling into the machinery, but the machinations as well; we think we are using the technology, but we are the ones being used. Our knowledge is incomplete (“two wings don’t make a plane”), and our labor serves only to build mansions that won’t last as we “walk with backs bent through a stately pile falling down.” In an imagined scientific study of snails, Hardwick wittily leaves open the question of whether our endeavors will yield any valuable insight into our future: “We send out scouts in the cool of morning to scour chewed stalks for our new Rosetta stone. . . . We know in our bones that this is important, but we don’t quite yet know why.”
Dennis Hinrichsen’s poignant new poems stitch together and unify the damage and suffering afflicting our world on every scale: from fireflies to synaptic sparks, clouds to turbines, rain to fallout, Whitman’s “thin red jellies” to chemotherapy, and tumors to radioactive waste. With these verses, he constructs a bleak and exquisite multi-part elegy for human and planetary destruction. Courageously and thoughtfully exploring what dementia has taken from a barely recognizable father and his son, up to and including either’s chance to grieve, and what our absorption in our present needs has taken from our earth and bodies, these poems confront the “collateral damage :: feelings” of the wreckage inflicted by our “lifestyle loaded to the edges // even now / with future.” In a climax of despair and transcendence, the narrator even voices the desire to lose himself in the anonymous fabric of the universe: “to ride the overwhelm / and let // quantum purring ingest / this better // Eucharist :: body / and blood // of me.”
In David Hornung’s loose but constructed compositions, akin in some respects to Paul Klee’s whimsical works, playfulness and a certain logic combine with subtle and striking colors. Hornung’s colors, indeed, have the nuance of dreams, where we know what we are seeing is unworldly: a mauve bird-shape, a blue-green reminiscent of darkness, but no darkness has that shade. The elements in the paintings partake of the same sensibility: the geometries and the subtly-edged patches of color, the shapes that almost resemble identifiable objects, as well as the shapes that definitely don’t. Hornung’s process is also intuitive, but with purpose. The artist says that he has to kill the “lovely thing so the unexpected can come into view.” The charm of the work is in that challenge; each stroke, area, or color is unexpected, and no two works are recognizably painted in the same style, although the unity of the work is like a poem spoken in another language, alive and transporting, if not completely understood.
The high-key colors and swirling forms animating Sharon Horvath’s extraordinary collages contribute to their dynamic complexity. Psychedelic and hyperreal, her vertiginous assemblages are studded with primal, collectively remembered iconography that integrates the real and the imagined, the physical and the psychological. Each opulent composition is not only a visual feast but a psychological treasure map, populated with an abundance of resonant references: fish bones and antlers, totems and mandalas, feathers and fronds, light rays and flames, amoebas and nuclei, and especially planets and galaxies, with the infinite mysteries they represent. Glowing and jewel-like, pulsing with energy and movement, these lush cornucopias of grand and tiny marvels teem with sparkling, sparking bits of light and energy. Horvath’s is a heartening, optimistic vision of a reality — an amalgam of our physical and psychic landscapes — that is overflowing with sensory delights, if only we can open our minds to perceive them.
Emily Kingery conjures the real nature of home and family, considering the subtle interplay of people and place against a larger social context. In “Homefront,” Kingery’s powerful imagery hints at fissures and ruptures at a wedding of friends. There is violence in the wings as well as beyond the borders: “God bless, our relatives crooned through the cake. They drove their forks like tanks through the roses,” as “we sucked in champagne like helium, and somewhere, lovers waited for bombs to explode in their rooms.” Indeed, Kingery’s double-sided impressions of domestic life begin early: “I was a daughter fond of families, unbodied. I would dunk my hands in paint and smear the legs and arms right from the heads. No stomachs, lungs – just heads.” In “The Shelly Disciples,” girlhood memories alternate with glimpses into another kind of freedom. “I stood at the arm of my grandfather’s lawn chair. . . . I breathed in beer, prettiness; I studied the float of ash in a half-drunk lemonade.” In the narrator’s observations, we see the flicker of creation in the disciples’ own club, created for survival. We feel a kinship with their secrets and their unbinding, even when it is infused with violence: “The Shelley disciples speak, unbound. We brutalize. Our pens turn blades in the knife games they play in dive-bar light.” In “A Made Place, That is Mine,” Kingery again makes the connection between freedom and violence as it extends even to the closest personal relationships, and makes clear the aching role love often plays in both: “For years, your threaded bird-heads have hung starry in the hall. At night, I run a finger in my mind across their backs. I make for them a thicket, and beyond that place, a field. It is featureless as an egg. I raise a shovel to it and break.”
Joseph Lease’s “Wake” takes on the varied meanings of its title: a wake for the dead, a desired reunion with the loved one, the longing to follow in their wake, and waking to a new reality when we realize that person is gone for good. The poem shifts between speakers in both the remembered words of the dead and the responses of the survivor, urgent to be understood: “daydreams in hand,” although “there’s less now, just, there are . . . fewer useable minutes.” The artifacts and memories left behind shimmer with meaning: “he just doubled down and tripled / down on knowing the names of flowers / he seemed to come out of nowhere / filling the page with light, the page / as slab of light.” The poet asks bedrock questions, like “how can / you leave me, how could you die,” before turning to comforting the dead: “read this and imagine me: in Berkeley / in Chicago, drinking tea, eating apples / walking slowly in the blustery day, the / day . . . full of talking animals.” In “Buried Life,” Lease continues the theme of death, but on an existential scale, with the questions that come to us in the face of danger or other moments of fear and despair, when “(we’re / waiting to / die (we’re / waiting to / pray (God / the rabbit / afraid.” How easily it can all disappear: our flimsy buildings, the forests full of trees and animals. The poet asks the questions whose answers we are afraid to confront as the sensations of present and future meld: “(are / we / extinct? / (colors burn / like garbage / on fire,” while the spacing in the poem brilliantly evokes the fragmentations of mind, and perhaps the rush and flash of fire at the world’s end.
In Ma Yongbo’s lyrical, melancholy English-language poems, modernity and tradition seamlessly coexist. Although situated in the modern world, these poems’ reliance on traditional imagery and symbolism reveals the relevance of historical culture to the timeless philosophical concerns these poems address: matters no less weighty than change, time, and death. Like the placid surface of a lake, the ostensibly simple events populating Ma’s verses cover depths of submerged resonance. “Night Stay by Gongchen Bridge” considers events on a canal in imagery both ancient (dowries, lanterns, poetry scrolls, and swords) and modern (white plastic boxes), making the case for the wisdom of acceptance in the face of the inexorable passage of time: “Don’t regret, just turn off the lights, / this is your night, this is the world’s way.” Acceptance is an aspiration in the other two poems as well. Although “it takes a lifetime to be born,” and we may dread being “engulfed by endless darkness,” Ma’s poems reveal the beauty of that eradication. In lyrical verses, the snow, like death itself, can ease life’s tension by erasing the self, transforming us “beyond the ancient struggle between being and nothingness” until we are “relaxed and nameless.”
Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s poems featured here are remarkable for their intimacy. The reader is drawn close not by way of personal revelation, but by an openness to possibility and suggestion, to uncertainty and imaginative collaboration. Malhotra’s syntax in “If With You” is of anaphora and incompletion, of thought being interrupted before it is fully expressed — “If we made our way past lichens & bearded moss;” “If I followed you to where the trees thin;” “If I lay myself among the bracken fern.” When the concluding “then clause” never arrives, we recognize a modality of wonder — “if we pause to listen — sound poured.” The radical openness of Malhotra’s lyricism is expressed formally in “Wave Organ II” and “V.” Here the initial blocks of text reopen into fragmentary, impressionist collage. We join the poet in the middle of an ongoing speculation of what “might” be, but which, despite vivid description, ultimately resides in the tender realm of imaginative proposal — “she might feel her own frequency slow to a steady whoosh & the little one sensing this shift / might draw nearer & they might find themselves entering into phase all around them.”
A sense of wonder is both elicited and expressed by the ethereal beauty of Shari Mendelson’s delicate, glowing sculptures crafted from discarded plastic bottles. Mendelson has spoken of her admiration for the craftsmanship of her artist forbears, and her own virtuosity makes her a worthy heir. The reverence of these delicately beautiful works recalls not only their ancient devotional inspirations but art’s stunning capacity to fashion sublimity from scraps. Mendelson’s re-imagined votive sculptures are also boundary-defying, bridging the gaps between cultures and faiths, eras and species, through their representations of animal-human as well as animal-vessel hybrids, and even a reimagined, literal “lamb of god” in the arms of a human-ewe Madonna. By painstakingly using detritus to reference ancient artifacts that have managed to outlive the civilizations that created them, Mendelson comments upon our apparent indifference to our own future. These works push back against a culture of disposability that is part and parcel of our insatiable appetite for the new, and which increasingly threatens our own survival.
At their tender, plain-spoken core, these new poems by Stephen Paul Miller are devotional. Imbued with his customary wry but gentle optimism, the open-hearted candor of their wide-ranging appreciation is part and parcel of the radical/ecstatic acceptance they model. Most if not all of these poems are anchored by the transcendent nature of the moments they capture: as the walls of paradise are lifted by the arrival of poet and friend David Shapiro; as, in a vision, the narrator’s deceased “Angel Boss” mother orders him “around your [god’s] / sonnet factory;” as the speaker is transformed “heart in hand over a new aura” (and new era) by holding the “Living Force Field” of his beloved’s hand; and as the speaker becomes one with everything and time itself recedes: “when I / become the cliff I hover over / and time goes out with the /tide.” The candor and open-heartedness of Miller’s ecstasy underscores the depth of its conviction. These are love poems in the most universal sense, whose breadth of affection is as irresistible as it is restorative.
Finely attuned to the strobing presences of light and darkness in our lives, Bryan Price’s poems are searing and beautiful depictions of human vulnerability and violence amid nature’s troubled yet inspired and inspiring persistence. Images of light and dark seesaw ecstatically through these poems accreting to a spare, mythological intensity — “and when/he gave us his teeth we sharpened them on / a landmine the shape and color of a new moon.” Price’s light and dark world is pierced by the poet’s recognition of the limits of art-marking and of our desire for transcendence — “one cannot wear black theoretical tightrope-walker’s shoes and just walk into the distance between hazel and hazelnut” — but also by a sustaining, flickering hope because “a lilac a little finger a grain of sand / dust into dust but the light / keeps coming over the mountain.”
Gary Sloboda’s city is a gift of transcription, perfectly depicted images translated into the transcendental. In this poet’s view, our lives are both fragile and decorative; we seem almost another species. we live in the shadow of “tall buildings’ windows once dazed by the river. . . . of pressed wood and carpenter’s glue. glitter paint job in the moonlight.” We’re imperfect: “we stumble with our bags. as the last days’ dark melodies unwind from passing cars. in the salt pinch of the waves that corrodes the metal railings. along the walls of rock where the ocean begins. and goes on forever,” unlike our impermanence. But how human we are, how alive and how aware: “hollering on the street like it’s the end of the world. and on the walkway of the bridge. how the form of our breath ascended. like the ghosts of pigeons. floating through the city. and the stars fetchingly arranged.” This hollering, the ascending form of our breath, blossoms into a kind of freedom, an exhilaration, and possibly a deep empathy with the stars. Or maybe, we’re irrevocably earthbound, interpreting our lives as best we can, “our belongings piled everywhere. as if we’re about to or will never leave.”
We’re immensely grateful for your time and attention. Please take care of each another.
Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash
