A Read of Taylor Jr.'s An Age of Monsters
An Age of Monsters by William Taylor Jr. (short stories, Epic Rites Press, 181 pages)
The stories collected in The Age of Monsters are as unadorned and straightforward as the blue-collar characters that inhabit them—characters who, in turn, inhabit cheap bars, motels and other dives across the US.
Focusing on self-destructive behaviour and self-destructive relationships, violence and art (sometimes all at once), the sparse narratives move via casual conversation, anecdote and reminisence with the barest momentum, rather than ripping along any well-plotted arcs. But that cautious pace just reflects the subject matter at hand, and Taylor certainly makes some subtle lyric twists along the way. These twists ensure that, while the stories are true to his character’s lives, they are never mundane.
Take “The Bastards Were Everywhere and Would Endure”, where the mantra-like repetition of a single epithet (“bastards”) imitates the violent cycle of reflection and frustration that grows throughout the story. Taylor gets his ideas across by building a visceral anger and tension through the main character, rather than by cheap exposition. Although the story ends with a desultory sigh that lets the air out of the tension rather than blowing things up in a satisfying conclusion (“The bastards were everywhere and would endure, but we do what we can”), this drifting end seems to be the existential point Taylor wants to make.
In the “Lives of the Poets II”, he juxtaposes the simple task of having a chapbook’s galleys approved against an increasingly absurd series of requests by the editorial team. The well-meaning publisher and editor try to give the poet and his work a ridiculous image makeover (essentially ‘Beating’ him up), which allows Taylor to examine honesty in art; that is, that sometimes resistance to selling out comes more from circumstance than virtue (this is a makeover that would never quite take). It is a biting bit of self-referential humour from Taylor, who notes:
“I have nothing against poets...I came to San Francisco to be among them. But it’s generally a good rule not to trust anyone who introduces themselves to you as such. Or has it written on their business card. It usually just means they’re unemployed, self-obsessed and have no skills that make them useful in the everyday world. Of course, I wrote poetry, too.”
Taylor has a few other tricks in his pen. The extremely short “My Hemingway Dream” lulls like a passage from a dream journal, but accretes a surrealistic quilt through patches of violence, comedy and absurdity (and stands the indulgent memoirist style on its head). The title story is a dark, cheeky quip that takes inspiration from and pays homage to past creepy pop-culture clowns (see: Krusty or Shakes). Taylor also gives us an anti-Bonnie and Clyde in “The Legend of Eddie and Lola” where, rather than going off with guns-a-blazing, the characters “argued for a while about whether or not they should wear masks…But what kind of masks? Ski masks? Nobody skied much in Kansas and Halloween was months ago”.
Like Eddie and Lola, the rest of the characters in Monsters largely go nowhere and grow little, and the stories tend to end abruptly. But the effect of that brusque dismissal is to allow for quiet reflection on the lives of the lowest of the low, rather than as a simple punch-line outro.
Momentum or no, Taylor’s manner of spicing up his examination of the everyday makes us feel like we’ve still travelled a ways and met some interesting locals.
Meet the locals at http://www.epicrites.org
New Year’s Resolution (Part 2)
Further to our New Year’s Resolution to catch up on some reading, we’re into the latest from PigeonBike Press: Gizmo by Rick Stansberger. Gizmo is a quieter affair than some of the more in-your-face work the press is becoming noted for. Stansberger delivers a long, episodic narrative poem built from an album of rural, turn-of-the-twentieth-century characters. He utilizes very loose free verse that is loyal to the moods and dialogue of the characters woven into the poem, rather than any hard and fast, predetermined lyric mode. That may not sound like a revolutionary concept, but underlining the main narrative is an edgier subtext about how technological progress is both an enabler of new wonders and destroyer of what we’ve long held precious. Stansberger’s measured approach makes for a subtly compelling work that only deepens the further you read.
As always, you can grab one at:
http://pigeonbike.blogspot.com/p/pigeonbike-store-buy-print-titles.html
New Year’s Resolution (Part 1)
Acting on our New Year’s Resolution to catch up on some reading, first up is Fluorescent Stilts For Your Uncle. Despite the new name, Fluorescent is actually the second year of the Epic Rites Press serial Tree Killer Ink, now under the editorial blade of poet Rob Plath. It may be an indie press review by another name, but this magazine is still stropped to a fine edge, with rattling (both sonically and through the use of cudgel-hard imagery) works of poetry like John Sibley Williams’ “Bone” or Plath’s own blood, sweat and blood lyrics. Based on a read of Fluorescent’s first two issues, Plath certainly isn’t trying to smash the frame of this publication so much as tug at the edges and widen the angles, with, say, some fairly substantial prose from the usually stripped-to-the-sinew John Yamrus here, or a bit of trippy surrealist blues from John Macker there. The artwork adds just the right (blackly) comic relief as well.
The continued growth and expansion of this review will be worth watching in 2012.
Only available through subscription, you can catch up yourself at:
A Read of Phillips' The Underbelly
The Underbelly by Gary Phillips (novel, 152 pages, PM Press)
Part comic noir, part off-the-cuff socio-economic commentary, this short novel by Gary Phillips presents a quick but engaging tour of the dirtier Los Angeles streets and some of the characters who prowl them. The book portrays the city with a hybrid gritty/stylized realism in a slightly skewed, almost out-of-time continuum that seems inspired by Phillips’ background as a graphic novelist.
The vehicle for the journey through the titular underbelly is Magrady, a sometimes homeless Vietnam vet who is struggling against the requisite demons from his past – including flashbacks to the war, substance abuse and guilt for having abandoned his family – and a sudden, more pressing problem. Someone is trying to set Magrady up for the murder of Savoirfaire, a street enforcer with whom Magrady had recently battled while preventing the thug from collecting on a dubious debt owed by one of the vet’s buddies.
The initial confrontation between Magrady and Savoirfaire sets the mood and tone for the book. It takes place in the middle of this anti-heartland: “smack in the middle of L.A.’s Skid Row” as Phillips describes it, which “[u]nlike the street’s more notorious incarnation in Manhattan…didn’t boast of edifices as testament to giddy capitalism”. “The bailout around here,” Phillips notes pulpishly, “was of the cheap whiskey and crack rock variety, the meltdown a daily occurrence.”
Magrady – dry for several months at this point and eager to continue his progress back into the world – sets out to track down the real killer with the tenacity of a Phillip Marlowe. And from here, Underbelly presents Magrady's struggle to redeem himself in the eyes of society, his family and himself. This is standard stuff, but Phillips’ description of Magrady's journey, with its simple, but dark, tone, is absorbing. His prose illustrates L.A.’s underground in crisp blacks and whites that are nestled in shades of gray as well. Some scenes could be straight out of a 1970s exploitation flick, but then the present suddenly intrudes in iPhones and Information Age allusions.
The book’s most poignant moment comes when Magrady, having pursued a lead far away from his home base and unable to afford a ride back into town, must spend the night outside, back in the real underbelly. He has to dig out “some greasy and musty clothing tatters” from a cardboard box in an alley and use them “the best he could like blankets” to sleep “under the Sixth Street Bridge with several others.” It’s a point at which he could easily be dragged back under.
But he rises again, dusts himself off and sets back to work, this recent descent only increasing his determination to climb out. And while a mystical flourish near the end of the book seems a tad tacked on, the redemption and resolution a bit rushed, and the character’s tenacity slightly problematic (Magrady’s interior monologues are pretty mundane for someone so conflicted and driven), the dark corners his path takes us into are enough to keep you turning the pages – especially if you like them pulpy – as much as the actual mystery.
Descend into it from: http://www.pmpress.org/content/index.php
The Outer Limits (and The Underground)
A cappella Zoo (Issue 7, Fall 2011, 164 pages)
Genre fiction receives an undeservedly rough ride from the Academy, generally dismissed as escapist juvenilia. One would hope, then, that genre would flourish in the underground as a suitable vehicle for subversion. However, it’s pretty tough to find, say, cutting edge speculative fiction in the small press world. That’s why A cappella Zoo is so refreshing.
Ostensibly publishing “magic realism” and “slipstream” (categories which do have some academic caché) fiction and poetry, A cappella Zoo is a ‘little’ magazine that doesn’t explicitly fly the flag for genre. However, the stories inside, such as “Waving on the Moon” (flash scifi) by Tania Hershman, “Painting God at Epcot” (time travel by way of surrealism rather than quantum mechanics) by Alexander Weinstein, and “Fixing a Hole” (just plain weirdness) by Anthony J. Rapino make you think Amazing Stories rather than New Yorker. (At least in terms of subject matter; the prose itself is the work of serious writers well-practiced in their craft.)
Even more surprising is the quality of the poetry. While some of the verse here finds Muse in fantasy – such as “Ginny” (a sea monster-shanty) by Elizabeth O’Brien – rather than more “serious” sources, the work is as technically tight as anything you’d find in The Paris Review and, arguably, more engaging.
A cappella Zoo is a good place for readers who want strong literature that doesn’t sacrifice vibrant imagination (or vice-versa).
Take a trip out to: http://www.acappellazoo.com
A Read of salier's wikipedia says it will pass
wikipedia says it will pass by diana salier (poems, 28 pages, The Red Ceilings Press)
wikipedia says it will pass takes a conventional structure for a poetry collection (a series of loosely-related free-verse lyrics about love, loss, relationships, etc.) and gives it a 2.0 dust-off, with a running conceit that places the material in a 21st-century landscape. It makes for an interesting, if not entirely successful, experiment.
diana salier harvests imagery from the technical and cultural ecology of our planned-obsolescence-based culture to represent modern relationships as transient things. Her best poetry comes in short, punchy moments of feeling (like a list of observations about one's life, as syndicated through an RSS feed). It works sometimes, such as in the self-explanatory “this poem is a chatroom and you have left the chatroom” or “my gmail makes you laugh so hard”. Occasionally, the conceit stretches a bit thin, such as in “i like human as a word but not as a concept” where the Twitter reference (“give it to me in 140 characters or less”) is certainly an up-to-date one, but also obvious and already pretty familiar.
salier’s use of (very) free verse – an almost spontaneous, Beat style – is appropriate for the ephemeral backdrop and stays true to the casual style of most electronic communication. “my computer goes to therapy on mondays” is, stretching things further, built entirely from error messages: “firefox’s connection was reset/ms-dos says abort – retry – fail”. The technique works well when she is brief and focused. It works less well when she carries an idea on too long, such as with “let’s make the world go quiet again” in which she wastes an apt line like “are you stuck in airplane mode” in a poem with too many throw-away ones.
That problem holds the collection back in another way. It could have had more immediacy had it been pared down to a more modest chapbook length. 24 poems, short as most may be, sometimes meander away from the core. And the best poem might even be “a londonparislondon sandwich” which is actually a much more traditional piece of verse, using geography rather than technology (i.e. John Donne 1.0), as a conceit.
Still, the title poem, which presents a quick, rhetorical epigraph with some subtle internal rhyme, caps the collection off nicely. “do you ever wonder how long this is gonna last >?” salier writes, “like when you have the hiccups and logic and wikipedia says/it will pass…”.
Take a quick click over to http://redceilings.blogspot.com
A Read of Jack Henry's Crunked
Crunked by Jack Henry (poetry, 113 pages, Epic Rites Press)
When first engaged, Jack Henry’s work seems like it will be fairly predictable. Reading the initial pages of Crunked, you quickly realize what you are in for. Poems about addiction – to methamphetamine, to be precise – and about the creative process itself. A little destruction mixed with a little creation. Another season in Hell.
But, flip a bit further in, and you will also dig a little deeper, and quickly start to appreciate that Henry doesn’t treat this familiar subject matter to a straight-up approach.
Poems about drug abuse and drug experimentation are standard fare in literature. But Henry isn’t trying to write a visionary Rimbaudesque tract nor a Burroughsian treatise. He’s simply pounding out the facets of the addict’s life (the shamelessness, the squalor, the selling of your self to feed your habit) in slivers of language that dig into the muck of the matter, like shards that scrape the dirt out from hidden corners. Take, for example, “dope on a table” where Henry simply notes: “she had dope on the table/what else could I need?” “this is how it works” describes in mechanical yet alarmingly stark do-it-yourself detail how to make money to feed your habit. The approach is quite gripping in its honesty.
Henry seems to find little real escape in drugs. In the title poem (“crunked” meaning “high”) he admits that “speed doesn’t do/everything/i hoped it would”. It is, rather, in the poetic process that he finds euphoria – and where the reader picks up his or her own buzz off the poet’s work. In “finding”, Henry starts off describing how he “found freedom/at the center/of a rolled up/twenty-dollar bill” but ends the poem on a roll of language that suggests words are where the real power lies:
smile serene
thoughts in proper order
i sit at the computer
listen to a clock tick
watch wind bend branches
planes fly over, land at airports
motorcycles rattle windows
cars bump down asphalt rivers
This pattern repeats throughout the collection: the addict getting the fix to satisfy a basic need; the poet finding a higher release through rhythm and image. Henry’s style may echo the addict’s life in the short, clipped lines that drive forward, like an addict hungry for his next fix, but his poetic ear is finely tuned to alliteration, consonance and other more subtle details. And it makes for a potent mix.
Get a bit Crunked at http://www.epicrites.org
What The Kids Are Up To
The kids:
- Aren't afraid to indulge in language, playing with words like toys even while working them like building materials.
- Don't shy away from rhyme, if it suits their purpose (but will wax prosaic as needed).
- Can weave traditional, pop-cultural and net-generation imagery into something that the faculty can still recognize but that the students won't ignore.
- Engage with the world in their art, whether through working class themes or impressionistic/abstract collage.
To get a taste of what the younger generation of poets is up to, order a (free) copy of this year's chapbook of selections from the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers – featuring winner, Garth Martens and finalists, Raoul Fernandes and Anne-Marie Turza – from: http://www.writerstrust.com/Awards/RBC-Bronwen-Wallace-Award-for-Emerging-Writers.aspx
A Read of Raymond (and his Sonofabitch Poems)
Sonofabitch Poems by R.L. Raymond (poems, 49 pages, PigeonBike Press)
Had Dashiel Hammet written verse, Ezra Pound been fonder of pulp fiction than the Greeks, and had the two decided to collaborate on a collection of poetry, they might have come up with something like Sonofabitch Poems. This short but hard-edged book has an undeniable swagger to it, the words spilling their blood and guts on the page. But the execution is undeniably slick with some academic ink, with a definite dip in the Classics.
Raymond rattles his lines off in short staccato bursts, like someone walking into a bar and emptying a clip from a Thompson gun into the décor – and a few chumps. The most straightforward of these, such as “Lucky Luke” ("the fist/hard and fast/nails him square/in the jaw") or “Skallagrim” ("he was bald and beardless/and so goddamn tough") are tavern dramas that come straight from the hip.
But Raymond also aims from the head. He occasionally will wrap his examinations of love, death and violence in more provocative latinate titles, like "Phenoptosis". He also mines High Modernism for inspiration, such as in the fractured "After the third beer and not much to eat" that cobbles a character study together from a number of disparate scenes, voices, Beckett references and a little game of solitaire – like “The Wasteland” in miniature and served in a dirty glass. “I haven’t read Krapp’s Last Tape/in a while/and can you get me a beer?” one voice asks, neatly mixing the mind expanding and the brain damaging in a quick bit of wit.
The collection ends with the long poem “Gravedigger”, a work that neatly pulls together the poles of Raymond's muse. It is tender and gritty, learned and raw. The heart of the narrative beats through an early image of a broken fence post: "a stub poking/from the ground/like a yellow tooth/in a rotten gum" which faces the title character, an average homeowner who is simply out to do some innocent yardwork. A subsequent series of modest but poignant neighborhood tragedies leads him to this role of accidental gravedigger, in both a literal and figurative sense. The poem is simple and blunt as the hammering iambs from which it is built and just as powerful in its final image contemplating the cold finality of death and inevitability of decay.
Get acquainted with the sonofabitch at: http://www.PigeonBike.com
A Read of Wolfgang Carstens' crudely mistaken for life
crudely mistaken for life by Wolfgang Carstens (poems, 93 pages, Epic Rites Press)
The world, as seen through Wolfgang Carstens' poetry, is mostly a dark, bloody and malevolent place. His preferred subjects are death and violence. He uses funereal and graveyard imagery to carve out poetic scars that throb like a raw wound on the page, whether he’s talking about the "sad drama of the flesh" or elderly men who "lift the bottle/in remembrance of those/lying broken in hospice beds,/inching towards oblivion". And he does all this with what seems to be a cathartic honesty.
Carstens hangs his work pretty firmly to the flesh. He writes about bodies wasted away by disease (in “do not resuscitate”) or ripped apart by the animal world (“anniversary of your death”) or desicated in the human realm (“notes on Seed”). He does so in blunt language that is powerful but never maudlin; tombstones, for instance, are "the final wisps of humanity".
But the work is never completely bleak. Carstens’ poems are often tempered by notes of tenderness, which usually manifest in the actions of children or a (brief) viewpoint shift through childlike wonder at the world before the darkness crowds back in. In “the drama of flesh” he describes building a snow-couple (snowman and snow-wife) with his kids – and then relates the subsequent weather-related destruction of this artificial relationship in sharp, black humour. In “tombstones” he watches his daughter pull flowers from the bouquet on the grave they are visiting and distribute them to all the stones throughout the cemetery, noting that “she was here/to celebrate the lives of everyone who had died”. It's a moment of warmth in a poem otherwise chilled by the vacuum of oblivion that lies on the other side.
Such moments work like a match struck in and against the dark, bringing some warmth but never quite enough light.
But Carstens' unwillingness to resolve light and dark in favour of one or the other gives the collection its dramatic tension, and an authentic poetic depth. His prosody reflects that tension, too. His is a free verse that is neither clipped syllables nor formal structure, but lines that move in and out of form. “flowers that count for nothing” comes close to iambic pentameter, for instance, while “on not being able to see her face in my mind” breaks structure down closer to blunt emotional momentum.
Crudely Mistaken for Life is not for the faint of heart. But despite much of the subject matter, and Carstens' unapologetic use of hard-edged imagery, it is certainly also not without a lot of heart – not to mention thought and craftsmanship.
See a little light at http://www.epicrites.org
