A poem by Joe Ceravolo…

Why would it make sense to analyze select poems by a disparate group of younger poets working today via one particular poem by Joe Ceravolo?  Wouldn’t it be better, if one wanted to make the case that Ceravolo is newly relevant, to take his entire oeuvre as a reference field?  And even if his poetry might presage formally (through its informality) some things some poets today are doing, surely there are many other ways they are writing that have nothing or little to do with Ceravolo, or have much more to do with a wide range of poets from diverse periods.

The fact is that there is something in the poetry of both Barbara Guest and Joe Ceravolo that is distinct from other poets of their time or later and which is becoming increasingly recognized and influential among poets working today.[1] Let’s call it musicality.  It is a way of communicating that has little to do with logic, except as the logical mind extrapolates from given signposts.  It is poetry that is non-linear; stories are not told.  Settings, if anything, are intimated, not specified.  The poems do not rely on humor, irony, or Surrealist surprise of detail.

And yet the poetry of neither of these poets is fragmentary.   I believe that has to do with the time in which both Guest and Ceravolo grew up.  In a pre-media, pre-multi-tasking, age, their poetics, aware though they were of tragedy, aspired to wholeness.  I don’t mean their poems have pat endings, quite the contrary, but their poems have completeness.  You can think of them as musical pieces.  They begin with motifs, which are elaborated, and ultimately conclusions — musical conclusions — are reached.

It occurs to me I have been trying for some time to find a way out of the fragmentary. The more the fragmentary has been praised as the signal artistic achievement of the past century, the more I have realized I am uncomfortable with its ascendancy.[2] Ceravolo and Guest are excellent guides to poetry that is thoroughly modern without being fragmented.  In their poetry, there is no desire to turn back to an earlier conception of poetry’s limits.

A poem by Joe Ceravolo, then, provides the springboard for thinking about a group of young poets, who have been published in recent issues of 6×6.  Let’s take a look at a poem by Joe Ceravolo, and then bring it back with us to 6×6.

Stars of the Trees
and    Ponds

This poem by Joe Ceravolo, “Stars of the Trees and Ponds,” accrues power through repetition.  Not a description of a scene, nonetheless a setting emerges; the title hints at that setting, although the force of the possessive “of” is ambiguous, and the graphic separation of the word “Ponds” from the rest of the title seems to set it almost as counterbalance to the other terms.

We are in the realm of pastoral.  The following words alert us: lake, mosquitoes, pond, earth, stars, tent.  But this is no narrative of a camping trip, no occasion for a meditation on nature.  Our first impression is that this is an occasion for the senses, and the trained ear may hear echoes of Mallarmé here, that is, of a poet who could write seemingly for sound only (or color, an Impressionist like his colleague Debussy), who created dreamlike passages of sound, in which desire is fomented and disappointment and attainment take turns as the tonic chord.

Ceravolo’s pacing is masterful: unexpected and precise.  There are pick-ups: the third line ends with “lake.”  The fourth begins, “The lake…”  The sixth ends, “we float…”  The seventh continues, “…through.  Float:”  “Blanket” rhymes with itself at the beginning of the tenth line (the last of the first stanza) and the beginning of the eleventh (first of the second stanza).  And so on: “…concealed to the lake./Conceal:”, “invisible man/Invisible:”

The colons have a specific function, almost like a musical notation of repetition of an idea, a pause for reiteration.  They initiate clarification of meaning but not by providing equivalents.  Ceravolo’s insistent mode is a lyrical breaking of syntax.  There is a progression as the poem moves through its stanzas.  Although the lines are short, the poem moves by pauses, not flow, creating an expanded sense of time.  This short poem can take a long time to read.

Cars are introduced at the end of the first stanza, grounding the poem in the mundane, as much as “the lumpy earth” grounds its physical experience.  The cars threaten to “blanket” that experience, but, the poem tells us, thoughts, associated by proximity to the cars, are “never concealed,” “never/hidden.”  Whose thoughts?  At this point, the poet’s — perhaps only his.  One interpretation could be that imagination is able to resist the onslaught of commercial culture.  Reading this way, one would be tempted to identify imagination (or intellect) with the natural elements in the poem.  Another interpretation could be that cars are transportation, and therefore imagination.

At the transition from the second to the third (and final) stanza, first a “man” and then “a woman” are introduced, albeit “invisible.”  In the poem’s final three lines, the drama of the scene coalesces, as, “Leak: a woman stands over you.”  This is the first use of the generalizing “you” in the poem.  There is a human opening, literally and emotionally, here.  The word “leak,” set apart by a colon from the phrase that follows, implies the woman, standing over “you,” is leaking.  The tension created between a physical and emotional leak is powerful.  But in the next line, the poet inverts the tension, clarifies it, or has the woman clarify it, speak it perhaps: “Woman: the pond leaks.”

Another idea makes itself felt: the identification of woman with nature.  This ancient male conception has been discredited by feminists, but some women have sought to rescue an element of power in the identification.[3] Perhaps Ceravolo’s poem partakes of this more tentative identification.  Perhaps woman in this poem is nature, in all its hovering evanescence, while man is identified with the car and tent not as progress and domination but as intrusion, pollution.

In the final line of the poem, three short words quickly focus the reverie.  Everything we have become aware of is part of the sensual experience of nature in a modern context, an ambiguous relationship between a man and a woman: “You hear it.”  Humans are invisible, apart from, through somehow identified with, nature.

I would like to keep the experience of reading this poem by Ceravolo in mind as paradigmatic while examining some poems by much younger poets, published in 6×6.

Published by Ugly Duckling Presse in editions of 1,000, 6×6, as its name implies, presents in each issue six pages of poetry by six poets.  (The Rolling Stones’ second album, 12×5, presented 12 tracks by five musicians).  I have access to issues 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19, and it is these I will consider here.  In these, all the contributors are contemporary, except for Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), whose poems appear in translations by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak.  No information is provided in the magazine as to who edits it.  No bios of the authors are given.  The magazine has a distinctive format, seven by seven inches square with the upper right corner cut out, bound by a fat rubber band.  The first line of poetry from the first poem in the magazine is printed on the cover along with the issue number but without the magazine title.

One of the pleasures of reading 6×6 is having one’s horizons broadened by the editorial policy of promoting experimental work.  There are, in 6×6, poems composed of prose, and there are poems in stanzas.  There are poems written in complete sentences, easy or difficult to comprehend, and there are poems whose syntax is interrupted.  There are humorous poems and despairing poems, also angry poems, and sexy poems. I am combing the pages of 6×6, looking for poetry that works by subterfuge — in ways not readily apparent to logical analysis.

In 6×6 #18, Guy Bennett presents a suite of conceptual poems.  Here is “Poem Wholly Lacking In Ideas” in its entirety: “Intriguing as the thought may be,/it is simply not possible/to write a poem wholly lacking/in ideas.”  This is very well done, as are his other poems in the set.  They are witty, and they keep to their intellectual premise of complete self-referentiality.  More importantly, they are poems.  They are very far, however, from what Ceravolo was trying to achieve.  There is no urgent feeling that syntax needs to be fractured while retaining with difficulty a melodic result.

Lawrence Giffin’s poems in 6×6 #15 bears a superficial resemblance to Ceravolo’s in their use of exclamation, repetition and spatial separation within normally laid-out lines.  Here is his opening section:

This is well-paced, and the word choices are very tasteful.  There is a subtle mixture of ideas from classical poetry, philosophy, psychology, and politics, without the poems’ seeming overly referential.  The ideas are subsumed into the poet’s own intervention in the English language.  But there is still here a reverence for the completeness of the sentence.  This is an important separating point, that determines whether a poet will be able to find his or her path of linguistic innovation, or will be under the sway of previous modes of connecting ideas.  And lest anyone think I only favor poetry of The Tennis Court Oath lineage, let me add that innovation can take place too on the level of the syllable, or in punctuation, or in the space between words.  Frank O’Hara does it in “The Day Lady Died” as much as he does in “Easter.”

Here is a poem that approaches what I am getting at.  It is by Ossian Foley, from 6×6 #16.  I can’t tell if it is a poem or a section of a poem.  It appears on its own page without a title:

What attracts me here is the use of the word “souse,” leading off with that, and yet — apart from the suggestive word “rimless” — relying on commonly used words, and resisting the temptation to pile words next to one another.   The use of alliteration, assonance and rhyme here is sophisticated — “hand in hand without halt/the sail spans the bay” is particularly successful — but what really hooks, and seems particularly Ceravolean, is the way Foley uses the word “bay” differently in the last two lines.  This gets inside the skin of poetry, to do something only a poet can do.  “time at bay” is both “time spent at the bay” and “time kept at bay.”  In the latter sense, the time — that is to say, the music — of the poem exemplifies what it suggests: it keeps rational clock-time at bay, at least for as long as we are reading.

Megan Kaminski, in 6×6 #17, presents untitled poems from a longer sequence, “Favored Daughter.”  Dispensing with punctuation, she creates blocks of text, whose meanings hover and migrate, as in this section:

As with all her poems in this selection, the first word only is capitalized, making them function like stanzas.  They are breath-blasts — a tiny pause, or caesura, thrown in the middle — the amount the poet can speak in one burst, getting it all down in time.  Getting it all done at once means that meanings wend their own way.  You could consider this description, if you are really hung up on syntax, but it would not get you too far: hands probing under the earth run into roots, which they courteously make way for, prompting the narrator to remember croquet games and other happy summer activities.  Even that, as description, is fairly odd, but what takes on much deep weight (“deeper roots”) is the way the sense of memory is leavened in, or rather how sensation (and here I get a twinkling of Ceravolo) unexpectedly prompts memory.  As in Foley’s work, Kaminski does not tell the reader this; her words enact it.

It happens here: “there is still darkness even this time/of year” (italics mine).  She (the fingers) has found the darkness — under the literal ground of earth and underground in the subconscious — which kicks up lawn parties and croquet and shockingly interspersed among them “bequeathed longings.”  By the last line of the poem, we know for sure that it is not only the tulips and nasturtiums that now sprout, but these precise longings, which have “lain dormant underground for years” (italics mine).  In this short, unassuming poem, there is a stark depth of emotion, all the more powerful for remaining unexplicit.  We inevitably fill in the blanks.  What remains is that strange word “bequeathed.”  Archaic-sounding, almost out of place, it keys in the poem, making the connection from one person to another and making that connection somehow uncomfortable.

Paul Hoover in 6×6 #18 is something of an anomaly.  I imagine most of the poets in 6×6 are in their 30s, maybe some in their 20s, some in their 40s.  Hoover is of an earlier generation, a revered figure both as a sophisticated experimenter with poetic forms and, with Maxine Chernoff, as a significant publisher of other poets.  His work in 6×6 is not, therefore, surprising, but it does fit with the editorial stance.  Here is the second stanza of Hoover’s “Night Is Spoken Here”:

One is aware reading this stanza of a poetics balanced by years of practice and freighted with an ability to handle the big questions.  Yet, the musical carries the burden, much as in Ossian Foley’s “the sail spans the bay—/time at bay.”  Here, it is the repetition of “clouds” in the first two lines, the way the word alters its function by what it is connected with: first, the direct and non-descript; then, by pacing and substitution, Hoover shifts the game into the metaphysical.

Dan Rosenberg in 6×6 #19 presents prosy poetry in which syntactic connections are ambiguous, as in this opening stanza to “sight cracks open my shell tight flesh sloughs off”:

The placement of words here is muscular, spreading energy through the text.  “Humming” at first seems to describe the refrigerator, but later attaches to the “I” of the poem, as “splitting open” seems to go with the peach that is standing for that I.  “Rippling in the colors” is still playing with the person/fruit metaphor, but the last line of this stanza takes an abrupt turn with the phrases “bled hot” and “breached walls helplessly.”  Significant, in my opinion, is the rhyme of “breach” in the last line with “peach” in the first.  The fruit is broken here, in the poem’s logic, although it is “walls” that are broken in the literal text.  Another rhyme happens too, this one a semantic one, as “helplessly” recalls an unexplained “placed next to” from the first line.  At whose mercy does this peach-person feel her- or himself to be?  That is not explained, but the feeling, the “helplessly” of it, is very clear.

What have I found in my stays in 6×6’s pages?  I realize that there is substantial diversity in the poets published by 6×6 in terms of style and attitude.  What I am personally drawn to, what I began this discussion with, is what I find in Ceravolo’s “Stars of the Trees and Ponds.”  I find reflections of that in 6×6 as well.  It just occurred to me that “stars” in Ceravolo’s title can take on the meaning of movie or theater stars.  The poem’s woman and man are the stars of the trees and ponds.  I recognize that my reading in 6×6 has allowed me this perception.  It is not a case of some poets published in 6×6 being influenced by Joe Ceravolo’s poetry.  It does not even matter if they are aware of Ceravolo.  There is something in the traffic — the taxis, and yes, of course, the subway — that travels in both directions.  I become aware that paying close attention to what the poets in 6×6 are doing has helped me understand Joe Ceravolo better.

In Barbara Henning’s quest narrative THIRTY MILES TO ROSEBUD, Katie, the novel’s humble hero, travels “on the road” toward what starts out as an open future, but which leads directly into her past.

Peggy and Katie were childhood friends, sister-like in their shared intimacy and devotion. Katie’s mom died when Katie was young, and when the girls turned sixteen, Peggy’s mom and stepdad die in a car crash, leaving their daughter with little more than a shoebox filled with odd, random family trinkets that includes her mother’s diary. The skinny “hippy-girl” Peggy escapes from her uncle’s backwoods trailer where she’s forced to live after her parents’ accident and runs away to New York City, forgetting to bring the shoebox. In 1972 Katie is seventeen and, like her friend, is ready to run from her dad and his wife and the Upper Peninsular of Michigan and its small-town shackles to the ever-alluring and way, way more cool New York City. Peggy, who phones her friend regularly, asks Katie to bring the shoebox with her and they’ll meet up in the East Village, and with that simple request and Peggy’s mysterious disappearance, Katie’s life-long quest begins.

It’s thirty years later and Katie—a photographer, now, who is writing a book and is on sabbatical from her teaching job, her daughter Lilly living on her own—is still in the East Village though is tired of feeling chained to her rent-stabilized apartment, sick of the city’s sounds and smells (familiar, no?), so decides it’s time to take off. Her future is open, she thinks—It’s time for her “road story” and for her to address the shadow that has left a disturbing smudge on her life…what happened to Peggy? Where is she? Why did she vanish, and why doesn’t she want to be found?

The novel intersperses Katie’s present journey with her past one. So the reader, for all intents and purposes, experiences two Katies—one is a seventeen year old, frightened of losing her boyfriend Jay, while the other Katie is forty-seven, self-assured, an independent mother, teacher, friend with a commitment to yoga, her spiritual practice.

THIRTY MILES TO ROSEBUD chronicles the journeys of these two Katies. The seventeen-year-old travels through the 1970s East Village, listening to Miles and Coltrane, Joni and Dylan. Her nickname is Jazz—a pet name given to her by Jay, the great love of her life. It is especially pleasurable reading about our neighborhood in the old druggy days, the rent-controlled one-bedroom on Avenue B and Tenth where seven twenty-somethings crash: “Roaches [,] darting up the wall above the sink, into the cupboards and across the ceiling into the light fixture.”

Harmonicas, electric pianos, guitars, everyone plays an instrument. Renee, one of the kids living in the walk-up—very sexy, naturally—flirts with Jay, and Jazz exists in a perpetual state of jealousy and fear that free-love will steal something precious from her. Modeling for five dollars an hour at School of Visual Arts, drug dealers peddling their product in Tompkins Square Park, Henning evokes a past with precision and tenderness.

When Katie meets Marz, the man who will be the father of her daughter, she describes him as “a womanly man in bed, and that was just what I wanted, some gentleness in my life after a year of hanging out and changing partners as frequently as I changed my clothes.” Marz lived in Detroit and after four days of hanging out together, Katie prodded him to move in. He had recently gotten sober in AA and wasn’t sure he would be able to uproot himself and maintain sobriety. You know where this leads. Yes, it might well sound familiar…Henning captures the lives that many of us led, though the familiarity is never trite and always insightful.

The other Katie of the novel is the mature teacher and artist, the one that scours the Internet, phone book, knocks on the door of Peggy’s childhood home, visits the workplaces of Peggy’s old friends and relatives, the one that with persistent effort will find her friend. And, of course, as the older Katie is wading through her past, her past, like a wave, spills over her. Back in Marquette, Michigan, Katie is confronted with memories of her mother, her father, and sentient friends and boyfriends like Jim Gordon who she dated in tenth grade. The past and present intersect before she leaves for her trip west when Katie runs into an old boyfriend, Gary Snow, a musician she knew in the 1980s. They keep up an email correspondence as she travels back in time and looks for Peggy. Gary reminds Katie of Jay— the way the mind can superimpose one face on another—people and places reference each other, transform and blur. Katie’s spiritual teacher Harihara has taught her that what has been lost can be found by remembering it.

THIRTY MILES TO ROSEBUD is a story of remembering, of finding and treasuring the trinkets of our lives without allowing them to weigh us down. Katie, the photographer and writer, guardian of past images, reunites with lost pieces of her life. She does find Peggy, though I won’t give away what happens, just know that Henning’s introspective take on the human odyssey is never timid but is always compassionate and startling.

Review by David Perry

Love poems? Of course you do. That’s why you’re IT, the human hockey puck from “Ice event: for 14 performers and one audience member.” Or maybe you don’t and you’re not. Maybe you’re the “angry man” who takes leave of his constipated woman, just as she is having a longish bout with her bowels while reading about the shipwreck of the Admiral Graf Spee and wondering vaguely if there are really people out there who “enjoy the smell of their own excrement.” Or perhaps you’re still not sure: You’re the ambivalent “I” of the (slightly shaggy) Franco-Cali-Steinian “Language barrier,” wandering between continents “with French dogpoo on your shoe,” wondering whom you prefer (dogs or men) and whether you might be in a movie (“One dog shoots some shit and this is a Western”).

Hurry Home Honey—a hat trick of a book, consisting of two previously published chapbooks, Balconic and Clutch: hockey love letters, and a third series, Crime to be quick—is a collection of prose poems, conceptual (sports) writing, poets theater, sound-as-sense associative riffing and artfully cracked lyrics that are cumulatively:

                                                   Not unlike

                                                                          kissing

                                                                                     on a crowded train

                                                                      you

                                                                         then you

                                                                                                                               (“Hockey on the 20 m2 balcony”)

Throughout, love declares itself in registers alternately serious and playful, rueful and eager, personal to the point of a luminous opacity and “universal” to the point of transparent tongue-in-cheekiness, as Nakayasu’s language runs through the long oddness of being the one in six billion who is, was and/or will be in love with some other one-in-six-billion or another, replaying the experience of scanning a roiling crowd in hope of laying eyes on a missed or missing lover as time runs out on a last chance (imagined or actual) whose in-the-moment high drama is as likely to mellow over time into bemusement as it is to crystallize into enduring heartache.

Balconic is a serial meditation on the balcony as a liminal space that is both inside and out, closet and stage—and, of course, timeworn romantic mise-en-scène in which the irreducibly subjective experience of love continues to irrupt anew, even among the most jaded of us. The series is preceded by a TOC/index poem driven by the phrase “having been given” that gestures towards Balconic’s 15 existing poems as well as others that do not appear, effectively pointing at lack as the negative ground necessary for the experience of presence.

“Door #3,” the penultimate poem in the series, deftly traces by way of a speed-meditation on balconyness the shape of a love affair tethered to “…our first balcony on the tenth floor, the balcony from where we watched the orange lights light the campus in that horrid orange way as only orange light can, that balcony where we waited out my first dryer cycle and the balcony where we waited no we didn’t wait my second dryer cycle because I put my coins in the wrong machine . . . .” This set of romantic subjective particularities emerges from a blur of more abstract, Platonic and ironic considerations of “the balconic balcony the balconian balcony the balconesque balcony the poeticized balcony the fully committed balcony” before collapsing (though not without some hope of return).

Clutch further pursues speed, crowds, performance and collapse (once one loses speed or collides with another). Nakayasu played amateur hockey around the time of writing Clutch, and her joy in the game takes this series beyond the conceptual play of Balconic to a more concrete space, one in which bracketed segments of fragmented verse both visually evoke “puck” and in their rhythm reproduce the alternation between smooth grace and the disjointed, violent motion typical of a game of dekes, checks and slapshots:

                                            [   ] altercate minute
                                                                  degloved vs. fragility
                                            enter who—on the board
                                                      join or immensify, leaving it up to
                                                                          [with] [whistle]

“Puck” fragments stand between longer prose poems and lyrics that perform the wonderfully unlikely role of being part of the greatest hockey serial love poem we have, climaxing in the aforementioned “Ice event,” in which IT, the audience member installed in a huge hollow puck, is subjected to a game presided over by a Perverted Referee in which one player is a disguised Person of Motherly Concern tasked with the impossible job of protecting IT from harm as the real players do with IT what hockey players do. As conceptual theater (staged once to date) Clutch lends a lightness and sophistication to Hurry Home that Balconic hints at and which the final series, Crime to be quick, brings to fullness.

Crime shows off Nakayasu’s serious quirkiness across a range of forms, but it is here that the slowest pieces propel Hurry Home from very good to remarkable. “Everybody’s breaking point,” “Hurry home honey,” and a brace of shorter prose poems drive this pillow (fight) book into near-allegorical narrative space where “love poems” begins to feel like a welcome command issued by Poetry itself. By the end, one may find oneself one among a strange group of obsessive collectors (books, flowers, booze) drawn to the shores of an “odd-figured lake” in “Everybody’s breaking point,” a tale that centers on a man dedicated to a project essential in its uselessness as failed love affairs or poems: “One day he will run the Boston marathon in one single breath, and all of us who have ever been to that lake will cheer him on, throwing our books and flowers and booze at him as he whizzes by oh-so-very quickly.” Love poems? Toss something you love at Nakayasu (if you can catch her).