a new measure (poetry report)

I came across  Stroke by Stroke  in the wake of reading The Wilds of Poetry , an anthology assembled by David Hinton, a poet and translator of Chinese poetry. In the introduction, he calls attention to writing’s pictographic origin, which ideograms maintained but alphabetic languages abandoned.  Whereas pictographic language “manifest[s] a direct connection to the empirical world,” alphabetic abstraction connects letters to speech sounds, resulting in “words that have an arbitrary relationship to the things they name.” This explains a whole cosmology for Hinton, whereby “consciousness as open and integral to natural process [as in Taoism] was replaced by an immaterial soul ontologically separate from and outside of material reality.” Instead of consciousness being the same as everything else, it is the Ego’s, a detached and reflexive entity that is not the same as the things it thinks about. Alphabetic writing, which “arbitrarily relat[es]” to the things it names, ac...

I entered without words  is comprised of “landscape-oriented” poems, in which drops of one or two words are spread across the page. The poems have a very singular look that’s neither “concrete” (the shapes are still determined by syntax, inviting you to start at the top left of the page and read left to right) nor “Projective” (that’s too determined by the “breath” of a subject). There are some similarities to ideograms, but ideograms are not alphabetic and are a kind of  “brushstroke.”   Some of the words are printed in bold type. Gladding states that these are entry points into the field of each poem. So, for example, one might read “in my sickness the sky kept spinning” in the following poem, but the idea is to also range across the poem and read other possibilities: When I go over this poem, I also read a statement of being “amazed at how all that could be firmament kept spinning.” All that is firmament is actually spinning, at the atomic level. You also need to ...

  In “Cruel Extensions,” an early poem in Cold Dogs , the scene is of “enter[ing] the shop of an absent grocer to steal” then getting trapped inside. The speaker never even tries to start stealing, though, they just find that the door closes in on them. They try to break the door, the window breaks “onto” their “face,” and the grocer appears, trying to catch the speaker as the speaker tries to climb out:   And pulls me down to kick me in the head I’m no prisoner to walking I walked into the cage of walking willingly I’ve touched every ad, become brilliantly traceable Ate food wrapped in bright words as if the food itself could speak Yesterday I got shot with footprints in my face The king pulled me down And kicked me in the head with power At first I was upset Because it seemed to reflect the essence Of what keeps happening  But I don’t want to write like that I want to live a long, good, hard, young life   This poem has a more overt “message” than most others—or, it...

  I first read  Tumbling Toward the End  in April 2023, in one sitting, aloud with my wife. Having just lived through our first winter in Vermont, we recognized a lot of what Budbill was talking about. Though we lived in an apartment in a downtown area, Budbill’s constant descriptions of “getting ready for the winter,” of chopping and canning, of relishing being a place so far away from “the world” and so respective of insularity, feeling like you never want to leave, resonated with us.    My wife and I laughed out loud while reading many of the poems the first time around. Though he’s obsessed with death, Budbill has a soothing sense of humor that is critical of human aspirations (" But when I get it [emptiness, not having to see anyone], I don't know / what to do with it, and then / I wish I didn't have it." ) and  in which hatred for the world and affirmation of the world’s sweetness interact (plus, as I mentioned, he let out a lot of “inside jokes”...

    Amanda Paradise  has  Resurrect Extinct Vibrations  as its subtitle, the latter referring to a specific (Soma)tic ritual Conrad used over the course of composing the book. The “resurrect” ritual is a means for Conrad to feel “vibrational absence,” to feel their breath sync with animals made extinct or endangered due to the “altered pattern of our planet’s assembled resonance” caused by “our war against all living beings.”    Of all the striking pieces in the book, the seahorse/Matisse cutout-shaped poems (intoned by a dream voice and Conrad whittling at their notes)  forming the first third spoke the most to me. One of these poems, called “Diving into the Premonition,” touches on witch burnings, growing up in rural Kansas and Pennsylvania in the 70s, the internet, and remembering a lost lover, all while modeling these poems’ action: diving into whatever arises in the present space opened up in the act of writing. Each of the poems is justified...

In Eroding Witness , Nathaniel Mackey writes of “[a]n undertow / of wh ir  im- / m er sed in / w or ds.” This whir resists the ordinary world named by words, gesturing to a “repressed” realm. To write with the whir is to create a space for the dead (whatever is “left out of reality”) to be present: “The song says the / dead will not / ascend without song.”    Gizzi chooses a line of James Schuyler’s to be his epigraph: “Poetry, like music, is not just song.” This line announces his project in  Archeophonics  (“the archeology of lost sound”) of using poetry as a means to know the whir, to converse with the dead.  Gizzi posits poetry as an eternal or eternally relevant thing suppressed by the “old language” of “statecraft.” He writes: “I always consult the air before composing air,” meaning that the force of his writing stems from tuning into existent yet distant or repressed frequencies.  This project leads to frequent disorientation (“Where / do I actu...

Williams wrote “the only reality we can know is MEASURE” and declared that the reader “never dares to know what he is at the exact moment that he is.” In Words, Creeley takes these dictums very much to heart (or, rather, mind), announcing at its start: "So it is that what I feel in the world, is the one thing I know myself to be, for that instant." In the poems that follow, he captures the mind’s movement as it, rather than fix on the things of thought, falls into a rhythm propelling everything in its time: The rhythm which projects from itself continuity bending all to its force from window to door, from ceiling to floor, light at the opening, dark at the closing (From the very first poem, which opens with the statement “It is all a rhythm…”) Consistently, Creeley problematizes how measure is a name for the overdetermination of one’s perceptions by one’s perspective, while also underscoring that there’s really no way out of that condition: Why not ride with pleasure and take...