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Linda Lerner POEMS BY VETERANS Edited by Dayl Wise Post Traumatic Press (PTP), 104 Orchard Lane North, Woodstock, NY 12498, 2007, $15. My upstairs neighbor, a man in his 30's, recently got a video game with pedals which he pounds with his feet. It sounds like a ball or a hammer. Sometimes they come fast, one after the other. Then I hear a cry of victory. Gun shots, I think. I don't know if it's one man or a battalion struck down. What I do know is he is playing some kind of war game, what Jose Vasquez refers to in his poem, "Among our machines," "little/ green men running across/ our screens so we/ shoot and cheer/ when we get those little fuckers." It is then we "reach the next level/ of this video game/ we call war." Camillo "Mac" Bica, in this collection's first poem, "A sign of the Times" writes "of those not driven crazy by war" for whom "killing and dying meant nothing./ In fact, in a perverse way, they enjoyed it.../ Those crazies hated to see the war end." They are not like the poet vets in this anthology who've fought in wars they are still fighting. Theirs is a video game war in which real people die. While most of the poets included in this anthology (what I believe is the first of several to follow) served in Vietnam-late 60's to early 70's--there are also vets from World War II, the cold war, and the Korean War, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their styles and level of craftsmanship varies; some have been writing poetry for years, while others are new to it, driven by the need to exorcise demons, to save people who died, to make us feel what they've lived through. Jim Murphy, who'd served in Vietnam writes, "I just got in-poet-country... (I'm a FNP...A Fuckin' New Poet)" describing the poetry business as being like war. "These brothers" who've been at it a while "keep their distance.../ not making attachments to me." Not sure who among them will survive, they guard their feelings. Despite differences among them, it is the immediacy of their experience which the poets bring to us. In one sense it doesn't really matter which war they fought in. The real war they are fighting is war itself. The game of war. Most of the poets are active in some Veterans for Peace organization, working for human rights, and are anti war advocates. But, not all those who came home made it back. Richard Boes' "The Wall" (chapter 10 of his novel, The Last Dead Soldier Left Alive) describes the mechanical "Welcome home" everyone kept repeating, "assuming, I did come back." He keeps looking at the wall, when suddenly he realizes "I wasn't looking for someone I knew. NO! But for that part of me I'd lost." No matter how often they tell their story, each one knows as Marc Levy says, "...in the busy chambers of my/ Heart are things/ I will never tell/ Though I swear we did not mutilate-/ Only booby trapped or ransacked--...Let me never tell you/ Things you cannot know." We begin to feel what he can't find words for. We hear the guilt he and others feel. Fred Nagel "Thank(s) the lord that (he) can't smell those fires;/ Because burning bodies make heroes into liars." Larry Winters can't win: "I'm ashamed that I may not have killed anyone in Vietnam./ I'm ashamed that I may have killed someone." None of them can forget what they saw, no matter how many decades have passed since "their" war. The poets who write of the current war include Bob Lusk, a NY folk singer, and a member of Veterans for Peace, who is arrested for reading the names of soldiers who died in the Iraq war outside a recruiting station. In Jan. 2005, Jose Vasquez, who'd served for fourteen years in the army, applied for conscientious objector status because he could no longer "fight for lies." Ron Thomson describes the president dancing "cross the floor/ While Iraq is at war/ And the band plays on." Dayl S. Wise cries out how we must stop "that endless cycle of rape/ Rape of women, peace, earth." Dan Wilcox asks, "If Peace broke out tomorrow/ would you be prepared/ like they say we must be/ prepared for war?" <> _____________________________ |
Linda Lerner RIVERINE (An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers) Edited by Laurence Carr Codhill Press, New Paltz, NY, 2007, $20. RIVERINE is a very impressive looking book, whose cover art, by Anne Gorrick, will immediately attract readers. The anthology is divided into five sections: Memoir; Short Story; Microfiction and Prose Poem; and two poetry sections-Hudson Valley Views, and Other Realms. There isn't space enough for me to discuss all the good work included herein, so I'll restrict my observations to the poetry. In the Hudson Valley Views section the best poems go beyond merely evoking a particular landscape. "We are skeletons buttoning sweaters against poverty's law," begins Jaqueline Renee Ahl. James Finn Cotter becomes our guide on "some day in late May,/ air clean as cucumbers" in one of the anthology's strongest poems, asking us to leave behind "knapsack, guidebook, and canteen" and follow him up Thomas Cole Mountain back a century ago to where "Men in black waistcoats and white collars/ strolled arm in arm with busted ladies..." And Phillip Levine, who has "broken hearts through the careless use of lilac and hammer" and has "built crooked stairs that climb to empty places/ hung doors where windows go/ and placed clear glass in entry paths.." is now content to have made a "plain and simple/ Flower box of clean straight edge." In the Other Realms section, Enid Dame tries to imagine the "five floor Bronx walk-up where memory started" for her father as she looks down on his dead body. She recalls the day they went to look at the building, now so dilapidated he says "This is awful. Let's go." She thinks "People...live here./ That counts for something." In the final stanza the poet touches her father's body "...untenanted,/ yet warm,/ a brick wall/ still holding in the sun." For Kate Hymes slave ships and chain gangs conjured up by iron shackles on a table provide a better lesson than all the "studied words about/ whips and chains and runaways" in one of her two tightly constructed poems whose imagery, reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, provides the perfect emotional impact. I like the way Christine Boyka Kluge blends her lovers into the natural setting: "The skies in their mouths/ meet in a kiss" begins her beautiful poem. There's no separation between them and the world which "...tastes of rain and torn petals." Donald Lev as well, in "Twilight" sees life as one continuous flow. "The rainbow collapsed today" he tells a person addressed as "Dearest." He's been soaking negatives in his darkroom, "in a solution of tears and acid." There are no positives. His eyes are closed as he works. There are no thoughts, "only a sense like the sound of a river/ entering an unquiet harbor." If you listen "you can hear laughter in the waves/ as being is transformed into memory." Marilyn Reynolds recalls "Indiana summer nights" and a "hot musician/ raising (his) trombone to the treetops," promising, "I'll be back to find you" in a poem that has a jazzy blues feel that isn't forced, but arises naturally from its subject. And a poem that made me laugh is Bob Wright's "A Valentine in Green Pastures" which begins, "I think I shall love you till/ the cows come home." Then he takes absurdity to its logical conclusion, as "those bovine creatures have been/ lost for decades now..." Many such surprises abound throughout this strongly recommended anthology, and much that makes it a very worthwhile purchase. <> |
Michael Carman YOU ARE HERE: NEW YORK CITYS STREETS IN POETRY Edited by Peggy Garrison, Victoria Hallerman, David Quintavalle P & Q Press, P.O. Box 554, New York, NY 10014-0554, 2006,152 pp., $12. What a good idea-an anthology of poems about the streets of New York City, all five boroughs, in all kinds of weather, night, day and in-between. It's a collection that has the feel of the classic old-time New York City bookstore, where the floorboards creak, the springs in the Overstuffed chair in the corner by the radiator gafve out in 1962, and the books are delicious enough to make you spend all your lunch money on them. In other words, this book is steeped in atmosphere. Two of the editors, Peggy Garrison and David Quintavalle, who also happen to be the book's publishers at P & Q Press, credit their partner, poet Victoria Hallerman, with having hatched the idea. It happened over lunch one hot August afternoon at Wave Hill Gardens in the Bronx. The gardens overlook the Hudson River and the Palisades from every spot, and maybe that is why, fittingly the book begins with water views. "Bargemusic," by Lila Zeiger, opens the collection, followed by "Brooklyn Bound," a reminiscence of beach and boardwalk by Barbara Elovic. Then comes a small poem by Myra Shapiro, who paints the quintessential image of a wet Village street in the rain. Shapiro writes, "4th and Perry was gold." The title of Shapiro's poem, "Gloria, I'm Here in Your City," is one of the delights of the opening "Boroughs" section of the book. It carries all the excitement and promise that first-time visitors to New York often express, which in a mysterious Way is almost the same feeling many longtime New York lovers, as Shapiro's bio indicates she is, still hold. The poem closes with an image of place as gift: "as if a fresh green salad had been prepared,/ a glorious blend of garlic, oil and vinegar,/ and it was being tossed at my table." Soon the poems move inland for awhile, although rivers and ocean are never out of mind. While Manhattan, perhaps understandably, takes the lion's share of the poems in the collection, all five boroughs are represented. Muriel W. Alexander, nearly ninety when she offered "Wall Street on a Sunday," begins, "Here is the hush of some Pompeii...the people fled from the lava of work." In the Bronx, Matthew Lee writes, "The side of the building, like a face,/ is half torn off" ("College Ave and 146th Street"). "Bensonhurst boys have tight bellies & ready fists," writes Jackie Sheeler in her Brooklyn memory, "Before They Come and Eat Me." Catherine Doty remembers, "The house, of course, is gone," in "52 Canal Street," Staten Island. And Matt Fried describes a witty, quirky conversation on a bus to Queens, where the poet meets the "Quintessa di Hapoli/ in red slippers" ("Riding to Queens"). There are poems about leaving the city, of course. A tongue-in-cheek escape poem from Staten Island, "Pushing Sixty" by Robert Monda, finds the city hard on an aging body. The poet longs to "hail a cab to a remote monastery and hide there/ among the missing until the coast is clear." In "Just in Time," Tony Gloeggler writes with nostalgia about his parents' narrow escape, as they saw it, from Bed Stuy in 1964. There are poems about sightings of the rich-and-famous-Sue Rosen, who lived near George Plimpton for a time, wrote "Plimptonville,"--and there are poems about just the thoughts of such sightings. John Grey's poem, "I Can't Just Stroll a New York Street," obsesses about Woody Allen, Al Pacino, and Garbo, as if the city itself were a movie set. There are poems that tell stories like the ones in The New York Times' Metropolitan Diary. In William Borden's "New York Shabbas," we meet a sweet and most unlikely young con. Peggy Brooks' "He Presumes" tells about the guy who manages to cut in line at the theater box office and get away with it. The three editors, accomplished poets all, contribute their own artistry as well. Garrison's "Coney Island" gives us the music of that place's "honkey-tonk tinkle." David Quintavalle's "8PM Blue Sky" moves us with its startling finish-"...the little earfuls I recognized on hearing, get lost,/ like the view of me from all that blue." And Hallerman's "Times Square Walking, 1969" illustrates the poet's striking exploration of interior geography: "coddled-egg Ohio shyness I left/ like a stocking on the sidewalk, but the voyeur/ remains." The reader might wish for a few more shapings of the material--a more traditional table of contents, for instance, rather than the poem titles' being listed only in the back by borough; if you don't remember the borough or the author, you have to search for a while. Some of the section titles-Sweep, Neighborhood, People, Offtime--aren't always helpful, although with poems that often contain all these elements, it couldn't have been an easy job to group the work. There are a number of spell-check and grammar-check escapees that make the reader stumble. And while the generally proletarian, generally middle-class view of New York City makes for good reading-broken bottles and cracked sidewalks, all that the city has spurned and lost-one wonders if there might have been a poem or two from other vantage points-from a ballroom floor or garden roof, say, or a poem written from the poet-view of someone without white skin. But the collection is strong in imagery, as in~ "From the train platform, look north for the yellow lamp/ left on in the kitchen. The tooth-colored sink,//the bowl on my table pool-water blue" (Matthew Thorburn, "A Postcard from Astoria for Wen Zhengming")-or Patti Sirens' viscerally guided tour of a drug trip ("Godless Creatures")-or David Masello's unusual narrative, "The Skateboarder Puts His Hand on My Shoulder." As for quality, the best poems are those powered by the intersection of a clear, structured consciousness and imaginative instinct, wired through poetic craft and skill. Most notable, for me, is Vijay Seshadri's "North of Manhattan," from his stunning collection, The Long Meadow. "You can take the Dyre Avenue bus to where the subway terminates/ just inside the Bronx/ and be downtown before you realize/ how quickly your body has escaped your mind..." Seshadri makes the mind's eye hold the physical and metaphysical together in a beautifully well-crafted sensory esperience. Two other beautifully realized poems are Catherine Doty's "52 Canal Street," and Caroline Kandler's "The River Under Stone Street," which finishes: "I hear echoes of that early life./1 smell fresh water from a distance./ A hundred years, two hundred years./ What does that mean to a river?" YOU ARE HERE ought to find many eager readers in this part of the world. After that, as the editors urge in their introduction, "Put your sneakers on and head for the streets!" <> |
Created on ... September 27, 2007