Blue Haze | Miyazawa Kenji | Translated by Kenji Okuhira & Gerald Hausman | Green River, VT: Longhouse, 2007
An accordion booklet from Bob and Susan Arnold’s Longhouse Publishers. These five lapidary poems, written in the 1920s, make their home out of doors (“Among the chill mist mountains”). Miyazawa Kenji makes careful record of clouds overhead, and does the same for thoughts within. Here’s “Cloud Signals”:
Whoom! feels good
winds blowing
farm tools shining
mountains blue hazingold, cold lava frozen
& bell-shaped rocks dreaming
all the time
when there is
no time
cloud signals
pale white spring
high up in iron sky
mountains in blue haze
the wild geese
come down on
four cedar trees
up there tonight
Rocket Attack U.S.A. !!! | Bill Shute | San Antonio, TX: Kendra Steiner Editions, 2007
Bill Shute’s chapbook length serial poem, inspired by the Barry Mahone film of same name, is less sci-fi than current event. Bad news is indeed afoot and imminent, but also under wraps. “Monochrome men” abound in “monochrome suits,” and they’re “armed with maps but no compasses.” Unfortunately, I’m unable to approximate here the poetry’s visual arrangement, which is vital to its meaning. No two words closely abut. Instead, the poems space themselves across the page to create a ruptured, syncopated read. If you’re in Glasgow, buy your copy here.
Model Homes 2 | Marie Buck & Brad Flis, Eds. | Detroit, MI: Lil’ Norton, 2008
The second issue of new journal Model Homes contains poetry and prose by Tan Lin, Judith Goldman, Kit Robinson, Robert Fitterman, Carla Harryman, Jennifer Scappettone, Tao Lin, Louis Cabri, Seth Landman, Nancy Shaw, and Catriona Strang. Dorothy Trujillo Lusk begins the issue with “Primumqagmem,” a rhythmic, agile sound piece written in a jerrybuilt creole of Latin, English, Spanish, French, and probably much more. Lawrence Giffin weighs in with “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” a mighty post-apocalyptic manual for child rearing:
What do you call a daughter
without ever having seen one
before? Padding its trench-wear
with the destiny of eugenics,
you don’t. You just push off into
the ensuing catastrophe unequal
to itself.
Giffin’s world is curbed, surveilled, anonymizing. The poem’s ending invokes a frightening politics, akin to a dying, where to assert oneself is to be anonymous:
Waves lick the child’s rigidity;
green and oceanic. What could she stand under,
recovered in mastery, thought
in vehicular perturbation?
She exhibits the slight
curvature of politics, which to traverse
excessively requires that one become
more and more nothing
and oneself.