Sunday, June 16, 2019
Sunday, May 5, 2019
HAIG CHAHINIAN reviews celebrated American writing professor and memoirist Susan Shapiro's new book, "The Byline Bible"
Book Review by HAIG CHAHINIAN
The Byline Bible reads like taking Shapiro’s class.
For twenty-five years Susan Shapiro has been teaching students how to write soulful and successful essays, opinion and humor pieces, and book reviews. Her students at the New School, New York University, Temple, and Harvard have been published in international newspapers, magazines and literary journals. Using her “Instant Gratification Takes Too Long” method, they aim to “write and publish a great piece by the end of class.” More than 25,000 have followed her advice, landing work everywhere from The New Yorker to The Nation to The Sun.
Not only does Shapiro develop her students’ ear for writing lyrically, she helps them create work publishable in the marketplace. In the last decade, her protégés have authored 150 books. Zack McDermott’s acclaimed Little Brown memoir Gorilla and The Bird—in which Shapiro makes a cameo as an inspirational writing teacher—was optioned for a television mini-series. Aspen Matis dedicated her HarperCollins memoir Girl in the Woods to her teacher. Several—including Cat Marnell’s addiction chronicle How to Murder Your Life and Renee Watson’s novel Piecing Me Together—have landed on bestseller lists. One former pupil has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Along with being an award-winning teacher and mentor, Shapiro is a bestselling author. In her thirteenth title, The Byline Bible, she’s gathered all her wisdom in a poetic, inspiring guide that teaches the reader how to write and publish creative non-fiction pieces.
Full disclosure: Seven years ago when I told a friend I wanted someday to get my writing published, he suggested I take Shapiro’s class. Her New School University seminar was already full, so I waited months to register for her 5-week private workshop. Skeptical, I doubted she could live up to the hype. But I was taken in by her story of getting her MFA in poetry, struggling through years of rejection finally to see her work in print. Shapiro stressed the importance of reading what you want to write, taking criticism, and doing multiple revisions. I devoured the course packet, thick with her students’ successful publications. To date my only byline had been a poem in The Bangles fan club newsletter. “The first piece you write that your family hates means you found your voice,” she told us. “So write about your obsessions.” Her first assignment was to draft three pages on our most humiliating moment.
As a gay father, I revealed my rage when a toddler on the playground told me my daughter had five dads instead of two. I published it in Salon. Shapiro’s method worked. Taking her class again, I wrote an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times about the cruelties of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day for same-sex parents. Since then, with Shapiro’s expert critique, my work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, O The Oprah Magazine and The Washington Post.
They say you’re supposed to teach the class you want to take and write the book you want to read. Shapiro injects humor on every page, including a section on “Cover Letters Editors Never Finished Reading” and “How Not to Deal with Rejection.” Her quick wit and self-deprecating style belie the massive feat she’s accomplished: taking the seemingly impenetrable newspaper, magazine, online and book worlds and demystifying the publication process.
The Byline Bible reads like taking Shapiro’s class. She details the same short nonfiction assignments given to her pupils. As in her course packet, she includes dozens of pieces based on her assignments that students published. Like a virtual teacher, she provides emotional encouragement, too. “No never means no,” she writes. “It means keep revising and try again.”
The Byline Bible
by Susan Shapiro
Writer’s Digest Books
2018, 268 pages, $19.99
Haig Chahinian is an executive coach and writer in New York City. He’s currently working on a memoir.
The Byline Bible reads like taking Shapiro’s class.
Not only does Shapiro develop her students’ ear for writing lyrically, she helps them create work publishable in the marketplace. In the last decade, her protégés have authored 150 books. Zack McDermott’s acclaimed Little Brown memoir Gorilla and The Bird—in which Shapiro makes a cameo as an inspirational writing teacher—was optioned for a television mini-series. Aspen Matis dedicated her HarperCollins memoir Girl in the Woods to her teacher. Several—including Cat Marnell’s addiction chronicle How to Murder Your Life and Renee Watson’s novel Piecing Me Together—have landed on bestseller lists. One former pupil has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Along with being an award-winning teacher and mentor, Shapiro is a bestselling author. In her thirteenth title, The Byline Bible, she’s gathered all her wisdom in a poetic, inspiring guide that teaches the reader how to write and publish creative non-fiction pieces.
Full disclosure: Seven years ago when I told a friend I wanted someday to get my writing published, he suggested I take Shapiro’s class. Her New School University seminar was already full, so I waited months to register for her 5-week private workshop. Skeptical, I doubted she could live up to the hype. But I was taken in by her story of getting her MFA in poetry, struggling through years of rejection finally to see her work in print. Shapiro stressed the importance of reading what you want to write, taking criticism, and doing multiple revisions. I devoured the course packet, thick with her students’ successful publications. To date my only byline had been a poem in The Bangles fan club newsletter. “The first piece you write that your family hates means you found your voice,” she told us. “So write about your obsessions.” Her first assignment was to draft three pages on our most humiliating moment.
As a gay father, I revealed my rage when a toddler on the playground told me my daughter had five dads instead of two. I published it in Salon. Shapiro’s method worked. Taking her class again, I wrote an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times about the cruelties of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day for same-sex parents. Since then, with Shapiro’s expert critique, my work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, O The Oprah Magazine and The Washington Post.
They say you’re supposed to teach the class you want to take and write the book you want to read. Shapiro injects humor on every page, including a section on “Cover Letters Editors Never Finished Reading” and “How Not to Deal with Rejection.” Her quick wit and self-deprecating style belie the massive feat she’s accomplished: taking the seemingly impenetrable newspaper, magazine, online and book worlds and demystifying the publication process.
The Byline Bible reads like taking Shapiro’s class. She details the same short nonfiction assignments given to her pupils. As in her course packet, she includes dozens of pieces based on her assignments that students published. Like a virtual teacher, she provides emotional encouragement, too. “No never means no,” she writes. “It means keep revising and try again.”
The Byline Bible
by Susan Shapiro
Writer’s Digest Books
2018, 268 pages, $19.99
Haig Chahinian is an executive coach and writer in New York City. He’s currently working on a memoir.
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
Russian Poetry Today : A Contemporary Sampler By A. DMITRIJANOV -- AN EXCERPT
An EXCERPT from the Cover Story of Pratik’s Current Issue
Established tradition breaks Russian literature down into clearly demarcated periods. The first of these to gain international prominence was the so-called Golden Age, referring to the first third of the nineteenth century. Golden Age poetry was dominated by syllabic-accentual verse, with relatively strict and well-established patterns of rhyme as well as meter. In the first third of twentieth century, the so-called Silver Age, however, those poetic forms began to break down and the formal range available to Russian poets was correspondingly vastly expanded.
Now, in the early stages of the twenty-first century, no particular formal requirements are expected of a poetic act. The result is a blinding variety of literary techniques and devices makes the poetic space multidimensional and colorful. This is very much the case in European and world poetry today, except that in the West, this situation is the result of long-term evolution. Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, formal diversity exploded upon the scene as Russian poetry raced at lightning speed through its own version of a century of literary history. As experienced from within, it was a genuine and stunning revolution.
This unusual historical arc has led to a unique feature of Russian poetry today – alongside the poetry we recognize as contemporary, there is a large and active school of poets continuing to write in metrically regular rhymed verse, in styles reminiscent of the early twentieth or even nineteenth century. Given this broad diversity, what stand out are individual, unique, and powerful individual authors’ styles (Russian literary criticism has a term for these – they are called idiostyles).
There has always been a tension in Russian poetry between tradition and innovation: on the one hand, those tensions arise from forces at work in the literatures of other (generally European) countries, which have tended to erode established Russian poetic traditions; on the other, they frequently arise from within, the impact of historically crucial poetic idiostyles – think of Pushkin, Khlebnikov, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, Prigov and Dragomoshchenko, to name just a few.
The 70s-80s of XX century were also characterized by powerful tensions, of which the friction between “official” Soviet poetry and the swiftly developing underground poetry is only the most obvious source. Many new trends and tendencies appeared in this period: conceptualism (in particular, a group called the Moscow Conceptualists), for instance, poked fun at Soviet cliché and inherited views of art and culture; metarealism expanded the idea of a metaphor, and drawing new realities from that linguistic practice; and so forth. Each generation absorbed the previous experiences, but at the same time denied past achievements, thus creating a great number of “electrical discharges” inside the language. Today, as poet and critic Lev Oborin justly notes, “numerous options are possible – there is no mainstream in the developing context [of Russian verse], a state of affairs whose roots go back to the modernist splintering of poetic movements. Even now the scene continues to veer towards still greater individualization.”
Continued...
For Full Story Read Winter Issue of Pratik..
Winter Issue of Pratik available in North America on
Amazon.com, Special focus Contemporary Russian and French Poetry...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QBBYSM7?ref=myi_title_dp
Winter Issue now on Amazon India!
https://www.amazon.in/dp/B07QBBYSM7?ref=myi_title_dp
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Winter Issue of Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing released: Special Focus Contemporary Russian and French Poetry
The current issue has special focus on Contemporary Russian
and French Poetry. It features new work by fourteen Russian Poets including
Dmitry Grigoriev, Alla Gorbunova, Olga Anikina Andrei Polonsky, Danila Davydov,
John William Narins, Anastasia Romanova, Dmitry Legeza, Igor Karaulov. Valerii
Zemskikh, Dina Gatina, Maya-Marina Sheremeteva, Irina Evsa and Serge Tashevsky. An essay “Russian Poetry Today: A Contemporary Sampler” by A.
DMITRIJANOV has been included as a prelude to the Russian Section.
The Winter Issue also presents Eleven French poets including Michel Bulteau , Gabriel Arnou Laujeac, Maram
Al-Masri, Hélène Cardona, Véronique Joyaux, Marie-Claude Deudon, Jean-Claude Tardif, Pierre Rosin, Nicole Barrière, Claire Paulian, Cirène
Gayraud and Jacques Jouet. It also has
special France related poems by Four American poets namely, Willis Barnstone, David Austell, Robin Metz,
and Rebecca Morrison
Plus it has new work of non-fiction American Authors, Susan Shapiro and Elizabeth Enslin and a
short story by leading Hindi writer, Pankaj Bisht
The artist of the Issue is Lithuanian sculptor and painter,
Ruta Jusionytė.
In addition, new work by Tim Kahl, Amrendra Khatua, Usha Akella, Shailendra Sakar. Chuck Joy and Raghubir Sharma has been showcased. Besides, Haig Chahinian’s review of Susan Shapiro’s The Byline Bible, George Wallace’s review of All Vows: New & Selected Poems By David B Axelrod, Edmound Miller’s review of Diane Frank's Letters from Sacred Mountain Place and Jeff’s Deck review Dan Szczesny’s The White Mountain are the highlights of the Issue. Stephanie Laterza Review Essay focused on Voices Carry (Shearsman Books, 2017) by Mervyn Taylor, Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press, 2017) by Susana H. Case, and Out From Calaboose (Nirala, New Delhi, 2017) by Karen Corinne Herceg has also been included in the Winter Issue of Pratik.
In addition, new work by Tim Kahl, Amrendra Khatua, Usha Akella, Shailendra Sakar. Chuck Joy and Raghubir Sharma has been showcased. Besides, Haig Chahinian’s review of Susan Shapiro’s The Byline Bible, George Wallace’s review of All Vows: New & Selected Poems By David B Axelrod, Edmound Miller’s review of Diane Frank's Letters from Sacred Mountain Place and Jeff’s Deck review Dan Szczesny’s The White Mountain are the highlights of the Issue. Stephanie Laterza Review Essay focused on Voices Carry (Shearsman Books, 2017) by Mervyn Taylor, Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press, 2017) by Susana H. Case, and Out From Calaboose (Nirala, New Delhi, 2017) by Karen Corinne Herceg has also been included in the Winter Issue of Pratik.
Thursday, January 24, 2019
Ravi Shankar reviews distinguished American poet and translator Eleanor Goodman's new poetry collection, Nine Dragon Island
Book Review
RAVI SHANKAR
A resonant empathy
and the long shadow
of mortality
I first learned about Eleanor Goodman’s work upon reading her translations of the Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni, one of the few women associated with the “Misty” school of poets and the prolific author of more than 25 books of poetry, essays and novels. Goodman’s book of translations “Something Crosses My Mind” was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and there’s a quiet ferocity in her translations which makes them utterly memorable. Therefore, it was with great interest that I picked up Goodman’s own first book of poetry Nine Dragon Island, published by Zephyr Press and in a handsome hardbound edition by HK Enclave Publishing House.
Goodman’s poems are also quiet and ferocious, but that’s where the similarities to Wang Xiaoni’s poetry ends, for the terrain traversed by Nine Dragon Island is distinctive and leavened with the sensibility of someone who has traveled across the world. The poems in the collection range geographically from Ohio and Indiana in America to Shanghai, China, even as far afield as Iceland and Zimbabwe. Furthermore, the forms employed by Goodman are equally as diverse, moving from sectioned lyrics to narrative elegiac remembrances to prose poetry, these places and modalities united by a resonant empathy and the long shadow of mortality under which we all labor.
Dedicated to the author’s father, Nine Dragon Island offers some of the most evocative and sensitive poems about dying and grief that I’ve read in a very long time. Never sentimental or cloying, the poems offer us a hard-eyed look at how we might confront our own bodies and those who we love, all of us caught in an undeniable process of decay. As the last stanza of the poem “Wanting Out” expresses:
But Lorraine says no
to mechanized breath, no
to priests and specialists, to catheters, to drugs, no to someone else’s blood.
She says no to life without life.
Now what’s left is the letting go
of what we think she should have said.
The final lines of this poem, demonstrate what Goodman is able to do with enjambment, overturning our expectations so that something wiser can emerge. Ultimately it’s not the speaker’s friend’s letting go with which we need to grapple, but our own expectations and wishes about what a person wants and how we want them to conduct their living (and their dying). We may crave they stay on life-support or undertake chemotherapy, but ultimately the most difficult thing is to respect another’s choice on the matter, and this poem depicts that effort with precision and grace. Or as the ending of another poem, “Oma’s Testament” puts it, “When my bones loosened, / I could not see, could not speak / there was no one. So this life asks nothing / of the dead, and the dead ask nothing of it.”
This book is about other kinds of death as well, like the ending of a marriage, and in one of the more poignant poems in the collection, “Since the Divorce my Mother,” the speaker discusses the dissolution of her parent’s wedding and how that has in turn has petrified her to the notion of everlasting union. The difficult truth, if we are able to be clear-eyed about it, is that such breakups are ultimately no one’s fault, even as we love to assign blame; relationships, like the ten thousand things of this world, just drift apart of their own inertia, and the realization of that fact, and our lack of control in the face of it, remains terrifying.
Another poem, one of my personal favorites, “Hummingbird,” begins with this very premise: “When I injure you, as must someday do, my silence will be like a poison drained / from a wound, and a like a hummingbird.” The inevitability of harm, the hopelessness of repair, and our reconciliation to the fact of the small and large losses that accrue around and through us every day are elucidated with such devastating skill that the reader shivers a little, considering its ramifications. Time and again, the speaker of these poems implicates herself in the suffering she observes with such exactitude.
However, the subject matter notwithstanding, this is not a bleak book; far from it. “Nine Dragon Island” pulses with vitality and sensuality, with dripping tangerine juice and fish-skinned fruit, with coils of neon and volcanic plateaus, with heat and light, sex and desire. Some of the poems I found most compelling were the ones set in China, for in them, we see a side of the country far from the official view. Goodman has managed to depict the rural poor unflinchingly and with compassion, whether legless and begging, plucking a chicken into a bucket or living in a cadaver of a home. This is the China we don’t see in State-sponsored transmissions that highlight the rise of upwardly mobile and the middle class. These people are not depicted with a voyeuristic eye but with a sensitivity that makes the poet and by extension the reader complicit in their condition.
There’s also an easy erudition in many of these poems that speak to other poets, past and present, as in the poem “To an old farmer,”which calls to mind Robert Frost’s poem “After Apple-Picking,” as well as William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say.” The allusions are subtle, never heavy-handed, and they turn the original poems on their head, for the poet always knows that poetry is her comfort and not the comfort of those who live in cities made of “rough-hewn cloth and the smell of blood.” In this way, the poems never feel superior to or beyond the people who populate the verse. Instead, the words share in the suffering of those for whom words, in and of themselves, are insufficient, which, to me, is one of the great strengths of this collection.
Finally, then, Nine Dragon Island is a virtuosic first book most of all for its restraint, for all that is held back and hinted at, for everything that lies outside of our control, for the slow, inexorable transformation of all our experiences into that of loss. Goodman’s poems are intimate transcriptions and they resonate with an inner life that is suffused with that Keatsian quality of “negative capability,” never satisfied with the easy resolution but possessed of an openness that allows for ambiguity and mystery to penetrate into the very act of perception, complicating the ways in which we love and injure one another, highlighting how the poor live in us. These poems are luminous with such suffering and ecstatic, full of a terrible tenderness and erotic charge that continues to radiate even after we’ve put the book down. That quality, its exultant sadness and clarity of perception, is the hallmark of a very fine collection, made all the more remarkable by the fact that this is Goodman’s first book. It’s the kind of debut that both devastates us and leaves us hankering after more.
Nine Dragon Island
by Eleanor Goodman
Paperback: 114 pages
Zephyr Press (December 6, 2016)
ISBN-10: 1938890205
ISBN-13: 978-1938890208
Distinguished American Indian poet, Ravi Shankar published twelve books and chapbooks including The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press). He founded Drunken Boat, has appeared on NPR, BBC, PBS, and in The New York Times and The Paris Review. The title of his memoir-in-progress is Correctional.
RAVI SHANKAR
A resonant empathy
and the long shadow
of mortality
I first learned about Eleanor Goodman’s work upon reading her translations of the Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni, one of the few women associated with the “Misty” school of poets and the prolific author of more than 25 books of poetry, essays and novels. Goodman’s book of translations “Something Crosses My Mind” was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and there’s a quiet ferocity in her translations which makes them utterly memorable. Therefore, it was with great interest that I picked up Goodman’s own first book of poetry Nine Dragon Island, published by Zephyr Press and in a handsome hardbound edition by HK Enclave Publishing House.
Goodman’s poems are also quiet and ferocious, but that’s where the similarities to Wang Xiaoni’s poetry ends, for the terrain traversed by Nine Dragon Island is distinctive and leavened with the sensibility of someone who has traveled across the world. The poems in the collection range geographically from Ohio and Indiana in America to Shanghai, China, even as far afield as Iceland and Zimbabwe. Furthermore, the forms employed by Goodman are equally as diverse, moving from sectioned lyrics to narrative elegiac remembrances to prose poetry, these places and modalities united by a resonant empathy and the long shadow of mortality under which we all labor.
Dedicated to the author’s father, Nine Dragon Island offers some of the most evocative and sensitive poems about dying and grief that I’ve read in a very long time. Never sentimental or cloying, the poems offer us a hard-eyed look at how we might confront our own bodies and those who we love, all of us caught in an undeniable process of decay. As the last stanza of the poem “Wanting Out” expresses:
But Lorraine says no
to mechanized breath, no
to priests and specialists, to catheters, to drugs, no to someone else’s blood.
She says no to life without life.
Now what’s left is the letting go
of what we think she should have said.
The final lines of this poem, demonstrate what Goodman is able to do with enjambment, overturning our expectations so that something wiser can emerge. Ultimately it’s not the speaker’s friend’s letting go with which we need to grapple, but our own expectations and wishes about what a person wants and how we want them to conduct their living (and their dying). We may crave they stay on life-support or undertake chemotherapy, but ultimately the most difficult thing is to respect another’s choice on the matter, and this poem depicts that effort with precision and grace. Or as the ending of another poem, “Oma’s Testament” puts it, “When my bones loosened, / I could not see, could not speak / there was no one. So this life asks nothing / of the dead, and the dead ask nothing of it.”
This book is about other kinds of death as well, like the ending of a marriage, and in one of the more poignant poems in the collection, “Since the Divorce my Mother,” the speaker discusses the dissolution of her parent’s wedding and how that has in turn has petrified her to the notion of everlasting union. The difficult truth, if we are able to be clear-eyed about it, is that such breakups are ultimately no one’s fault, even as we love to assign blame; relationships, like the ten thousand things of this world, just drift apart of their own inertia, and the realization of that fact, and our lack of control in the face of it, remains terrifying.
Another poem, one of my personal favorites, “Hummingbird,” begins with this very premise: “When I injure you, as must someday do, my silence will be like a poison drained / from a wound, and a like a hummingbird.” The inevitability of harm, the hopelessness of repair, and our reconciliation to the fact of the small and large losses that accrue around and through us every day are elucidated with such devastating skill that the reader shivers a little, considering its ramifications. Time and again, the speaker of these poems implicates herself in the suffering she observes with such exactitude.
However, the subject matter notwithstanding, this is not a bleak book; far from it. “Nine Dragon Island” pulses with vitality and sensuality, with dripping tangerine juice and fish-skinned fruit, with coils of neon and volcanic plateaus, with heat and light, sex and desire. Some of the poems I found most compelling were the ones set in China, for in them, we see a side of the country far from the official view. Goodman has managed to depict the rural poor unflinchingly and with compassion, whether legless and begging, plucking a chicken into a bucket or living in a cadaver of a home. This is the China we don’t see in State-sponsored transmissions that highlight the rise of upwardly mobile and the middle class. These people are not depicted with a voyeuristic eye but with a sensitivity that makes the poet and by extension the reader complicit in their condition.
There’s also an easy erudition in many of these poems that speak to other poets, past and present, as in the poem “To an old farmer,”which calls to mind Robert Frost’s poem “After Apple-Picking,” as well as William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say.” The allusions are subtle, never heavy-handed, and they turn the original poems on their head, for the poet always knows that poetry is her comfort and not the comfort of those who live in cities made of “rough-hewn cloth and the smell of blood.” In this way, the poems never feel superior to or beyond the people who populate the verse. Instead, the words share in the suffering of those for whom words, in and of themselves, are insufficient, which, to me, is one of the great strengths of this collection.
Finally, then, Nine Dragon Island is a virtuosic first book most of all for its restraint, for all that is held back and hinted at, for everything that lies outside of our control, for the slow, inexorable transformation of all our experiences into that of loss. Goodman’s poems are intimate transcriptions and they resonate with an inner life that is suffused with that Keatsian quality of “negative capability,” never satisfied with the easy resolution but possessed of an openness that allows for ambiguity and mystery to penetrate into the very act of perception, complicating the ways in which we love and injure one another, highlighting how the poor live in us. These poems are luminous with such suffering and ecstatic, full of a terrible tenderness and erotic charge that continues to radiate even after we’ve put the book down. That quality, its exultant sadness and clarity of perception, is the hallmark of a very fine collection, made all the more remarkable by the fact that this is Goodman’s first book. It’s the kind of debut that both devastates us and leaves us hankering after more.
Nine Dragon Island
by Eleanor Goodman
Paperback: 114 pages
Zephyr Press (December 6, 2016)
ISBN-10: 1938890205
ISBN-13: 978-1938890208
Distinguished American Indian poet, Ravi Shankar published twelve books and chapbooks including The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press). He founded Drunken Boat, has appeared on NPR, BBC, PBS, and in The New York Times and The Paris Review. The title of his memoir-in-progress is Correctional.
Monday, December 10, 2018
Stephanie Emily Dickinson reviews The Gates of Pearl by Distinguished American Poet, Jill Hoffman
Mediations between
the World of Beauty
and the Netherworld
Before opening this poetry collection, the dark jewel that Jill Hoffman calls The Gates of Pearl, the reader might pause to admire the cover painting of a seemingly carefree young woman wearing a 1940’s style bathing suit. The artist chooses to work with pastels—pinks, mauves, and turquoises—the colors of seashore outings and children’s birthday parties This is our first sight of Pearl Yuni Hoffman, looking windblown and beguiling, as painted by her daughter. The painting provides a counterpoint to the unquiet passions these pages contain and gives the reader a glimpse of Pearl in her happier days. Be forewarned this collection is not written in pastels, but in dramatically vivid colors and is dangerously explosive.
When I was bingeing 4 years ago – I would steal ice-cream from my
daughter’s fridge so they wouldn’t see the gluttony. I would
steal from me own refrig as soon as my then husband was asleep –
Hoffman names herself an amanuensis. She is transcriber of her mother’s sometimes agonized and sometimes delighted voice captured decades ago in telephone conversations, the collector of Pearl’s stream-of-consciousness Overeater’s Anonymous journals, and the writer of her own Daughter-of Pearl poems. The zeitgeist of the present moment invites the hybrid in our writing texts and so the 3 braided strands analogy (Telephone Poems, Pearly’s Journal, and Daughter-of-Pearl poems) that Hoffman uses to describe the book’s structure will find a receptive audience. The Telephone Poems are not only truly innovative—the term and concept coined by the author—but astonishing time capsules, rhythmic distillations, and rap-like in their intensity and humor.
“Leper Colony of One” is illustrative of the leaps made in these Telephone Poems, the form elastic enough to hold the mother’s impressionistic and fervent voice. She wrote one poem that she reads to her daughter over the phone.
I bleed from the breast
I stain my blouse
My blouse offends
Her sensitive eyes,
Her sensitive eyes
Reproach
My daring to exist --
Not whole.
One stanza later the lines stretch across the page.
4 beat up granny apples for raw apple sauce
Samuel Johnson said whoever writes not for money is crazy—
poetry is sheer lunacy. My lunch is already late—
Maggie Nelson’s celebrated Jane, blends her poetry with her murdered aunt’s diary. Pearly’s diary, though, is of a wholly different order, as she exhibits an originality and sensuality in her journals. Her instincts are those of a lyrical poet that reach fruition in her daughter’s work.
In her highly crafted and enigmatic poems, some published in The New Yorker and Paris Review, Hoffman addresses her mother. The poems radiate love and act as mediations between the world of beauty and the netherworld.
Take this one long exquisite slender white rose.
I throw it across Central Park to you.
It is the white snow, the red carpet, the white
cauliflower,
the plush red coach,
the white lace at his neck, your red
stays.
The poet writes of her mother, “our one soul/haggles for hours/on the phone a/golden harp.” In “Mama Pyjama,” the daughter speaks of her childhood: “You sent me out with a spoon/and your love followed me like cereal/to school.” The reader acclimates to the mother’s voice as if to a deep sea dive. Self-lacerating, she lives the metaphor of an open wound. Pearly suffers from Paget’s disease, a form of breast cancer. She speaks of the “nipple drawn to the side/where it shouldn’t be.” She divorces Stephen, her husband of forty years, and shortly after laments it. Rejecting Western medicine, she travels to a Mexican laetrile clinic, and when the treatment fails she follows another alternative protocol that includes fasting and raw vegetables. Using food as balm for her frustrations, Pearl suffers for most of her adult life from an eating disorder.
Everyone is married. Everyone I am sure will have sex when they go home. I am strangely relaxed with the food plate that has nothing on it for me. Perhaps there will be something at home for me. We try, but there is emptiness – now deep snoring – I leave the bed – I go towards an icy box -- holding out its frozen breasts and erect penis to me. I go towards its pleasures and oblivion
A mismatched couple from the start, Pearl’s husband and father of her two daughters withholds more than sex. He represses what is intimate and playful in himself. Hence, they seem never to have been true lovers. She grew to adulthood long before the sexual revolution that would come in the late 1960s. The era in which she was raised condemned a woman who desired fulfillment and Pearl was called a “nymphomaniac” by her husband.
I was hungry for sex – a juicy peach of a young woman eager to love, eager
to be loved. On our wedding night – he told me I was tired after the huge
wedding. I was disappointed but nice brides didn’t say so – I knew I was
hungry. I did not know I was angry. Who could be angry at Rhett Butler --
A female Jeremiah who never quite curses the universe, Pearl rails against the indignities of her fate. She speaks with a blazing tongue—“A pox on his soft flaccid penis.” Her bathwater bloody from her oozing breast, her foot painfully sore, her bank account overdrawn, she soldiers on and rises to the heights of the heroic.
As she begins to explain herself to herself in the midst of self-recriminations like
—I short changed Jerry my first fiancé by breaking the engagement I am very ashamed that I pawned his diamond engagement ring and I gave him the pawn ticket instead of the ring —
that stretch back to her youth, there seems a desire to love herself, and then more fully love life. Often her explanations are comic, her mantra-like repetitions incantatory, and as she walks close to the edge of extinction, Pearl displays an admirable and courageous determination to be “positive.” She scolds her daughter:
“You’re full of aspirin and I’m full
of positives that I don’t want
stolen from me!”
There is so much body in The Gates of Pearl, the sexual body and Pearl’s bleeding body, as if she is a human sacrifice to a Moloch.
Julia Childs was trussing a chicken for a spit, a rotisserie.
She had to bind the legs with a lot of white rope and it bothered me
a little – her treating the chicken as if it had never been alive.
After begging Steve to let her come home, to reconcile, and being refused she sees herself like Julie Childs’ chicken as if she had never been a bride, a mother, a grandmother, instead garbage to be thrown into her raw vegetable compost.
And yet there is compensation in the relationship between cherished mother and cherished daughter. If Pearl becomes Jeremiah, then the Daughter-of Pearl becomes Solomon in her songs. Listen to the daughter honor the mother in “Demeter.”
From you I learned joy, my middle name,
goddess of appetite, at whose touch
Farmer’s cheese put on a bed of lettuce
or smuggled into tomatoes in a pink and
white motif reminiscent of strawberries and cream,were compositions of originality and freshness.
In the throes of excruciating self-condemnation, we envision another mother, the one “of originality and freshness,” the one who taught “joy” to her daughter. As Hoffman explains in the Preface, “Her life is revealed in her journals, mine half hidden in my poems.”
The daughter celebrates her own sexuality in “Joy.”
You have a mate. Quickly
the match is announced in heaven.
Dark shadows robe you.
Everyone, but the small child, knows.
But it is not like that. The summer light
leads up-river like a raft and the breeze
blowing in all night brings the sea
in its salty net and you are Heidi on top
of a mountain, and I am there too
near your shoulders, your eyes,
on the romantic slopes.
When the daughter’s novel Jilted, a fictional treatment of her love affair with Frank Stella, is thwarted because a character threatens to sue, we hear the mother’s desire to comfort.
I must call my heartbroken daughter Jill. Her novel, her literary baby was slaughtered – impaled by the threat of a 5 million dollar law-suit.
Both mother and daughter have sacrificed their happiness to men who find true intimacy intolerable. The mother to her husband, Steve, and the daughter to a famous artist.
In a Telephone Poem, the mother directs them both to “get up from our coffins.”
I’m going to make it, don’t you worry
about it. We are both in
open coffins and Frank Stella is
in the dream and we get up from
our coffins and go toward life –
and Frank Stella is my ‘little Daddy’ –
Pearl’s journal entries contain miraculous moments and range from riding on the bus with a painful foot that afternoon to early childhood remembrances. “It was a few days before my sixth birthday.” She and her pregnant mother were going to Lofts to order birthday chocolates. Her mother, pregnant with a son, got into line to pay. The man behind her set down his valise and her mother tripped and fell. “I lost my baby brother. I lost my childhood that day.”
There are comparisons that could be made to Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, an older woman dying of AIDS given to her by her bi-sexual lover, or Jean Rhys’ vulnerable and abandoned protagonist in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, even to Cynthia Cruz’s opulent post-confessional How the End Begins. While there are echoes, The Gates of Pearl is an exemplar. Nothing like it has graced bookstore shelves or the Amazon marketplace.
“I cannot tolerate the lack of interest in men’s eyes,” says Pearl, our doomed heroine, our Ulysses of the piss-smelling elevator and jostling bus.
This time there will be no lack.
The Gates of Pearl
Poems by Jill Hoffman
Box Turtle Press
Mudfish Individual Poet Series #11
Stephanie Emily Dickinson raised on an Iowa farm now lives in New York City. Her novel Half Girl and novella Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil. Other works include Corn Goddess, Road of Five Churches, and Port Authority Orchids. She and her partner Rob Cook publish Skidrow Penthouse.
Saturday, November 10, 2018
Barrett Warner reviews American Poet David Daniel’s new poetry collection, Ornaments
Book Review
by BARRETT WARNER
Asleep with Whitman,
and Blake,
and the Romantics
It’s a shame that David Daniel’s Ornaments is not printed in braille. His words are best touched in order to be read, so full of intense emotion are they, yet without being “emotional,” or carrying the too much personal drama. Daniel writes to a certain core energy of feeling, full of impulse, and at times off balanced, precarious like some great stone resting on a marble. The poet doesn’t seek out this energy. He creates it out of nothing, and once he builds it, he gives that blue spark a place to go, with turns and lead changes and half passes that could rival Joan of Arc’s charismatic Percheron.
Daniel’s opening poem “Glass” sets the beat: “Once I made poems of glass, crystal pitchers / For wedding gifts, that sort of thing—very fussy. . . . / That was two hundred years ago / And also perhaps tomorrow—who knows?” Neither do we knowabout the poet’s older efforts which he still can’t break away from, but we shouldn’t try to know them. We shouldn’t even care. Almost every poem we try to write is some version of a stupid epithalamion poem and life isn’t about the marriage of this and that. Vows are not where empathy begins. And what of those crystal pitchers?
Now, though, I fill them up: You see
We’re fucking—making love I mean—all across America;
She’s on top, humming, dancing some late-Seventies
Disco thing, which is hilarious and a little scary,
And then (I write like this, too): her agonized aspect
Of ecstasy familiar from our saints, our porn—
Then a little blood, semen, a taste of iron
On my tongue. Stains everywhere. Life!
In an era of lower case, unpunctuated verse that feels more like a schematic diagram than written song, what pleasure to find m-dashes, colons, exclamation points, italics, ellipses, question marks, and commas as plain as nail holes. In “Glass,” Daniel uses these to set the energy loose, tightening the stream.
Two hundred years? Daniel is a hungry bear after such a long hibernation. He’s been asleep with Whitman, and Blake, and the Romantics who dove into nature for truth because myth and religion were too fragile. Now that we know how fragile nature is, Daniel’s plunge into instinct makes perfect sense. The physical and quantum laws which rule our reason are only speedbumps. He revs on approaching because he loves the jostle of hitting them. He is not after discovering life itself as much as he wants to find the will to be alive, the will to live.
Not everything has to be explained. Close your eyes and hear the beginning of “Crash”: “When I was a boy, angels appeared at my window. / They would open it, like a window, to my parents’ dying: / The jangling car crash, the spinning, that moment frozen, / Then the next: Such terror and beauty mixed, / The angels’ hilarity. They crept up the glass like frost. . . .” It isn’t that Daniel trusts the reader to stay with him. He cares, but he doesn’t care. As a poet, he’s a reader too. His poems are not his creations—he’s not playing God—his poems are simply voices he heard that no one else did, and he wrote them down so we could hear them too. So we could feel them. To every jaded critic who picks up this book and says, “OK, what’s my angle?” Daniel is replying, “Me. I’m your angle.”
Time only matters when you’re doing it, which is what I love about these poems, especially “The Sonnet” in which Daniel shows that once you learn heart speak you can talk and make love to anything, even a sonnet:
God how I love sonnets! I think of them every day
Just as I think of my father, who was,
In fact, a sonneteer: he wandered twelfth-century
France or Italy—wherever, grief fogs such things—
His huge head full of song: God I miss him:
But he clearly wasn’t meant for war: They say
He stood up in the trenches to recite poems
In the enemy’s direction: love, you know, love:
Then the red laser sight-light found his forehead,
Reminding his commander, for a moment,
Of a beautiful Indian woman he wished to love:
Bang Bang. Sometimes love is like that, just
As you reach for it, it runs away, or else it puts
A bullet in your head...
The hardest thing for a natural—and Daniel’s ability is about as natural as it gets—is to become a perfectionist. Perfecting an acquired skill is so much easier. With these poems in Ornaments, Daniel has perfected his natural gifts. He seamlessly enters any century and any sound and any love without its feeling overblown. Daniel doesn’t suspend our disbelief, he engages and embraces it. The long time Blake scholar doesn’t just stand with Whitman, he does so comfortably, and we feel comfortable too. He gives our disbelief the great big hug of an old friend meeting up with us again. This book is his blessing to the world.
Ornaments
Poems by David Daniel
University of Pittsburgh Press,
2017, 55 pages, $16.00
by BARRETT WARNER
Asleep with Whitman,
and Blake,
and the Romantics
It’s a shame that David Daniel’s Ornaments is not printed in braille. His words are best touched in order to be read, so full of intense emotion are they, yet without being “emotional,” or carrying the too much personal drama. Daniel writes to a certain core energy of feeling, full of impulse, and at times off balanced, precarious like some great stone resting on a marble. The poet doesn’t seek out this energy. He creates it out of nothing, and once he builds it, he gives that blue spark a place to go, with turns and lead changes and half passes that could rival Joan of Arc’s charismatic Percheron.
Daniel’s opening poem “Glass” sets the beat: “Once I made poems of glass, crystal pitchers / For wedding gifts, that sort of thing—very fussy. . . . / That was two hundred years ago / And also perhaps tomorrow—who knows?” Neither do we knowabout the poet’s older efforts which he still can’t break away from, but we shouldn’t try to know them. We shouldn’t even care. Almost every poem we try to write is some version of a stupid epithalamion poem and life isn’t about the marriage of this and that. Vows are not where empathy begins. And what of those crystal pitchers?
Now, though, I fill them up: You see
We’re fucking—making love I mean—all across America;
She’s on top, humming, dancing some late-Seventies
Disco thing, which is hilarious and a little scary,
And then (I write like this, too): her agonized aspect
Of ecstasy familiar from our saints, our porn—
Then a little blood, semen, a taste of iron
On my tongue. Stains everywhere. Life!
In an era of lower case, unpunctuated verse that feels more like a schematic diagram than written song, what pleasure to find m-dashes, colons, exclamation points, italics, ellipses, question marks, and commas as plain as nail holes. In “Glass,” Daniel uses these to set the energy loose, tightening the stream.
Two hundred years? Daniel is a hungry bear after such a long hibernation. He’s been asleep with Whitman, and Blake, and the Romantics who dove into nature for truth because myth and religion were too fragile. Now that we know how fragile nature is, Daniel’s plunge into instinct makes perfect sense. The physical and quantum laws which rule our reason are only speedbumps. He revs on approaching because he loves the jostle of hitting them. He is not after discovering life itself as much as he wants to find the will to be alive, the will to live.
Not everything has to be explained. Close your eyes and hear the beginning of “Crash”: “When I was a boy, angels appeared at my window. / They would open it, like a window, to my parents’ dying: / The jangling car crash, the spinning, that moment frozen, / Then the next: Such terror and beauty mixed, / The angels’ hilarity. They crept up the glass like frost. . . .” It isn’t that Daniel trusts the reader to stay with him. He cares, but he doesn’t care. As a poet, he’s a reader too. His poems are not his creations—he’s not playing God—his poems are simply voices he heard that no one else did, and he wrote them down so we could hear them too. So we could feel them. To every jaded critic who picks up this book and says, “OK, what’s my angle?” Daniel is replying, “Me. I’m your angle.”
Time only matters when you’re doing it, which is what I love about these poems, especially “The Sonnet” in which Daniel shows that once you learn heart speak you can talk and make love to anything, even a sonnet:
God how I love sonnets! I think of them every day
Just as I think of my father, who was,
In fact, a sonneteer: he wandered twelfth-century
France or Italy—wherever, grief fogs such things—
His huge head full of song: God I miss him:
But he clearly wasn’t meant for war: They say
He stood up in the trenches to recite poems
In the enemy’s direction: love, you know, love:
Then the red laser sight-light found his forehead,
Reminding his commander, for a moment,
Of a beautiful Indian woman he wished to love:
Bang Bang. Sometimes love is like that, just
As you reach for it, it runs away, or else it puts
A bullet in your head...
The hardest thing for a natural—and Daniel’s ability is about as natural as it gets—is to become a perfectionist. Perfecting an acquired skill is so much easier. With these poems in Ornaments, Daniel has perfected his natural gifts. He seamlessly enters any century and any sound and any love without its feeling overblown. Daniel doesn’t suspend our disbelief, he engages and embraces it. The long time Blake scholar doesn’t just stand with Whitman, he does so comfortably, and we feel comfortable too. He gives our disbelief the great big hug of an old friend meeting up with us again. This book is his blessing to the world.
Ornaments
Poems by David Daniel
University of Pittsburgh Press,
2017, 55 pages, $16.00
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