THE ANTS and INSECT COUNTRY (B) by SAWAKO NAKAYASU

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

THE ANTS by Sawako Nakayasu

(Les Figues Press, Los Angeles, 2014)

and

Insect Country (B) by Sawako Nakayasu

(Dusie, Switzerland, 2007)

To know of Sawako Nakayasu is to know that she’s got this committed relationship to/with ants.  She’s been writing about or through them, as well as conducting related performances, for many years.  When I think of Sawako Nakayasu, I remember her lovely smile, her intelligence … but also, always, ants.

Thus, I was not surprised when she came out with a new book entitled (wait for it) THE ANTS.  Eagerly, I delved into it.  Actually, I could have opened the book with no particular enthusiasm to my curiosity and still would have been snagged immediately into the book—there is a propulsion to Nakayasu’s writing styles and engagements with ants that make the book a page-turner. 

That propulsion may be attributed to the enchantingly weird turns the poems make, their wit, their humor, their insight, even its version of algebra (“Apple Speed”), their deft deadpanness (“The Cannibal”), the writing’s punchiness (“Art Project”) and always her unique discernments. Here is a sample—and for this example, I opened the book at random to show how many of the poems benefit from Nakayasu’s poetic strengths as I identified them:

Girl Talk

We are sitting around the table eating and drinking and exchanging stories about flashers, gropers, underwear thieves, your general assortment of urban perverts. When I tell the story about the man who came up to me and opened up his bag and offered me one of a teeming million wiggling ants in his bag, the whole table goes silent and I am reminded all over again how hard it is to get along with the women in this country.

One of the book’s strongest poems is actually the opening one, “We the Heathens.”  After reading the first poem and before the rest of the book, I wondered whether this poem would overshadow the rest as I found it so effective.  Fortunately, all of the poems were strong in different ways. 

The writing contains much forward-pushing momentum, of which “Battery” is an exemplary example owing to its use of repetition, (lack of) punctuations, and masterful use of the word “very”—here’s the poem’s beginning:

We get lost in the desert, lost very lost, and although we aren’t going to tell anyone that we can’t possibly be any more than two miles from civilization, the fact remains that we are lost very lost in the desert very desert, and the car very car is having a hard very hard very hard time getting started up again, and so we very kick it in its ass very ass and the car is still having a hard very hard time …

Now, I did pause in my readings over the poem “Decay,” specifically wondering whether it was aptly titled. For, isn’t the matter of decay a process of time versus the quick crack of the pop?  Here’s the poem below and you decide (at one point in my considerations, I thought the poem should be retitled something like “Bliss”—as in the paradoxical bliss one sees in a hungry ascetic’s eyes):

Decay

The great desire is to get inside of it—the poem, the painting, the movie, the music.

An ant, perceiving itself to have failed to get in anywhere, takes one brave leap off a cliff, thereby making its last and final attempt to get into something, anything, anyhow.

On its way down, or perhaps at the moment it lands (neither of us are quite sure which), it makes an undeniable percussive sound as its body breaks, pops, and for the duration of the decay of this sound, it is as inside as it can get, there, inside that sound, however short-lived, who cares if it is witnessed or not.

Nakayasu does note “however short-lived” for the sound of “pops”; I wonder if it’s an improvement if the “pops” was just eliminated so that the “sound” referred to then would be the breaking, which is more of a process of time as is decay.  Anyway, a minor point….

*

Nakayasu’s ants were previously featured in chapbooks; Galatea Resurrects reviewed the Dusie chap INSECT COUNTRY (B) twice – HERE by Bob Marcacci and HERE by Nicholas Grider. I also previously reviewed the first chap, INSECT COUNTRY (A) over HERE. Reviewing THE ANTS made me look up the B chap version again and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I can see how for some readers or depending on the reader’s mood at the time of reading, the chapbook presentation may be more effective because of its ant-like scale: the smaller size of the chap, the more emphasized drawings of the ants, and the fewer number of poems present the project more intimately than does this “trade book.”

Interestingly, I didn’t have the same doubt in reading the poem “DECAY” – the duration implied in “decay” not fitting the brief time aspect of a “pop” sound -- when seeing it in the chapbook version.  I’m not sure why; perhaps the chapbook’s enchanting presentation just doesn’t lend itself to analysis so much as just experiencing joy.

Yet of course the book is necessary as it’s also worthwhile reading to see all of the ant poems in the same space.  And the book’s advantage is how its scale, unlike with the chapbooks, allows for references to other poems in the series (e.g., "Ant Heart") as well as to evoke a more present sense of the poet’s autobiography or series persona (I can’t tell, not that it’s necessary to know for purpose of enjoying the poems, whether some of the Japanese references are true to life or fiction).  The overall result is a deeper, more multi-layered project that will linger in memory longer than the chaps’ charm.  Nakayasu has spent years with ants, and this book makes her endeavor worthwhile.

I’ll end with one of my favorites—it made me laugh out loud, startling the cat and making her jump from the windowsill:

Art Project

I am observing an ant trail from the tenth floor of a building, and photograph the exact same frame, once per second, sixty times, in order to have an accumulated minute of ants. Later, much later, I go back to the same exact spot where the ants once were, and place a grain of rice in the exact location of each ant in each frame. I am growing satisfied with the precision of my accumulation of ants and time as represented by grains of rice, until my postwar Japanese mother finds me and slaps me upside the head for wasting all that rice and tells me to get back inside and do my homework.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects because she's its editor (the exception would be anthologies she edits because they focus on other poets as well).  She is pleased, though, to point you elsewhere to recent reviews of her work.  Soffwana Yasmnin engages her poem "Jade" from her THE THORN ROSARY: SELECTED PROSE POEMS AND NEW (19980-2010) .  Her latest book, 147 MILLION ORPHANS (MMXI-MML), is also reviewed by Joey Madia at New Mystics Reviews as well as at Book Masons Cafe Press Website and Literary Aficionado.


And her latest anthology as editor, VERSES TYPHOON YOLANDA, receives an engagement in this issue of GR by Aileen Ibardaloza; at Manila Standard Today by Jenny Ortuoste; at North American Review by Vince Gotera;  and at Philippine Inquirer by Luis H. Francia.

IN THE HOUSE UN-AMERICAN by BENJAMIN HOLLANDER

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

In the House Un-American by Benjamin Hollander

(Clockroot Books, Northhampton, MA, 2013)

THIS IS AN ACUPUNCTURE BOOK. Like any great medical text, it contains a selected "case” where someone presents to a great doctor a discomfort, a situation of malaise. The exact contours of the discomfort may or not be exactly clear to the sufferer, their family or friends, but they feel hindered, confined, a little choked. … And so naturally they explain. … The great doctor merely takes it all in — listen, senses, watches, waits, perceives — bringing no previous judgment of the situation to the situation. The words are, to him, only partially instructive. Rather he sits there in the flow of explanation. — blank-faced, unmoving, empty as an old black stone —

                        Seung Sahn, Only Don’t Know

Unfortunately, in this world, Carlos ben Carlos Rossman’s world, my world, your world, our world, there is no such thing as an acupuncture for our malaise. And, as for a doctor, are you kidding? There is no doctor. There has never been a doctor. Tho, somewhere, on some beach or other, there may be an old black stone …

                        JBR

1.

… so the furthest I’ve ever been able to get in Kafka’s Amerika is the scene where Karl Rossman leaves his luggage in the care of a total stranger and plunges back below deck because it’s just too painfully obvious what’s going to happen next even if it doesn’t, but I know from Benjamin Hollander’s In the House Un-American that Karl does indeed manage to leave the ship more or less, less probably, un-intact because on the first page I am introduced to the offspring of the mystic marriage between Karl and William Carlos Williams, Carlos ben Carlos Rossman, who grows up in Queens, eventually moves to San Francisco (neither of which seem anywhere near The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma), and mind instantly brings to itself two poems, Jerome Rothenberg’s “Cokboy”,

saddlesore I came

a jew among

the indians

vot em I doink in dis strange place

mit deez pipple mit strange eyes

could be it’s trouble    

could be       could be

etc, tho here it is not “the indians” who could be trouble, and Kenneth Koch’s “This is Just to Say”, especially part 2,

We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing

who does?, but I don’t think it’s that version mind is really trying to think, it’s one in which the plums are injected with strychnine, or cyanide, or Round-Up, which I may or may not have dreamt (or maybe it is this one, because it has lye in it), but in any case, and in a manner of speaking, and we can’t make too little about a manner of speaking, because a manner of speaking is what there is, because what is not a (sometimes spoken) text (which I first typed as test)? the real concern here is: can one actually enter into “America’s pastime” with a green baseball bat?

2.

America, Amerika, the great melting pot, in which all differences are melted away, so goeth the myth, which is useful to the ruling class but is only painful for everyone who actually has or is a difference, because this is an unforgiving and unaccepting place, really, if the difference is perceived to make a difference, because then it is information in the Gregory Bateson sense, and we all loves us our information, because that tells us how to respond to others, and we all loves us our stand your ground laws, which allows us to kill that difference, and yes of course this is hyperbole, but maybe not to an immigrant, which means every one of us besides the indigenes who is not amnesiac. And I wonder: difference, “could be it’s trouble / could be       could be” … identity, “could be it’s trouble / could be       could be”, coincidence when you’re a stranger in a strange land, “could be it’s trouble / could be       could be” …, what does it mean that Bateson shares a first name with Samsa? (“could be it’s trouble / could be       could be”) In any case, if the ground melts away, it melts into what, exactly? into an American. But what the hell is that? NB, this is a timely book, because, as the ubiquitous news tells us, in early May 2014

Alabama’s chief justice offered an unusual interpretation of the U.S. Constitution in a newly-released video, telling a religious organization that the First Amendment only protects Christianity. “They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship” Chief Justice Roy Moore announced at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, an event hosted in January by Pro-Life Mississippi. … Moore told his audience that religion in the First Amendment only applied to the God in the Bible. “Let’s get real. Let’s learn our history. Let’s stop playing games. Everybody, to include the U.S. Supreme Court, has been deceived as to one little word in the First Amendment called ‘religion.’ They can’t define it,” the state’s chief justice said. “They can’t define it the way Mason, Madison and even the United State Supreme Court defined it, ‘the duties we owe to the creator and the manner of discharging it.’ They don’t want to do that, because that acknowledges a creator god.” “Buddha didn’t create us. Mohammed didn’t create us. It’s the god of the Holy Scriptures,” said Moore. (MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/judge-first-amendment-only-christians)

but since millions of other “Americans” instantly cried bullshit, it doesn’t tell us what an American is, only that no one knows, not even “the pure products of America” (about whose craziness more in a minute). But one thing we do discover in In the House Un-American: real Americans do not come to the park with green baseball bats.

3.

What we have is a genre-bending series of meditations by Carlos ben Carlos Rossman on what his (trans)migration might signify, and by the end we are no nearer understanding – or are we? – than Karl Rossman was, when he saw the Statue of Liberty looming and either confusedly or correctly or … saw its torch as a sword … this is not a book for those looking for answers, I don’t think, it’s a book for those in search of uncertainties. Among the uncertainties are linguistic ones, and In the House is written in such a way as to foreground them, to hint that language just might be the key to the mystery, not that there really is a key, because there might not really be a mystery, tho on the other hand …. and pace all you theorists and philosophers and poets and leftists and … who bemoan the “linguistic turn”, by the end of this book I am pretty well convinced that, to quote Pound, “you who think you will / get through hell in a hurry”, are shit out of luck, as my mom liked to say, and language (which of course doesn’t stand alone, which of course makes and is made of history) will remain the ground of all thinking.

Here’s a beautiful (necessarily a bit lengthy) example of what I’m mumbling about:

Anyone in America could be Ron Paul.

So when his teachers claimed Berri was just right in English, and thus in his head from the moment he said “yes” in it at the age of six after arriving at the Harbor of the New York of the New Land, he seized a particular kind of invisible ownership of the language – somewhat like Xerox did with the copy, advertising itself out behind the scenes in the land of plenty – an ironic kind of Americanness he never felt but projected, without anyone noticing what of this language belonged to who of his person, as silent and screened, at the time, as the name “Carlos” in the iconic three-folded name of the American poet William Carlos Williams – who today would be framed as the white American male poet William Carlos Williams.

Strange. At the time, no one knew or even asked about this Carlos, who or why his middle name was Carlos, his name later discovered to have come into being after brother of his Puerto Rican mother, yet who knew, at this time, of a Puerto Rican mother, at the heart of this white American poet’s calling, certainly not Carlos ben Carlos Rossman or his friend Berri, for example, naturalized Americans in Queens, both of whose mothers were born in the city of Leipzig, Germany, at the turn of the last century, although their families went deeper in time into the Eastern past, into what was then called Posen, the future Poland, which they had left Leipzig for just before the war to escape the Nazis – you know who they are, the mothers used to whisper to their children in America about anyone they either thought was following them or going the other way, it didn’t matter, if they thought they looked like Nazis, you know who they are, they whispered to their children, who were born after the war and never knew any Nazis. A mistake, in hindsight, more menacing, to be sure, to be invisible, a rumor, for the children to have never known Nazis yet live with them as if their names and faces were just coming into being in their bedroom closets, to be sure, the family could escape, quietly to Warsaw because they thought it was safer than Leipzig, so that they went there not to be shot in the ghetto but the Nazis followed them into the future, at least this is what was rumored, what they told their children, but Carlos and Berri, naturalized Americans in Queens, got to wondering why an American poet would say he wanted his poems to sound an authentic American speech, the same as that which could, he emphasized, come out of the mouths of Polish mothers, which would have been fine with Carlos and Berri, though a bit curious, to be sure, since they wondered, looking back, why could he not have made the speech coming out of these mothers’ mouths his own, Puerto Rican. The fact that he didn’t, threw them.

OK. The ground keeps shifting, the old world ground, the new world ground, nothing retains its name or identity, for reasons that can only remain mysterious, even if we can explain them. Even if they can be explained, they still remain mysterious. And, to my ear, the language in this passage is masterfully controlled, and at the same time a little bit … off … and by off I mean not quite American.

4.

And yet. And yet. Aren’t these boys pure products of America? I mean, not only can anyone in America be Ron Paul, that’s been proven, unfortunately, anyone in America could have a Puerto Rican mother AND assume that the authentic American speech must flow from another mother, maybe a Polish one. And anyone in America can have a mother from Leipzig who lived briefly in Poland. Who then lived in Queens. Etc. And make the same speech assumptions. That wherever the language is, that wherever Americanness is, it’s not quite here. So we are all left looking for something that supposedly exists, that indubitably exists, but which can never be quite found. Who could be crazier than Ron Paul? Even if he doesn’t know it? Just listen to him. Who could be crazier than a real American? Who isn’t a stranger in America [ which I could be spelling Amerika, as Kafka and sometimes Hollander does]? The indigenes of course are not from America / Amerika. They are from a place with other names, a much older land.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman has about a year and a half to go on In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam. The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making (Leafe Press, 2007), and Flux, Clot & Froth (Meritage Press 2010). In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, the main other thing on his plate right now is an anthology which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg, titled Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Anthology of Outside & Subterranean Poetry, due out from Black Widow Press, Autumn 014. He's also learning to play the viola and he blogs at www.johnbr.com (Zeitgeist Spam).    

MEMORY HOLES by ERIN VIRGIL

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

memory holes by Erin Virgil

(Monkey Puzzle Press, Harrison, Arkansas, 2014)

memory holes is well-crafted work, and deceptively so.   “Deceptively” because this memoir is rooted in darkness: the first section “withdrawal” handbook* is about withdrawing from Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), the second section “offers other people’s memoirs” which are replete with loss and desire as they should be as they’re harvested from Craigs List want ads, and the third section is about living in an RV which is a lifestyle inherently singed with uncertainty (where to park tonight?).  Yet, there’s a light—and lightness—in Erin Virgil’s telling/re-telling that alleviates the dark: despair does not have a strong presence in these tales.

So how did the author lift despair out of these dark moments?  One can’t know for sure but I suspect the writer’s observing eye (it’s professional in its distancing!), self-awareness and compassion allows her to rise above if not survive what could be debilitating.  For example, this discerning excerpt from “withdrawal handbook”:

Did you take: 

 Xanax 

Valium

Prozac 

Cymbalt 

Wellbutrin 

Effexor 

Paxil 

Celexa 

 and were you still sad in your heart?

In a recent post on her blog, Virgil discussed meditation, which I mention as just an example of what I perceive to be her efforts to increase (self-) awareness .  Such seems to have strengthened this memoir.  For example, from the apt but poignantly titled “want ads”—

loneliness

Ok, so you must be normal and sane and not an ex-murderer and all that stuff. You must be able to carry on a conversation, or at least act like you’re paying attention.  You must NOT be looking for a sugar momma.  You must be fairly tall (over 6 feet) and not have a mustache. Brownie points if you are Southern. Actually, on second thought, you must NOT be a relocated yankee.

Loneliness is often marked by false bravado. I do it too.  Demanding something so specific from the vastness of the internet: good luck.

Her astute observation and then penetrating insight into what’s observed is welcomingly sparkled by humor: “I am the better space cadet” (27)

Tough circumstances.  But Virgil maintains nothing less than equipoise.

* More info at http://sitwithmoi.blogspot.com/2013/02/handbook-for-withdrawal-by-erin-virgil.html

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects because she's its editor (the exception would be anthologies she edits because they focus on other poets as well).  She is pleased, though, to point you elsewhere to recent reviews of her work.  Soffwana Yasmnin engages her poem "Jade" from her THE THORN ROSARY: SELECTED PROSE POEMS AND NEW (19980-2010) .  Her latest book, 147 MILLION ORPHANS (MMXI-MML), is also reviewed by Joey Madia at New Mystics Reviews as well as at Book Masons Cafe Press Website and Literary Aficionado.

And her latest anthology as editor, VERSES TYPHOON YOLANDA, receives an engagement in this issue of GR by Aileen Ibardaloza; at Manila Standard Today by Jenny Ortuoste; at North American Review by Vince Gotera;  and at Philippine Inquirer by Luis H. Francia.

THE TV SUTRAS by DODIE BELLAMY

TOM BECKETT Reviews

The TV Sutras by Dodie Bellamy

(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2014)

The TV Sutras braids inspired wisdom received through a television with memoir and fiction in a profound investigation of spiritual experience.

The TV Sutras is in three parts.  The first part, “The Source of the Transmission,” is a procedural note about how the “TV Sutras” were created.  The second part comprises 78 “TV Sutras” with commentaries. “Cultured,” the third part (a memoir/fiction hybrid), is an extended meditation on cult experiences and the author’s spiritual journeys.

Bellamy explains that

“In receiving The TV Sutras I attuned myself to messages that are broadcast into the living room of my San Francisco apartment.  My method: I do a half-hour yoga set while watching the DVD Peaceful Weight Loss through Yoga.  Then I turn off the DVD player and TV, sit cross-legged on the floor, facing the television, and meditate for twenty minutes.  I breathe in, wait, breathe out, wait, breathe in, wait…try to accept whatever arises, internally or externally.  I do not close my eyes because closed eyes equal duality, I’ve been told, while open eyes equal oneness.  When my mind wanders, I say to myself ‘thinking,’ and refocus on my breath.  When I finish meditating, I crawl off my cushion and turn the TV back on.  Words and images emerge.  There’s a flash of recognition and my hand scribbles furiously: I transcribe the first words that strike me, then briefly I describe the scene from which the TV sutra arose.  I take a breath, scoot against the wall and quickly write my commentary.” (14)

Here’s a typical TV Sutra:

46.

Find everything you want with name brand products up to 70% off.  Every day.

Woman opens a small earring box, and the screen fills with jewels.

COMMENTARY

The treasure chest is not elsewhere, not something you need to strive for.  Be present and it will open for you.  The slightest things can have enormous potential if you focus your attention on them.”

The largest portion of the book is the “Cultured” section.  It’s magnificent and fully situated in the mess of everyday life.  Which goes to the heart of Bellamy’s  ambitions:

“Kevin turns back to the computer and begins typing.  He’s writing about New Narrative, how it reclaimed what was considered vulgar in poetry.  New Narrative Dodie versus New Age Dodie.  Can one ever stop embarrassing the other?  Dare I reclaim what’s considered vulgar in spirituality?  Bring on those crazed ascetics rushing from the forest to the Ganges, slaying any hoi polloi who step in their path!  Bring on crucified Jesus oozing blood and horror.  Bring on those horny gurus who fuck their students into enlightenment. Understand your attachments, your aversions, and your indifference, and love them all.” (106)

It’s important to note that The TV Sutras does not come across as having been written tongue-in-cheek.  There’s no flippancy, no broad winks to the reader.  There is, rather, an earnestness—a desire for revelation.  A desire, even, for unflattering self-revelations.  It’s a book written with an open mind and open heart:

“Once when I parodied sheeplike followers, my Buddhist Teacher lover asked, ‘What about the beauty of belief?’  This is the one true thing he ever said to me.  Beliefs should not be judged as true or false or ludicrous or reasonable.  Beliefs should be judged like art or women or sunsets—by their beauty, by the x-factor that makes us fall in love with them.  Belief should spasm our hearts with desire.”  (226)

I am in love with this beautiful book.

*****

Tom Beckett's latest book, Dipstick(Diptych), is now available from Marsh Hawk Press.