ToxiCity: Poems of the Coconut Vulva
Heller Levinson
This electrokinetic
volume of poems is not your standard release, but it'll sure start some trench-warfare. These poems are forged lightning
tied into double knots. Surely, Levinson's work-table must resemble a blacksmith's shop. Under his close eye, writhing
words are warped until they capture his thought's cataracts. With dense lines such as, "forensic malfeasance
rarely typifies/unsubordinated documentation," Levinson refuses to become bedtime-reading. Your brain better be be
on full alert. Otherwise, the poems will blare by like a freeway full of trucks. However, with close enough attention,
the poems begin to conduct a music, a throbbing music that makes you dance sitting down (like ole' Charlie Olson would say). Levinson's
music is almost machine-like, the pumping of pistons, but pistons hammering out a Max Roach solo.
While exciting, Levinson tends to
shy away from lyricism's often dripping emotion. This is echoed by his love of long, gnarled words and technical jargon,
all of them strung together into a chicken-wired web entrancing the reader. However, this doesn't mean that he lacks
compassion, rage, or desire. Rather, he has the mechanical world of glittering billboards cannabalize itself. Call this
a hunch, but I think his experience in the garment industry has sharpened his criticism of our obsession with the material
universe.
However, ToxiCity's
strongest point is Levinson's love of words. Carefully chosen and arranged, his poems resound with a cavernous mystery,
like a blacksmith hammering a forge. The words are chosen for their sound as much as for their meaning. Read these poems
out loud, feel them seduce your tongue!
While some of the longer pieces do test the patience, a lot of the short pieces create mushroom clouds of astonishment. Check this out
from the poem, "Ripening the Cantaloupe Files":
PSALM
(as nocture
The loss that grooms the paste flowers
the canvases themselves decoding pilot teeth
- - unbottling batwings
FerocitySilence!
night bends
arguing for a slower filtration
So for those up for the challenge,
ready to ride the lightning roller coaster, go out and find this book. And for those who'd pass up the experience,
remember, it's a lot more fun to ride than to watch.
Reciprocal Distillations
Clayton Eshleman
This slim, but far from
slight volume is a great read for anyone interested how art sears the brain. What starts out as uber-perceptive fan notes
about Eshleman's favorite painters metamorphizes into thought-cyclones in a flash-flood instant. Eshleman's inquisitive
eye dives into a whole buffet of renegade artists: his friend, the woodcut-artist Bill Paden; the reclusive janitor-painter
Henry Darger; Caravaggio; surrealist scrawler Unica Zurn; the bust-out-of-the-alphabet poetry of Henri Michaux. While
this might be a motley crew, to Eshleman, they all have the stamina to wrangle our baffling, ferocious
lives onto the canvas or the page.
These poems remarkably
converse with the artists and their artwork. As each painter creates a new aesthetic to express elusive impressions,
Eshleman matches their feats. Images and words are contorted, balloons in his magician's hands, making wonderful,
seemily impossible designs. Prepare to go woah! Check this: Unica Zurn's mysterious, but suggestive sketches
are rendered into,
"To travel within Unica's tear, to view the celestial
viper-vibrational
xylophone of her mind, the cartwheel
cocoliths of her insectile-thronging dark."
Matching this word skill is
Eshleman's monster appetite for accurate research (check out the Complete Poetry of César Vallejo review below).
Besides copious book reading, Eshleman went as far as studying Caravaggio paintings inches from his face. While this specialized
knowledge threatens to storm the poems with obscurity, Eshleman remains true to his proposition that writers and readers
must meet halfway. The detailed research actually opens a gate into the artwork, driving those unfamiliar to learn more.
Highlights for me included "Darger,"
a truly frightening piece about an artist's motives. Delving into this Chicago painter's disturbed world of
naked girls with penises and giant serpents, Eshleman does not judge as much as try to understand what deep desires and
pains would propel someone to create such a universe. "A Shade of Paden," is also wonderful. It's Eshleman at his
most candid. A humorous, gut-wrenching portrait of a dear friend, it is in this poem that Reciprocal Distillations
becomes incandescent, where the research, language-play, and quest for our origins collide, the explosion's heat fusing with
our minds, ejaculating a mirror in which we see ourselves.
In this dazzling volume,
Eshleman reciprocates the energy the artists' emit, revealing that after all, art is less a monument than an
endless, never-tiring balltoss of ideas.
An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire
Clayton Eshleman
After reading Eshleman's
latest collection of poems, I am convinced that it is an ode to the mind's reach. Containing some of his best work in
at least a decade, An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire is brimming with ricocheting thoughts. While each poem is widely
different, they are not neatly constructed imaginary universes. Eshleman never did write in that Aesop's fable, MFA confession-box
sort of style. Byte-sized answers and morals are not dispensed to the lackadaisical reader. Instead, these poems
are seismographs of a mind quaking to intimately know the writhing turbulence of being alive. Questions lead to
perceptions which only lead to more questions, the process spiraling out endlessly, with the arcs magnificently expanding.
In fact, I myself haven't seen a poet overloading his work like this since the Rilke of the Duino Elegies
or early Aime Cesaire. In the hands of both Eshleman and these poets, the poem becomes a wrecked archipalago of thought floating
on the void, maybe even sanding against it, exploring the dark stains left from such frictive contact.
However, trying to invent his own epic doesn't
mean Eshleman harbors a giant ego. The voice in these poems is not the kind of noxious my-shit-is-roses voice that can be
found in Howl, for example. Eshleman never pretends to have the answers. In fact, the speakers constantly flip both
positions and perceptions faster than fingers through a Rolodex. Take the wonderful "Noctural Veils" for example. This poem
starts out with Eshleman being unable to sleep then it goes into visions of a bear and a crocodile copulating into a visitation
from the ghost of his dead friend Nora Jaffe to veiled Muslim women on a Kabul bridge to albino babies floating like balloons.
All of this in a three page poem! It's the work of a brave poet seeking out the mysterious connections in this world.
It's this crackling energy that makes
Alchemist such a searing read. Tenderness, humor, anger, and inquisition jostle together inside the same poem. Sometimes,
they exist in the same line:
"Anal epoch, millions with their heads up their asses,
patriotizing the shit they see
spread by our junta's appetite.
Tonight the color of the sky is infested, radiant with stealth."
Eshleman says it best in the preface:
"Treat boundaries like stage scenery." In this book, he rips that scenery off the stage, opening our eyes to whole new vistas.
The Complete Poems of César Vallejo
Translated by Clayton Eshleman
After devouring this volume
(in small, savoring bites), one thing strikes me: the unforgivable inadequecy of book reviews. This mountainous book represents
the lifework of two souls, both César Vallejo, Latin America's most writhing poet, and his unstoppable English translator,
Clayton Eshleman. The title is a little misleading for it's two bodies of poetry merging, Vallejo's
tornado record of our most fleeting desires and Eshleman's recasting of that tornado into the English language. So how
can a review do justice to such an effort? Maybe by simply saying this: READ THIS NOW.
César Vallejo's work stands as the Stonehedge
of Spanish-language poetry. Infinitely fascinating, but no one knows what to make of it. He is a mystery with
lines denser in implication than those ancient slabs of rock. However, Vallejo's poems never indulge in obscurity for its
own sake. On the contrary, he desperately screams for the reader's empathy and understanding. The poems are difficult
because they contain our most intense fears and desires, the exact places where language falls apart, words shredding
in a blinding blizzard. Determined to understand the soul's invisible, but potent resevoirs, Vallejo bent the Spanish
lanaguage like no one before. Vallejo speaks in an alien language, a warped and idiosyncratic mirror of his soul.
Given this short, completely inept case study
of Vallejo, one can see the immense problems facing a translator. Vallejo presents translators with what I call the Russian
Poets Issue, where the poem is kidnapped on the ride from one language to another. However, Eshleman never lets
Vallejo's poems out of his sight on such a ride. When you open this bilingual edition, two voices jump at you. On the book's
left side, the Spanish voice courses with a bloody tornado howl, jarring you with its power. When you move your
head to the book's right side, your shock grows. After decades stacked upon decades, Eshleman has managed what has eluded
other Vallejo translators: a successful language transplant. Under Eshleman's shawl of research, Vallejo's living
howl remains intact in English. While this howl's English version undoubtably has a different flavor, its mysterious
core bouyantly floats into the reader's mind.
Maybe the reason for this is Eshleman's
dedication. Since the 1960s, he has continually revised and republished his translations. No, it's not a ploy to get more book
sales. It's a devotion to Vallejo and a desire to preserve the poems' integrity in their new language. While before we
had to settle for bits and pieces of Vallejo's oeuvre in English, we now get all his poetry in one book, a most happy moment
for those of us who stumble in Spanish. It's now possible to trace the shifting currents in these poems,
to observe how this compelling voice established itself.
One could say that Vallejo
never wrote a light-hearted poem. The most striking aspect of the work is it's utter (maybe deadly is a better
word) seriousness. While in his second book, Trilce, Vallejo would join in the Modernist obsession with
wordplay, there is a lack of play in these lanaguage contortions, an absence of the giddiness one
would find in, say, Max Jacob's prose poems or James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. However,Vallejo never becomes that depressing
friend with the annoying apocalyptic predictions. I think it has something to do with the nature of his seriousness. Antonin
Artaud once theorized that there was a force in culture almost identical to hunger. Vallejo's poems exist in
this hungry space, they savagely try to bust out of a spiritual bankruptcy. A great example of this would in the
title poem from his first book, Los heraldos negros. At first, it seems like the classic poor-me
poem, something akin to the Symbolist drivel dominating world poetry for a good couple decades. However,
Vallejo mutates this emotion into something raw and frightening. The result is not a sob, it's a scream. In fact, it's
the child of the very first scream to puncture the sky.
While many poets would have beeen
happy with being able to capture such a scream, Vallejo starts to spiral into it, to find the scream within the
scream. In his second volume, Trilce, Vallejo's poetic identity shatters like a beer bottle and the poems
become a mosaic of the shards. The result is what many consider to be the most difficult poetry in the Spanish language,
a body of work that seems to be born from brain regions besides the trusty frontal lobe. It's the inside of our
skins showing us their tattoos. In one of the most striking poems of that series, Vallejo exclaims, "Make way
for the new odd number/potent with orphanhood!" Rarely has our homelessness within ourselves been so articulated.
If Los heraldos negros discovered
that God was an arbitrary, weak creature and Trilce found that the self is a desert, then what is left?
In his last poems, Vallejo decided to bark at the void by seeking companionship with other people, finding that all of
us are bonded in misery. These last poems, unpublished in Vallejo's lifetime, are the pinnacle of his work, the
poems where he does something strangely unique. When writing about solidarity, most poets would try to transcend
the ego, but Vallejo does the opposite. Not only does he hold onto his own pain, but he discovers humanity's
mutual ego. It's a poetry that simultaneously personal and communal. By stabbing himself on the thorns of his
own despair, Vallejo accomplished what Thomas Merton has said: "César Vallejo is the greatest Catholic poet since Dante- and
by Catholic I mean universal."
Now a great poet partnered with a great translator
is the core of this book's accomplishment. However, the readers get some more great goodies in this volume. The Peruvian novelist,
Mario Vargas Llosa, writes a nice, tone-setting forward. Efraín Kristal gives a great introduction for the uninitiated (like
this reviewer) on the different stages in Vallejo's development, providing an easier entry point into interpreting these difficult
poems. Stephen Hart provides a thorough chronology of Vallejo's life, not only giving us the key moments in his life, but
also telling strange and interesting anecdotes (the one about Vallejo having sex with a stranger in the dark was particularly
weird). However, the best part of the extras has to be Eshleman's own translation memoir, a fascinating look at the process
of translation and a engrossing account of how two minds from two different worlds entwined.
