Two new finds today. Worthy for far more than was intended by the source, methinks..-Tyr
Both from this link..
January 16, 2017
Burning Down Suburbia: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Sjohnna McCray's Rapture
9781555977375
Rapture
Sjohnna McCray
Graywolf Press, 2016
Sjohnna McCray’s debut collection, Rapture, celebrates the lives fountaining through a single life and transmutes the eddies of those lives into an aria. Like the blossoms seen falling through a kitchen window in McCray’s poem, “The Pear Tree,” the poems in Rapture helicopter to earth, “suicidal brides plummeting.” These poems skitter on the edge of adoration, limned with want, cankered with loss, honeyed with the sweet fearful immensities of the strange thisness shuttling between the heart and the mind. Many voices vertebrae the poems in this book in registers of devotion, passion, ire, sorrow, and jubilation. McCray draws on the details of his birth: his father was a soldier and his mother was a “comfort woman.” In “Bedtime Story # 1” McCray describes his parents after they had first met: “they could stroll the lane like an ordinary couple:/ the unassuming black and the Korean whore/ in the middle of the Vietnam War.” From these details, McCray explores the complicated notions of Americanness that his life embodies, implies, and challenges: “an extravagance of small pauses,/ / many caesuras.” However, McCray’s work as a whole concerns itself with recreating the infinitesimal moments in a life, situated on the threshold of song, when past, present, and future overlap and we are most ourselves.
McCray’s lines are most themselves when Eros and Thanatos equally inhabit them. In the last lines of the book, McCray redefines “rapture” as the moment before an orgasm, “an old LP, a needle tracing static,/ a record ready to drop.” Meanwhile, outside, walnuts smack on the roof, a cardinal shakes on the line, and “still we refuse to yield/ back into being singular.” For McCray the refusal to be anywhere else but in the posture of eternal embrace constitutes the very groundwork of existence; we are always dying into each other, into our pasts and futures, into our ghosts and regrets. Throughout Rapture, McCray opens a dialogue with his father, whose life and legacy constantly swans into the poems. The poem “Portrait of My Father as a Young Black Man,” for example, reads:
Rage is the language of men,
layers of particulates fused.
Rage is the wine
father pours to the ground
for men whose time has passed. Rage
is gripped in the hands
like the neck of a broom held tight. Rage
gets stuck in the throat, suppressed.
Rage is a promise kept.
Although rage is part of the vocabulary Rapture sorts through, the real language of this poem and every other poem in this book is love. Whether commemorating the lives of his parents, hailing his beloved, burning down the suburbia of his own adolescence, or elegizing the tragic life and death of the poet, Reetika Vazirani, Sjohnna McCray is driven to the page out of love. Rapture is a reminder that we are at our best when we refuse to yield back into being singular, a timely and timeless collection to laud on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2017.
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Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Review's 2016 Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, and the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize,
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LinkwithinPosted by Dante Distefano on January 16, 2017 at 04:23 PM in Book Recommendations, Dante Di Stefano, Feature, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 13, 2017
Do male poets have crushes on female poems? [by David Lehman]
Do male poets have crushes on female poems? Maybe, but the reverse is also true, and the old canard that male poetry editors like it when the women talk dirty implies bad faith on the part of the males and bad morals on the part of the females and is as reductive as concluding from a man's appreciation of, say, Marianne Moore's poems that the guy likes scholarly and quaint. There's more to Moore than that, and a poem with the tits to start "Fuck me" is daring not so much because of the grab-you opening but because that's a high standard of intensity for the rest of the poem to live up to.
Do (some) male poets have a weakness (or a yen) for lustful poems by women such as Olena Kalytiak Davis, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Kim Addonizio, Jennifer L. Knox, Nin Andrews, Deborah Landau, Moira Egan, Cynthia Hungtington, Sharon Olds? Sure, but the length of that list and the fact that it could be twice as long lead to a different explanation, and I would argue that female sexuality is an area of experience that had not until recently been explored quite as candidly and with language as frank and sometimes even deliberately crude as you find in the best American erotic poetry. After the 1960s you could tell there was a void in the literature and you knew you could do something about it. Taking advantage of the opportunity, talented women have given us some wonderful erotic poems.
Now the idea of "gendering" neutral objects fascinates me. In Grench and Ferman, I mean French and German, the nouns are grammatically either masculine or feminine. I believe this is for arcane reasons having more to do with signs than with meanings, and there are oddities aplenty -- in French the word for the female breast (sein) is masculine and the word for the male chest (poitrine) is feminine. There was always a semantic difference between gender and sex, and though it has been obscured tremendously in recent usage, it's a pity if the distinction is lost, and "the difference between gender and sex" has real possibilities as a title.
That said, don't you love the idea of assigning a sex to the parts of speech -- or to individual poems? Please then, dear reader, guess the sexual identity of the following works: "Ode on a Grecian Urn." "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." "The Waste Land." "In Memoriam." "The Sick Rose." Though all were written by men, I'd say two of these is female.
Read The Iliad and you are in a universe that is male and tragic. Read The Odyssey and you are in a universe that is female and comic. Mark Van Doren said that. The Odyssey has the greatest cast of female characters: Calypso, Nausikaa, Circe, Athena, and Penelope. But that is just one reason The Odyssey is feminine.
A more challenging case is that of "To His Coy Mistress" (Andrew Marvell) versus "To His Mistress Going to Bed" (John Donne). Set the poems before a group and ask for its preference, and you'll see a 50-50 split on which they like more -- and which they consider more acceptably masculine. It's always the women that have the strongest opinions.
Reading a poem without knowing the identity of the author, as during certain prize competitions, you invariably wonder whether the author is old or young, man or woman. Researchers Camille Pascale and Robert Petit tested themselves and were 80% wrong. Guessing the age and the sexual identity of twenty poems anonymously presented in a variety of typefaces, they were wrong sixteen out of twenty times. This happened repeatedly. They concluded that the whole endeavor was a blind alley. (See Camille Pascuale and Robert Pettit, "Blind Judgment: The Poetic Case for Gender Neutrality.")
But the conceit makes it great: the idea played with in the dance hall of poetic improvisation. The idea that some poems are male and some are female, and that male poets may write female poems and female poets may write male poems, stands or falls not on its truth value but on its value as a stimulus to thought and discussion.
As Ern Malley observed, "a poem is both the means and the end." Eric Rice adapted Orwell: "Some poems are more equal than others." The Dickinson expert Jessica Miller said "some poems have cojones" but was opposed as sexist by Jane Splice, who favored the "tits" locution used above.
From the archives: originally posted January 13, 2012.
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