Review of Steven Schroeder's A DIM SUM OF THE DAY BEFORE

Steven Schroeder, A Dim Sum of the Day Before (Ink Brush Press, 2010).

            At this year’s Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, at East Central University, I had the great pleasure of meeting Steven Schroeder. Schroeder is a tremendously prolific poet and a constant supporter of poetry in his involvement with the “Virtual Artists Collective.” As much as I enjoyed meeting Professor Schroeder, it was perhaps an even greater pleasure getting to know his poetry, including one of his most recent works, A Dim Sum of the Day Before. The book seems to have been composed primarily during one of Schroeder’s sojourns in southern China. It is not, however, a “touristy” book of naïve wonder. Nor is it a book that presumes to speak on behalf of the Chinese people who inhabit its pages. Rather, it is the poetic record of a wanderer in a land that is both familiar and alien to him.

            This sensibility of the wandering outsider often leads Schroeder to compose poems focused on what one might call the “remainders”: that which is over-looked or left out. Stray cats, for instance, can be seeing scurrying about the peripherals of human society throughout the book, as in the opening poem “Mao’s Ghost Wandering,” which begins with “Gray tabby slips under a chair / at the empty table next to mine / silent, waits.” Stray dogs also seem to be frequent companions for Schroeder. In “another dance,” Schroeder says, “Black dog likes the sound / of my feet on paving stone, / picks up the pace,” an image which invites us to consider the stray poet and the stray dog as kindred spirits and temporary traveling companions. In fact, Schroeder often leads the reader to associate the almost invisible animal life of urban China with its human counterparts. Consider the first stanza of the first movement of the poem titled “year of the rat”:

                        Rat

                        scampers

                        across

                        the path

                        between

                        dogs who

                        take no

                        notice

                        and

                        walkers

                        so early

                        they have

                        no place

                        to go.

The effectiveness and ingenuity of this sentence/stanza is its union of movement of thought with movement of form. The stanza both mentally and typographically draws a line from rat, through dog, to human. This movement is more than a clever trick; it is an impressive act of the sympathetic imagination. As an outsider, Schroeder sees what the person busy with the insider’s business inevitably misses, and what he sees, and shares, invites the reader to enlarge her sensibilities and sympathies, to think about what it means to be a sentient being in the center or at the edge of things.

            These are, clearly, meditative poems, and it is in that reflective quality that they most resemble the great Chinese poetry that necessarily looms over a book project like A Dim Sum of the Day Before. To publish in the west a book of poems about China is to ask the reader to think about Chinese poetry, about Li Po and Tu Fu. Schroeder’s poems, however, rarely directly evoke these great Chinese poets. Rather it is in thematic focus that one hears the voice of literary tradition in this book. Traditional Chinese poetry, to my untutored mind, seems to derive much creative power from the tension between permanence and transience, between the Tao of the Confucians and the Tao of the Taoists. This same philosophical tension animates much of Schroeder’s work. In “a peculiar song” we are reminded of change, and perhaps industrial “progress,” though brief description of a drained pond which was once home to a flock of flamingos. Yet we are also reminded that change leaves ghosts, as a remaining “bird sings the absence / of a pink crowd / always present.” An even more powerful picture of permanence and transience is given in the image of Chinese men writing in water on the sidewalks, a trope used to beautiful effect in both “the calisthenics of rain” and “for the light.” In the former poem “Old men copy ancient poems / passerby know by heart.” The antiquity of the poems and the longevity of the men gives a sense of permanence, which culminates in the following line’s assurance that both the poems and the activity are permanently housed in the consciousness of the “passerby.” Yet in just a few lines we are reminded that the poems written in water “will last until water / turns to air under the influence / of time and sun.” Rather than resolves such a tension, Schroeder leaves it to linger in the mind of the reader, a reminder of the mysterious mixture of eternity and mutability in which we live.

            Similarly, the latter poem states, almost paradoxically, “This text will not last.” The text in question is ostensibly whatever bit of Li Po or Han Shan has been reproduced on the sidewalk, but it also asks us to consider the book we hold in hand, making the this self-referential.  Schroeder wisely and humbly does not consider his own work outside the bounds of time, which may just be one reason we can expect his poems to be with us for a long time to come.

Review in Books and Culture

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My First Time Reading with Music and Visual Accompaniment

I’ll be reading a love poem for my wife tonight as one small part of the OBU Bisonette Glee Club’s concert, which celebrates national poetry month with a cornucopia of poetry-related music. There will also be a visual-arts element to the concert. If you are in or near Shawnee, you won’t want to miss this concert, which is at 7:30 tonight in the Yarborough Auditorium of the chapel on the OBU campus.

Terror and Transcendence: A Brief Review of Larry D. Thomas’ A Murder of Crows.

Larry D. Thomas, A Murder of Crows. Virtual Artists Collective, 2011.

        A Murder of Crows is a terrible book. To be clear, it is very good poetry: finely crafted, brilliantly imagined, stunningly vivid. It is terrible only, but powerfully, in the true and classical sense of the word: it evokes a sense of terror in the reader, a kind of dark sublime. It is also a book that, like the birds that fill its pages, rises above the mundane. A Murder of Crows is a powerful exploration of violence and art, of terror and transcendence.

      Thomas turns the bird-watcher’s hobby into opportunity for precisely observed instances of Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw.” He signals the frankness of his observation in the book’s opening lines: “By cold, hunger, or the brutal / amusement of a cat, it probably / will die before I do” (“The Sparrow”). The startling combination, made even more forceful by the delaying line-break, of “brutal” and “amusement” is characteristic of Thomas’ tone in this book, which often gives us a vision of bird-life beyond good and evil. A typical example is the gull which descends from a pure sky to “the vile devourment of offal” only “because she wanted to, all / without the slightest twinge of guilt” (“All Because She Wanted To”). A Murder of Crows is a poetic Wild Kingdom narrated by Friedrich Nietzsche, and, like all the best wildlife documentarians, Thomas doesn’t flinch from vividly depicting this amorally violent avian world. Consider this image from “Starlings”:

                                the chunky males

                                will grab

                                baby sparrows

                                by their necks,

                                drag them

                                from a birdhouse,

                                and drop them

                                to burst

                                like ripe figs.

These short lines in groups of three evoke the work of William Carlos Williams and appropriate his emphasis on precision of image, but this certainly isn’t chickens beside a wheelbarrow. Thomas here, as in all the poems of this book, is careful to keep concrete image in the forefront, letting the abstract implications make themselves felt by means of the picture before the mind’s eye. He need not tell us how to feel when he presents us, for instance, with the image of carrion crows pulling their beaks from dead flesh and “stringing it / into bracelets/ of soft, / gleaming rubies”  (“Carrion Crows”). Thomas’ precision of image and concision of language ensures that the terror of each poem is intensely experienced by his reader.

     Yet, there is more to this book than terror; there is also transcendence. Most of the poems are shaped into stanzas of a regular number of lines, thus enacting on the page the struggle of art to master terror. Like great war poets from Homer to Sassoon, Thomas seems driven by the imperative to make poetry from the darkness. The regular stanzas certainly don’t diminish the violence, but they do contain it within boundaries set by the poet. Such an effort to turn terror into art is perhaps the point behind the poem “Red-tailed Hawk,” which describes one of the book’s very few stuffed birds. The taxidermist’s work is described as a “masterpiece,” its “waxen beak” curved “[w]ith the trajectory / of violence.” As in Yann Martel’s recent novel, Beatrice and Virgil, the taxidermist is the poet’s doppelganger, making art from the terror. Thomas makes the point even more explicitly in “Of Five Crows Flying,” in which he makes from the sound of the birds overhead “the dissonant, / interminable sonata / of darkness.” Art never conquers terror in A Murder of Crows, but it also never submits to it. Amidst the blood and guts of “nature red in tooth and claw” art seems triumphant merely by virtue of its ability to exist in the darkness. It transcends by remaining.

     A Murder of Crows is a disturbing and captivating book. In its singularity of subject matter it demonstrates an ambition often lacking in small-press poetry, and the ambition proves appropriate, as Thomas achieves both a unified effect and a philosophical cohesion. This book is certainly not for the faint-hearted, but true poetry never is. As Thomas admits in the book’s stunning final poem, his true purpose is, after all, to reveal “the ravenous, reeking / psyche of our kind.”

Oklahoma Book Award

Elegy for Trains has been awarded the 2011 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry.

This award is given annually by the Oklahoma Center for the Book, a state affiliate of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, and honors one book each in five categories (poetry, design/illustration, children/young adult, non-fiction, and fiction) either written by an Oklahoman author or addressing a subject directly relevant to Oklahoma.  

Here are the past winners in poetry:

1990: Wiliam Kistler

1992: Carol Hamilton

1993: Jim Barnes

1994: Carter Revard

1995: Joy Harjo

1996: Francine Ringold

1997: Renata Treitel

1998: Betty Shipley

1999: Mark Cox

2000: N. Scott Momaday

2001: Carolyne Wright

2002: Ivy Dempsey

2003: Joy Harjo

2004: Laura Apol

2005: Francine Ringold

2006: Leanne Howe

2007: Carl Sennhenn

2008: Sandra Soli

2009: Nathan Brown

2010: Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Review: Alan Berecka, Remembering the Body

Alan Berecka, Remembering the Body. Mongrel Empire Press, 2011. $15.00.        

               “Finding your voice” is a writing cliché second in prominence perhaps only to “write what you know.” Yet, as a reader, one does look for poetry that in some way distinguishes itself from the crowd of contemporary voices. Alan Berecka’s new book does just that, moving beyond a distinct “voice” to offer something even more rare: a discernible poetic personality. Berecka’s poems seem, to borrow a metaphor from Montaigne, consubstantial with the poet, displaying a unique mind and distinct viewpoint on the world. The personality enlivening Remembering the Body is witty and clear-sighted yet also conflicted and, above all, empathetic.

                Sadly neglected in recent poetry, wit had its heyday as a literary value from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, but, through ceaselessly rewarding word-play, Berecka makes a good case for its comeback. In “Rewriting a State Motto,” for instance, the possibility of bird-watching in New Jersey leads to a string of images caught between the literal and the half-dead metaphor: “odd ducks / jail birds, dirty birds and flipped birds.” This is witty in the contemporary sense of being funny, but it also exhibits wit in the literary sense of the term: it is apropos, evidence of a lively mind making unexpected connections that, once made, seem inevitable.  This quality is also evident in Berecka’s use of line breaks. Consider his appropriation of Shakespeare’s Caliban, whom we are first led to see in his familiar bestial state, perhaps breaking some small animal over the rocks for his brutal meal, before Berecka, through a clever break, wittily revises our image of the famous beast: “Caliban cracks the spine / of each volume of his new OED and consumes / each word” (“Vollard Fails Caliban”). True wit in a poet enlivens the wit of the reader, takes the mind for a rewarding ride, as Berecka does repeatedly in Remembering the Body.

                Berecka’s wit sometimes manifests itself in extended metaphor (what an earlier age called “conceit”). The best example of this tendency may be “The Theology of Dodge Ball,” which considers the coastal residents’ prayers in hurricane season in terms of a cosmic version of that hated gym-class ordeal. The poem raises classic questions about the justice of God by examining the troubling correspondence between “the jock” who “stands armed / on his side of the court” and “the God of mercy / and compassion.” The end result of the metaphor is a powerful bewilderment: “The spared will  heap praise / on a loving God, as a stained ball / slowly rolls back across a gym floor.” This is deadly serious wit.

            “The Theology of Dodge Ball” is also a great example of the conflicted side of Berecka’s poetic personality. Many poems in Remembering the Body, especially in the second part of the book, take up the problematic nature of faith in the contemporary world. Berecka seems drawn to believe and yet rejects the too easy pietism that often infects contemporary Christianity in the form of Joel-Osteen-like optimism or anti-body neo-Gnosticism. In “Shopping for Miracles: Lourdes, 1979,” the poet seems to counter naïve optimism by suggesting that real faith is modeled not by pilgrims seeking miraculous deliverance from the holy water of Lourdes but rather by his mother who “remained / bedridden and continued to say the rosary / through her pain every day until she died.” In response to the undying heresy of the Gnostics, Berecka offers the collection’s title poem, which first flirts with paganism as an alternative to disembodied Christianity before returning to an orthodoxy strengthened by doubt:

                                Once grace with this glimmer of Christ

                                freed from Gnostic beliefs, I return

                                to give thanks  for the creed

                                which states that Christ rose

                                to reign forever, his body restored –

                                a bright, blood-filled vessel – molded

                                in the image of the Creator, as are we.

Berecka calls us to remember that the faith of the Christian is faith in a man who, like us, inhabits a physical body, both glorious and capable of suffering. In fact, the glory and the suffering are as intertwined in Berecka’ poetics as they are in Christian theology and tradition. In poems such as “Easter Art” and “The Price of Art,” Berecka suggests that beauty comes from pain (Not that Berecka’s counter-Gnosticism is always morbid: consider the delightfully fleshy “My Bone of Contention with Roethke,” in which the poet declares in response to Roethke’s famous line about lovely bones, “I know a woman lovely, / and I mean lovely, in her flesh”).

                Such a theory of art born out of pain must put a great emphasis on empathy, on art as consolation in a fallen world. Berecka accordingly has filled his book with narrative poems in sympathy with a poetic type one might best describe as the “noble loser,” a figure who seems, in some way, to represent essential humanity. Narrative verse is, we are told constantly, a distinctly unfashionable choice, despite the fact that it is utilized by many of the best contemporary poets, including David Mason and B.H. Fairchild, to whom Berecka pays tribute in one poem in the book. Berecka, however, bodly defies fashion to offer, instead, poems that satisfy the reader with a fullness of imagination. In fact, the poem “In Defense of the Narrative” pits the narrative poet’s work ethic –describe in terms of a pinball game: “Ignoring / the lights and playing the game” – against the perhaps flashier poetics of the Imagists and their imitators. Such hard work pays off in stories of troublingly beautiful outsiders, like the “Litvak” champion of flatulence in “The Assimilation of Vita Perkunas,” a character unlikable in a number of ways but whom Berecka manages to stir up empathy for regardless. Sometimes in Remembering the Body, the story seems to originate closer to home, as in “the Prophet,” which tells the tale of the poet’s uncle hiding in the cellar and drunkenly praying for mercy in fear that Neal Armstrong would knock the moon from orbit. The scenario provides easy laughs early in the poem, but by the end Berecka has brought us around to see the truth in his uncle’s fear. Watching “a production line where robots / spot weld cars” and thinking, perhaps, of his own hard-working immigrant forbearers, Berecka realizes how fragile is the gravity that holds all our worlds in orbit, how suddenly a known universe of the personal sort may be obliterated. Many such characters inhabit Remembering the Body – Aunt Helen who talks to cows, Santos the drunk who talks to Jesus – and each one teaches us something about being human.

                There are many more stand-out poems in this thoughtful, engaging volume. Both “Sins of the Father” and “Flashes,” for instance, are masterful blends of narrative and personal lyric, finely paced and vividly imagined. Though he may occasionally count himself among his own “noble losers,” as in his tribute to Fairchild, in which he calls himself “a minor league poet,” Berecka has written a winningly witty and humane book indeed. Remembering the Body is clearly a major league accomplishment.

Scissortail Authors

I had a wonderful time at Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, at East Central University in Ada. Even taking time out to teach my Friday classes, I managed to hear twenty-five poets, novelists, short-story writers, and essayists. Here’s a list, with a few notes and links, of authors I heard over the course of the three day festival:

1. Shirley Hall

2. George McCormick (reading an absolutely brilliant short story).

3. Ken Hada (reading from Spare Parts, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award).

4.Alan Barecka (reading from Remembering the Body).

5. Rilla Askew (first chapter of a new novel!)

6. The one and only Jim Spurr, of Shawnee

7. Jason Poudrier (Jason is an Iraq War veteran, whose poetry offers a powerfully affecting view on the war).

8. J. Don Cook

9. Me (reading from Elegy for Trains).

10. Jane Vincent Taylor (a smart and engaging poet)

11. Jeanne Dunbar-Green

12. Arn Henderson

13. Carol Hamilton (reading from Umberto Eco Lost His Gun, another finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award).

14.  E.K. Mortenson (reading from The Fifteenth Station, a very powerful cycle of poems).

15. Mark Walling

16. Larry Thomas (former poet laureate of Texas and author of, A Murder of Crows and many other books).

17.  Nathan Brown (reading from Letters to the One-Armed Poet).

18.  James Brubaker

19. Sarah Webb

20. Patrick Ocampo (who has a new book out from Mongrel Empire Press).

21. Tara Hembrough

22. Dan Wilcox (all the way from Albany, NY.)

23. Dean Rader (reading from Works and Days).

24. Ron Wallace (reading from Oklahoma Cantos, yet another finalist for the Oklahoma Book Awards).

25. And the grand finale: Billie Letts.

I also picked up a number of new books I hope to review on this blog soon.

What a great festival!