Doug Anderson's Xin Loi

So tonight I leaned over to my wrought iron bookcase, the one I found abandoned on 14th and 7th and carted home by bus, the one holding favorites, and took The Moon Reflected Fire by Doug Anderson.

Anderson's Goya series, Les Desastres de la Guerra,  is exquisite as the drawings of reference. Every poem in the collection is furiously intelligent, observant, lovely, stuck in the heart's throat; poems of war, Homer, Vietnam; declarations of the universal.

"Xin Loi" is in Part I, a section needing no name. All is in the poem, as it should be.


Xin Loi

The man and woman, Vietnamese,
come up the hill,
carry something slung between them on a bamboo mat,
unroll it at my feet:
the child, iron gray, long dead,
the flies have made him home.
His wounds are from artillery shrapnel.
The man and the woman look as if they are cast
from the same iron as their dead son,
so rooted are they in the mud.
There is nothing to say,
nothing in my medical bag, nothing in my mind.
A monsoon cloud hangs above,
its belly torn open on a mountain.

--------------
Doug Anderson, The Moon Reflected Fire (Alice James Books)

My 3,000 Loving Arms Blooms. Why I like blogging. Daniel Rifenburgh.

First, a note about blogging.

I'm finding daily posting here lifts my spirits. It's the act of writing and the sense of contact. With humans. It's like having the answer, or thinking I have the answer, and getting called on, telling the class my great idea about, say, symbols in cymbals. It's the relief following a deep sigh.

(Looking back, it wasn't me raising a hand in class. Looking back, I was far too shy. Looking now, a blog circumvents shyness.)

Since July 2010, the numbers for My 3,000 Loving Arms have more than tripled. I know that doesn't entirely represent readers--some come in search of an image or hoping to see 15,000 fingers. But still.

Today is the first day of advent which always reminds me of the glee, when I was a kid, of opening the little window on an advent calendar, the bits of glitter and very Euro-kitsch. For today I googled "advent poetry" and discovered some less than stellar work and some work too overtly religious (overtly religious is often less than stellar, too, being without invention).  The title of Daniel Rifenburgh's collection, however, is Advent. And this poem, "Turf Tract," wins my heart with its literary discussion, something I love, ultimately focusing on the personal and particular, ditto.

Like poets Doug Anderson and Yusef Komunyakaa, Rifenburgh is a Veteran of the Vietnam War. Like a bad editor I almost added a bit of punctuation at the end of this poem. Duh! I do have higher angels.

Turf Tract

In Shelley's last, unfinished poem,
In Shelley's great poem which is without closure
Because the poor poet drowned in water,
in Shelley's great "The Triumph of Life,"
The last word of which is "of"
And the whole thing stops right there
While Shelley goes out to take in a boat ride
(Talk about your Lethe and Nepenthe!),
We meet, according to Harold Bloom
And Lionel Trilling, "Rousseau,
Prophet of nature, serving
As a surrogate for Wordsworth, entering
The poem as Virgil, the guide to Shelley's Dante,"
And all of this is related to you by Rifenburgh.

It's much easier, and sometimes as rewarding,
To study the bloodlines of flat-track thoroughbreds,
Such as: Raise A Bid got out of Botcha
Botcha's Bid, or, This
Is Enough from On To Glory
Gave This Is Glory, especially if he won,
But Life always wins. It's got
By Spirit out of Some Kinda Shit
And the odds are a zillion to one
(Or, is it one to a zillion, I forget)
That Life is going to win,
Going to suck you in, and Something Spritely
Is the racing name of that foal.

How can you resist her?
Who said you should?

Shelley did;
Laid his pen aside for an hour
And died, gasping water for air, air
And Life.

I sat in my car outside the track
And counted my losses.
Life lay down with death beside me
And they had the nerve
To fornicate in front of me.

I was thinking how Mar Best gave
Mon Go Fast by Mongo
And mon do go fast
But the colt, he finish last
And my money was wasted
Fast as life, fast as that,

Fast as was the track
Where the fleet hooves
Tossed up the turf;
The little clods of this our earth,
The quick, high flinging and falling of

______
Daniel Rifenburgh, Advent, Waywiser Press, 2002.

More on books (not classy enough to be "On Books")

Aside from being signals of my disinclination to dislike sloth, the books that have been on my apartment floor for the past week or so are signals I've been working full time. This should not be unusual, but it is. I'm on the dole.

Occasionally, thank goodness, I get the call, literally. This time it was to join a group of people I've known for the past five years. We're all artists of one sort or another and we all copy edit and proofread financial statements as one of the ways we earn our living.

Generally we divide into twosomes, with one person reading out loud and the co-pilot marking the latest version of the 10-K or other SEC filing. The work isn't fascinating but it sure is eye-opening (as to what those filings really are about, hint: justification of business practices that don't favor the common person). When the justification is in high swing, the work is exhausting.

So I'm beat. So the books stay on the floor rather than getting dusted and returned to their shelves, old and new (new as in my rescue bookcase mentioned in my previous blog). Tonight I made another push to organize them. It's never over. I always think it will be, that I will have finally decided what stays and goes where.

As anyone sensible knows, books have a life of their own and it can be eerie, as in the case of Doug Anderson's poetry collection, The Moon Reflected Fire, which kept showing up in different parts of my apartment last month. It would loft itself off shelves, page across the floor, wait from this or that part of the room or kitchen or work area. Doug is a wonderful poet and The Moon Reflected Fire speaks of life (and war) through Goya and Homer in incredibly beautiful and disciplined anguish.

You know, what I planned on saying in this blog was the following:

* It sure is hard to have a life and work (big news there)
* Some books I will never reread, however much I loved them. Not writ in stone but I suspect that Conrad's The Secret Agent, which has fascinated me for the past thirty years, will have to wait (for me, not thousands of other readers and rereaders)
* Some books I might reread: Jane Eyre is always a possibility; I read A Confederacy of Dunces seven times in the year I read it (which began with my rereading Jane Eyre)
* Some books break open, literally, such as Anne Sexton's The Awful Rowing Toward God (splendid), and I will have to buy a new copy. My Babar books turned to dust. My King James Bible, which I thought was supposed to last forever--it's on what we called "Bible paper" in my Protestant Sunday School--is calling it a day and a night, in its Biblical manner

My final insight is this: pink lentils and fresh chard cook down beautifully. Add sauteed garlic and, to sweeten the soup, an apple. Spice as you will (I'm always up for Indian). Eat. You'll find the energy to at least put the last of the books on the shelves and, almost as good, delude yourself, as I have myself, that the ultimate reorganization will take place this coming weekend.

Hah!

Blurb and Be Blurbed: or, as ye blurb . . .

Blurb is not an attractive word. Visually it is at best whimsical, a bulging clown. Audibly it is the anti-onomatopoeia. A bl-ur-b is written in praise?

But it is.

From Wikipedia: "The concept of a 'brief statement praising a literary product' dates back to medieval literature of Egypt from the 14th century. The concept was known as taqriz in medieval Arabic literature." From medieval Arabic literature to God’s ears.

Movie blurbs are laughable—there are so many “best” movies of the year according to blurbs, Oscar ballots could be bound books rather than short lists.

As for fiction, I once heard an author—a good writer—at a reading—state he didn’t have time to read the books he blurbed. Maybe he was being flip?

It’s blurbs on back covers of poetry collections that interests me here, although I never gave them much thought until I had to ask poets to “blurb me.” I asked five and four agreed. (Their comments are at the end of this entry.) I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t admire their work and when I read the comments, I found temporary residence in another world where Sarah Sarai is a temple goddess of 3,000 loving arms and one heart, where chocolate is iridescent, where seersucker is the fabric of royalty.

The Future Is Happy is a first book. The fact that four poets were willing to link their names with mine made my present happy.

I don’t know that blurbs are necessarily useful or even necessary in helping me select books I like. Even if admired and beloved John Ashbery or Rita Dove recommend a book I’m not necessarily going to buy or like it. Taste is individual.

An acquaintance commented, on a social networking site, “Attention poetry publishers: when sending promo for a new book, don't even bother sending blurbs. Blurbs are bullshit and everyone knows it. Send sample poems and some kind of description. Really. A movie trailer shows scenes from a movie, right? Common sense. And poetry books are way more expensive than movie tix.”

My reaction was immediate and kneejerk, not to the sentiment (such as it is) but to the sweeping generalization. “Blurbs are bullshit and everyone knows it.” Are they? They reveal writing quality of the blurber at the very least, but also can convey a sense of WHY someone liked the book. Even briefer, they give a sense of the book.

This same poet added, “I just think it's a stupid custom, largely unquestioned although everyone I know mocks them.” EVERYONE?

Anyway. I'm not a total idiot. Every field is fixed at times by which I mean, some poets write praise they don't mean. I have read stupid blurbs of generic praise. I have doubted some poets ever internalized Camp Fire Girl, Girl Scout or Boy Scout codes of honesty.

You know. I was going to write my reaction to the blurbs on my book but realized I would be blurbing the blurbs which might invite another blogger to blurb the blurbs of my blurbs. Search on the BlazeVOX [books] catalog for a blurb written by one Sarah Sarai (for Charles Freeland’s Eros & (Fill in the Blank).

And, ta-dah, here are mine:

Sarah Sarai’s poems are charged with the terrible presence of the now and the dangerous fact of words. This is poetry as it should be. Scary, strange, generous, intensely in a physical world while illuminating an unimaginable spiritual world. This is writing that sings. The song it sings is the song of our hearts.

—Jack Wiler (Fun Being Me, I Have No Clue)

With both wit and tenderness, Sarah Sarai rigorously navigates the dialectics of knowledge and not knowing, thinking and being, the fantastic and the quotidian, the spiritual and the earthy, in language that is by turns crisp and lush. These are heady, whip-smart, funny and moving poems in which time becomes fluid and vertical—high-rise pageant of art, ephemera, filigree and memory through which our physical and temporal bodies spark and fall much too quickly.

—Lee Ann Roripaugh (On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year; Year of the Snake; Beyond Heart Mountain)

How often we hear it: "No ideas but in things." But Sarai throws pie in the face of such doctrine, and a tasty pie it is. Here, abstractions such as connection, morality and "sloppy forgiveness" form the crust of her work. But the filling, juicy with the polymorphous perversity of a living breathing world, teems with a compote of voices, textures, colors. Socrates, James Brown, Anna Karenina are tossed together with bebop, chili peppers and "100 billion neurons nipping maybe 268 mph." So much to chew on! The poet serves it all with an uncommon heart and broad-ranging intellect. The result is writing which is naked, urgent, frisky and sublime.

—Nina Corwin (Conversations with Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints; Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art by Women-editor; Fifth Wednesday Journal-poetry editor)

Sarah Sarai’s poetry is hot-wired and hip-swivel all the way up the spine! Emily Dickinson is Jewish and Moses breaks tablets for stellar sex. She’s retained the best of modernism (especially that syncopated variable foot Charlie Parker bop in the word-love) and moved onto new red earth for her own vision. Eat this book! It’s terrific.

—Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire; Blues for Unemployed Secret Police; Keep Your Head Down-a memoir)

Buy The Future Is Happy from Amazon or Small Press Distribution.

Links to reviews are HERE!

 

See also: Polonius on Acid (re: art of the blurb)