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
