Vertigo by Marvin Bell

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Vertigo by Marvin Bell

7 August 2011

Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems is Marvin Bell’s twenty-third book of poetry, and his fourth full-length collection of “dead man” poems. The form, invented by Bell, takes the zen admonition, “Live as if you were already dead” as its epigraph, eschews enjambment (one sentence per line), and always appears in two parts (“About the Dead Man and ___” and “More About the Dead Man and ___”). Pushing limits in the dance between the intentional and arbitrary, Bell has arranged the poems in this book alphabetically by each fill-in-the-blank word or phrase.

Bell tells us that “[t]he dead man, like you, entered through an archway of effects,” echoing the first line of another iconic poem, “Why Do You Stay Up So Late?” where he declares, “Late at night, I no longer speak for effect.” In un-death, as in late-night delirium, Bell’s other-self has found the means to integrate worldly overwhelm since, for the dead man, “[i]f it were not for the lateness of the hour, everything he sees would be too much.”

The effects he rejects include “the tautologies that cloak war and torture” and glitzy marketing-speak. Through an at once more direct and more off-kilter relationship to language, the dead man can “[enter] your consciousness without tripping the alarm.” And so, through a broad range of different tactics, including humor, pathos, and brain-bending syntax, the dead man slips in his meaning, juggling around the sometimes-awful truth like the fool in King Lear’s court.

The book opens with two quotes–one about the curious nature of philosophy and another about the naturalness of making art. Bell invokes concepts from philosophy, such as Buber’s “I-Thou”, Zeno’s paradoxes, and Occam’s razor, yet the dead man himself is not loyal to any insignia, treating religion, superstition, and science alike, for he “has worn the lone Star of David and the ankh, the good luck rubber band, the medical alert.” Despite this, “he is at peace with the one fact that most informs science, puzzles philosophy, and troubles medicine: that things end.” Continue Reading “Vertigo by Marvin Bell” »

Discovering an Artistic Ancestor

23 July 2011

The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb by Mervyn Peake

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

-William Blake

Sometimes a book chooses you. Sheltering from the rain in Black Gull Books in East Finchley, I browsed the poetry section, arranged alphabetically by author, until a familiar surname leapt out at me. I knew Mervyn Peake for his fiction and illustrations, but not his poetry. The opening image from The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb stopped my breath–an infant curled up, crying out into inky blackness. It recalled to me, simultaneously, the earliest images of our son in utero, and our own anguish at his death.

I read the first few musical stanzas about Mervyn’s babe “born in the reign of George”, during the height of The Blitz, down to where “the murderous notes of the ice-bright glass / Set sail with a clink of wings”. It reminded me of one my favourite lines by one of my favorurite poets, the moment in William Blake’s “The Tyger” “when the stars threw down their spears / and watered heaven with their tears”.

The whole poem, and its accompanying illustrations, are Blakean in scope, bringing together images and poetry in a dazzlingly imaginative metaphysical ballad about the resilience and splendour of the human spirit. Continue Reading “Discovering an Artistic Ancestor” »

By Robert Peake | Also posted in Poetry | Tagged Mervyn Peake, WWII | Comments (0)

Letter to Leonard Cohen by Nancy Hechinger

10 July 2011

Nancy Hechinger’s chapbook has been a favourite re-read on my London commute. Like Kitty Jospé, Hechinger and I shared many a workshop roundtable in the Pacific University MFA program. And like Jospé, her work has rocketed forward in depth and quality owing to that time. But Hechinger’s poems embody a different take on femininity–a punchy, NYC-bred divorced-and-single-womanhood that is tough and tender all at once, where “we still sleep and read on the side of the bed / that was always ours, wonder if coming / alone is worth the pain of memory.” (“Early December”)

These are poems of homosocial collusion and collision. In “Jacks” the speaker tells us, “My mother was nifty, cool, gorgeous, / could scoop up fours-ies easy as ones-ies. / She was so close, I could almost touch her.” And “When Wives Dream,” she tells us, “We roared. / We snorted. The men turned around / to find out what was so funny. / We shut right up, stood, smoothed our skirts, / rearranged the salads, and asked them when / the hell the chicken would be done.”

But this short, snappy collection gains even keener focus when treating the rougher sex, who smell like “cumin” and “leather in the sun.” (“The Smell of Men”) Continue Reading “Letter to Leonard Cohen by Nancy Hechinger” »

By Robert Peake | Also posted in Poetry | Tagged Leonard Cohen, Nancy Hechinger | Comments (1)

Cadences by Kitty Jospé

26 June 2011

Kitty Jospé’s debut collection Cadences is a chapbook with a mission: all proceeds from its sale go to the charity Women Helping Girls. Fittingly, the collection touches on mother-daughter issues (including the “in-law” variety). In particular, I am drawn to the way poems juxtaposed in the second section unfold like a map of the emotional landscape of daughterhood, and one daughter in particular coming to terms with her mother’s mental illness.

In “Pulling at the Dark,” the younger daughter is doing her math homework upstairs when her mother “stomps into the rain-slicked night / slamming the door / so it shivers in its frame, / her head screwed tight with a quart of Jim Beam, / her hands held out as if to tear off headlights– // Stop bugging my house, she roars / with a rake of rigid fingers as if to dig noise, like dirt, / out of the night.” The daughter goes out after her, and observes rough tenderness as, “The policeman grabs her, / pulls the sleeves of the wool sweater down / so the handcuffs won’t bite into her wrists.”

Next, in “Visiting Day,” the daughter visits the presumably older mother in an institution where she “tells me it’s not safe around there and Rita has absconded / with one of her sneakers and Claire stole the sheet of paper / where she was making words out of NOTICE. / I had a whole list– / ice, tone, tin, tine, tic, ten, cent, once.” The daughter enters the mother’s world of word-making, picking a different sign and, collaboratively, “we start making words from it, / hinges for a story, / once, text, note, lonely.”

It seems for Jospé, words are just this–hinges for a story, keyholes into rooms. Continue Reading “Cadences by Kitty Jospé” »

By Robert Peake | Also posted in Poetry | Tagged Kitty Jospé, Motherhood, Mothers and Daughters | Comments (0)

Notes on Contemporary British Poetry

6 June 2011

The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, has been my field guide to better-known British poets, and a useful overview for me. Having mostly studied British poets dating from before the 18th century, and American poets since that time, I have been reading this book as eagerly as I have been reading the London A-Z map book (which is not faint praise; I am enthralled with maps of London).

For each poet, I have been jotting marginalia on my tube journey to work. I include these notes here, in a similar fashion to the notes I took on Modern American poets during my MFA degree. Unlike those notes, however, these are taken on a short sampling of work, as opposed to a whole book. I therefore intend them as starting points, not summaries.

In my notes I have also included broad designations of geographic origin, since to my outside ear a poet from Leeds and a poet from Northumberland have an auditory relationship to language more in common with each other than they do to a poet from Oxford (hence my coarse-grained designation “Northern England.”) I realize I may be missing out on subtle distinctions in language and even politics. But for now, I am concerned with puzzling out in general how these poems would sound read aloud by the authors themselves, and taking a first pass this broadly has been helpful.

Compiling in this way, I am particularly struck by the complete absence of Welsh and significant lack of Scottish poets from this volume, and the controversial inclusion of so many poets from Northern Ireland. I would be interested to hear who else you think should have made it into this book.

Here are my notes:
Continue Reading “Notes on Contemporary British Poetry” »

By Robert Peake | Also posted in Poetry | Tagged Andrew Motion, Anne Stevenson, Blake Morrison, Carol Rumens, Christopher Reid, Craig Raine, David Sweetman, Derek Mahon, Douglas Dunn, Fleur Adcock, Hugo Williams, James Fenton, Jeffrey Wainwright, Martian poetry, Medbh McGuckian, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Penelope Shuttle, Peter Scupham, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Tony Harrison | Comments (1)

Reading, Writing, Surviving, Thriving

29 May 2011

A Review of MFA in a Box by John Rember

Each chapter of John Rember’s MFA in a Box can be read in the time it takes to travel between Finchley Central and Leicester Square station on the Northern Line of the London Underground. I know because I read it this way. At least, I read full chapters on the days I could claim a seat. Other days, I read what little I could at the distance of two inches from my nose, using the book as a v-shaped shield against the armpits of businessmen’s suit jackets as they made their way into the The City to plan the next financial collapse.

A recent transplant to London from a rural town in California, I was following the “when in Rome” adage–immersing myself in written ideas to transcend the fact of my animal body crammed in with the warmth and smell of my fellow humans in a speeding subterranean metal box. Each article in the tabloids unfurled all around me had been engineered to be read in the length of one tube stop. By a precise mix of fact and moral opining, they were also designed to provoke an “Isn’t that terrible?” reaction, before being discarded in the overflowing waste bins at the top of the stairs.

I was reading a book about why one should try to write literature. But in fact, MFA in a Box is about much more than this. It is about how to survive, and perhaps even thrive, through writing, in this highly-engineered world.

I met John during my first residency in the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program. It was less than a year after the death of our infant son. John gave a talk that was to become chapter eight, about The Book of Job, and Leviathan, and why one should “go deep” in the process of writing–as “conscious dust” in a cosmos that we can only pretend to control, wrapping our arms around the big human questions because we are human, and questioners, and big and deep at our core, despite our cultural contract that says we should instead keep lacquering the surface.
Continue Reading “Reading, Writing, Surviving, Thriving” »