REVIEWS
Reviewed by Wred Fright
If your idea of a female American poet is Phillis Wheatley offering odes to the morality that led her to slavery, poverty, and an early death, then it's time for you to leave the eighteenth century.
If your idea of a female American poet is Emily Dickinson all dressed up in white staying home pining for unrequited loves and pouring her soul into poems that wouldn't be published until after her death, then it's time for you to leave the nineteenth century.
If your idea of a female American poet is Sylvia Plath crafting elaborate metaphors that encrypt more than confess before she sticks her head into an oven because she married a jerk, then it's time for you to leave the twentieth century.
Because if the anthology Sirens: Five Femme Fatale Poets edited by Victor Thorn and published by Sisyphus Press in 2008 is any indication, in the twenty-first century the female American poet is not going to work for free, not going to stay home, and certainly not going to stick her head in an oven over any man. Where Wheatley dreamed of angels, Cynthia Ruth Lewis in "49% Sweetheart, 51% Bitch" tells the reader that if she's treated like an angel, she'll "take / you straight to heaven." Where Dickinson's life had stood like a loaded gun, Debbie Kirk is using a gun as a sex toy, telling the reader, "The heat of the gun / turns me on." Where Plath fears Daddy, Iris Berry knows her con-artist father is more to be pitied than feared, using "his wounded Vet story" to cut lines at the movies. And, instead of cloaking her thoughts in the metaphors of the past, Misti Rainwater-Lites has the speaker of "I Have A Daughter, Yesterday She Turned Nine" just tell us bluntly how she gave up a daughter for adoption. Meanwhile, Jude Lynn takes confessional poetry to a new height by telling us far more than we probably ever wanted to know about her sex life in "Swell And Hatch Into The Fold." Combined, the Sirens take Dickinson, Plath, Wheatley, and the entire female American poetic tradition for a long overdue girls' night out. As a whole, the poetry in the volume is of the wild, underground variety. Most of the poems appear to be autobiographical. As a bonus, the book throws in some color artwork and photography by and of the poets (multitalented these women are), and features interviews with the poets so the reader can gain some background into the person behind the poems. It's all very good. Like the sirens of mythology pictured on the cover of the book, even when you know you're heading into dangerous waters, you have to head in closer to hear more.
First in the book is Kirk's work, which I've long enjoyed, first encountering it earlier in the decade when editor Thorn published Babel Magazine, an online literary journal which due to its frequent publication schedule--I think it was weekly at one point!--seemingly gathered all the post-Beat, post-Bukowski denizens of the American literary underground in one place online. Thorn's been busy exploring another of his major interests, politics, for the past few years, so with Sirens it's nice to have him back in a literary bent. His taste in literature remains sure, and oriented to the raw over the polished. And few do raw better than Kirk. Even if it's only half-true, her poetry makes me fear for her safety. Here's a few reoccuring motifs: guns, abuse, mental illness, sex, rehab, violent urges, hate, smoking, religious guilt, alcohol, drugs, and more sex. Thankfully, she juggles situations that would kill lesser mortals with humor and wisdom. "Improvement" is a typical Kirkian classic:
My therapist said
I absolutely
Could not have
Any more unprotected sex
With strange men
Because it was self destructive
Behavior.
So, I shoplifted condoms
And lube
To use
When I have sex
With strange men.
Sometimes improvement
Is subtle.
Reading Iris Berry's work, I somehow get the sense that if she and Kirk went out drinking, Kirk might be the responsible one. There's lots of references to shooting smack and throwing things out the window at 4 in the morning. On the other hand, most of the poems seem to be reflective, looking back at a past time, so maybe she made it through those wild times more or less unscathed. Berry deals in the underbelly of Los Angeles, where the American Dream discovered there was no more land westward to explore and now it has to find another reason to live, but that's too hard so it's been biding time taking acting classes and developing a coke habit. In its shadow, the inhabitants of Berry's poems make do, like in, "By the Light of a Clock Radio":
It was 3:15 AM
and in typical Hollywood
rock ‘n’ roll manner
on a couch
that neither one of us owned
in a house
where neither one of us lived
with a love
that neither one of us liked
by the light of a clock radio,
we did it.
we did it so wrong
It was right
we did it so bad
It was good.
I didn’t know you
and was scared to.
you didn’t know me
and didn’t care to.
we did it like 2 ships in the night
like 2 enemy fighter ships at war.
but there were no winners here
just casualties.
Unlike the remnants of Romanticism in Berry's works (even if they just stem from the fairydust of Hollywood), Cynthia Ruth Lewis has no illusions in her poetry. What you see is what you get, and in addition to the poems you even get a nude picture of Lewis. Her poetry is similarly unadorned. She's angry, and she wants you to know it. If you don't like it, fuck you. In fact, fuck the whole human race. This is poetry as therapy. Perhaps even poetry as genocide if you really piss her off. Any thought of the reader is secondary. Fortunately, Lewis has the goods, so no reader’s going to be disappointed by sloppy seconds, like in "Boiling Point":
Isn’t it obvious?
You can tell by my face
that I’m irritated,
yet you still find it necessary
to intervene and ask me
“what’s wrong?”
Those two words really
drive me over the edge.
I can’t help looking pissed off;
it’s my natural expression
To a pessimist, there’s nothing worse
than a smiling asshole
with ‘good intentions,’
so stop trying to improve the world
and concentrate on your own problems--
go pound sunshine up your own ass;
I’ve got a major bug up mine,
and eternally happy, bubble-headed
fucks like you only make it worse...
in my version of a ‘perfect’ world,
idiots like you would have missed
the egg, entirely, and merely ended up
a stain in someone’s pants
I laughed out loud reading this poem. Lewis, of course, could care less what I thought, which is the source of her poetic power. Office workers worldwide would likely tape up that poem on their cubicles if they could get away with it.
Misti Rainwater-Lites continues the therapeutic/autobiographical vein of the anthology, but she's more oriented to the outside world than Lewis. She observes with a wry eye ex-lovers, hipsters, fellow poets, music, families, suicide, movies, poor little rich girls, sex, what women want, the fact that I.Q.s don't correlate to income, America, Christmas, children, and more. My favorite is her response to a video on the Internet demanding respect for Britney Spears, titled appropriately enough, "What A Crock Of Shit":
pass me them marlboros, baby
mama’s got some preachin’ to do
I don’t know who this chris crocker character
thinks he is
thinkin’ it’s his duty to defend
some rich stupid bitch who can’t even take care
of her own babies and feels the need to show
her baby factory all over the town
give me a big fat break, dude
I’m swamp trash, too
I come from a little town you’ve probably never heard of
houma, louisiana
home of bingo halls
best crawfish boils in the world
and hardcore southern baptist churches
where the preachers don’t sugar coat shit
live this way
love this way
or burn in hell, motherfucker
I’m britney spears, basically
with darker roots
and a whole lot less money
hell, if someone wanted to make my ten year old ass
a mouseketeer I woulda learned how to sing
real goddamn quick
if someone wanted to make a video of me sluttin’ around
a high school freaked out in schoolgirl garb
I woulda been all over that like cheez whiz on dick
if justin timberlake wanted to eat my cooter
then brag about it to howard stern
that would have tickled me to death
in short…shit
that bitch ain’t got nothin’ to cry about
and she sure as fuck don’t need some
dipsy doodle mama’s boy cryin’ to the world
about how the world needs to leave poor britney alone
well, he got his fifteen minutes and then some
and I’m so happy for his gay ass
that I am shittin’ rainbows
as I sit here in my trailer
drinkin’ coors
watchin’ “as the world turns”
Jude Lynn probably would think the same of the Britney video, but she's got more pressing matters to write about, like golden showers and the man known only as Uncle Dick, so she doesn't say. Her specialty is the prose poem, stretching verse out until it meets the sketch and short, short story. The closest she comes to traditional free verse is when she writes about anal sex or watching a gay porno. But you don't really notice because her way with words is such, and her instinct for rhythm is so. Plus, when you're reading about such fascinating subjects as the crazy guy who likes to dress as the Easter Bunny and picket the courthouse, it's pretty easy to not notice the poetics, even if they are pretty good. Here's an example in, "O, We're All In Trouble":
Last one out of the bar is a rotten lay. At two in the morning, there’s no buoyancy to our come-on. Wedding rings buried in back pockets. Phone numbers handed out like free samples of hickory smoked sausage. Skirts raised a little higher. Phalluses lying deep in their cotton trenches, waiting for the battle cry. There is no shame. Liquid appeal, gettin’ noticed, doesn’t matter by whom, just so someone notices us, damn it! Strategy is a wallet full of bills and the bartender’s attention. A woman’s carefully applied waxy red lips soon to be smeared down the shaft of a bloated dick.
We copulate with words before we even get to the bedroom or the back-seat. Fool’s foreplay is one more shot of Tequila and a quick tit compliment. It seems harmless. A bar full of laughter and innuendo, just a bunch of horny fucks with no one at home to help us come. The later it gets the more liberal we get. Take home the fat chick, the dumb bitch, the ugly dude, the short bastard ... we just want to get off. Fuck world hunger, fuck war, fuck disease, fuck you right and fuck you wrong ... we’re going to match up pussy to cock like puzzle pieces just to tear it apart the next morning.
And, oh yes ... there’s always the next morning. The walk of shame back to our cars. The long showers. Those split seconds in which we hate ourselves and swear to become better people. But people don’t get any better than this: lying flat on our backs at three in the morning, praying for this fuck to be the final fuck that cures us.
Odysseus told his men to stick beeswax in their ears so they couldn't hear the song of the sirens and shipwreck. Odysseus himself had his men tie him to the ship's mast because he wanted to hear the song of the sirens. Odysseus always was a crafty bloke. He'd want to hear these sirens too, I bet. I know that I'm glad I did.
Wred Fright is the author of The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus, a comedic novel about a hapless garage rock band in a college town. For more information, please visit his website at www.wredfright.com
For more information, please visit his website at Wred Fright.
Reviewed by David McLean - Clockwise Cat
This anthology is very worth reading, especially for the contributions by Misti Rainwater-Lites and Iris Berry, but all of the poems are great. Some irritate me, but they are all well-written. The collection seems in a sense to be unified by one thing, that it is motivated by feelings of desperation and loss, that loss of the illusion of rootedness which is perceived as a malaise in most western societies, and motivated by a refusal to swallow the social lies that Kant, benevolently, and Freud, perhaps slightly cynically, wanted us to swallow.
As to the question of whether this book will actually make you shoot yourself or someone else: Reading it does express a Sisyphean lesson. (It's published by Sisyphus Press), but a genuine Sisyphean lesson. Sisyphus was no hero, but a self-serving criminal and a murderous bastard. His handcuffing of death, his last crime that so angered Thanatos, was absolutely not a good thing. Hideously injured men couldn't die on the field of battle; the old lived on as shells, robbed of their right to die. Pretty much as the old do nowadays. The reconciliation of Sisyphus, as Camus depicts it, is that he can't help smiling in the face of his meaningless punishment. Life is worth living just out of sheer obstinacy, though a thinker knows that there is no God, one can't live for that fatuous delusional crap, and trying to help others, adopting the political solution, is just being a self-centered twat and generally making a nuisance of yourself.
If you belong to that category of people who strive to see the positive side of life, the positive as it is conventionally presented, then many of the poems in this collection may disturb you. Good job too. If, like me, you actually think life is an imposition, in the Sisyphean sense, an unpleasant contingency worth little beyond some token hedonism, then you may miss the point of the poems that strive to disabuse you, in that they actually are rather humane in their intent. Cynthia Ruth Lewis, in “passing through,” would probably say that the hole in the ozone layer, which many people (who don't follow South Park) actually believe in, and believe to be growing, is a bad thing. Sometimes I think it's rather a good thing.
Most people are probably like me in not giving much of a shit about the general division that people constantly nag about, between “the canon” and “the outlaws.” There are just poems, and writers of poems, and it is surely coincidence that I only ever happen to read nowadays in magazines those on the underground side of the divide. But I don't see why I should have to choose between Bukowski and Auden. Bukowski liked Auden, so do I.
Generally, there is much more positivity here than might be expected. It's probably an American thing. Maybe Americans have to affect their affected ennui, my affected ennui, like that of many Europeans - well, several - is genuine affected ennui. But some of the problem that burdens these poems seems to be the general American attitude to sex, which, judging as I do from literature, gender studies, and TV, is hideously and extravagantly distorted. I'm very far from pretending that Sweden, where I live; the land that god apparently hates, is some sort of feminist paradise. It's not, but it's probably better to be a woman here. Though the problems are related, both lands are in the control of the regime of the brother that Juliet Flower MacCannell has analyzed so well. The general accessibility of bitches as commodities, combined with the remnants of the ancient condemnation of uninhibited promiscuity. That's what I focus on in this short and vague review, the sex and gender issue. Perhaps interestingly, the father is usually a quite significant figure here.
Considerations of space and so forth preclude a general consideration of everything, but I shall focus first on Misti Rainwater-Lites, since she is generally regarded as “underground” though she obviously carries the heritage of older poetry in her, and since she is the only one here I had ever read before. Most of the poems here are familiar, and the language drags one in as usual; the lines fall well into each other and reflect a world very familiar. A heavenly King James' hell where:
.. everything crumbles
even cookies left out for Santa
and some of us
crazy motherfuckers
do not mind
at all
Misti's poetry is really exceptional. She portrays herself in a way that actually interests the reader in her fate, her history, and she is evidently going to succeed. If she doesn't then I have one more reason to despise popular taste. She is also very good at finales, ends poems excellently, something most poets can't do.
Debbie Kirk, who starts the anthology, writes painfully. But though she writes of her sufferings at the hands of mental illness, she is not without humor and a rage that is, one hopes, an empowering rage.
There are excellent lines like:
Put me in a room full of
Crazies and drug addicts
And I feel the spotlight in my eyes
and it's like I'm a debutante
Claiming my white trash heritage
And somehow I feel like
I've finally fucking arrived
Iris Berry is excellent. Her poetry swarms with punk sub-cultural references that work on both sides of the Atlantic, except, you know, we think that Hanoi Rocks really sucked. She depicts the junk life with perfect clarity:
I think most of all
It was that last OD...
first i saved you
and then you saved me.
Waking up in a bathtub
of cold water
fully clothed,
you standing above me
just wasn't fun anymore
Cynthia Ruth Lewis has in particular one poem here that really struck me as great: “cut & dried.” A fearless poem about cancer is fairly unusual. I'd quite like cancer too.
death doesn't frighten me --
let it come, softly,
at its own pace
like night ends the day,
taking it under its wing when it's spent,
slipping gently into oblivion;
a quiet ending to a day undone--
a tender, new moon rising
to replace a burnt out sun
Again, some of her poems reveal the shortcomings of gender relations in the USA. Maybe Judith Butler should be allowed to write a list of men who deserve to die and Kirk and Lewis should be given free reins and a chainsaw?
Jude Lynn's poetry, which is less bound to traditional forms, or at least to the use of the enter key, again reveals the shortcomings of gender relations in modern society though without taking sides against men.
The problem is not the individual men that are often featured as dick-heads in the poems in this anthology; it's the regime of the brother and heterosexism that prevail in the west, and probably everywhere else. I'm very far from being against bonking, but heterosexuality and a taste for pussy is not the same as a belief that god and nature have told me to do it without really asking first.
Anyway, the book is in general superb. There are rather lovely pictures too, for most if not all of these ladies seem to be artists. I think it may become a significant landmark collection that you will curse yourself for not buying. So go do it now, fucker.
David McLean is a reviewer for Clockwise Cat, a progressive literary magazine.
For more information, please visit his website at Clockwise Cat.
REVIEW OF SIRENS
Five Femme Fatale Poets
Reviewed by Crazy Carl Robinson
i guess i’ll begin this review by quoting the freak-that-is-me from the back cover of sirens: “the voices that thorn assembles here epitomize everything that ‘bloodreal’ art should be”……the emphasis of my blurb is bloodreality and that’s ultimately what i look for in everything i read…..and in a roundabout way, bloodreality equates to writing a bloody memoir……like i don’t wanna hear that you relate to aileen wuornos because you do drugs and feel disenfranchised. i wanna hear about the night that you drove around in your car with your friends drinking beer and running over rabbits because they were there……i wanna know that you lived what you wrote in much the same way that a rapper needs to have shot somebody/been shot herself and is therefore deserving of the street cred….full disclosure: victor thorn is my friend, but i don’t really gush over anything that doesn’t connect to my own life…..i got out my pen and paper and sat at my kitchen table and took notes on sirens the same way i would if I had bought it in the poetry section of barnes & noble---the same way I would if The Oprah had magically peed on each and every page…..i guess my point is that the collective voice of the women in this collection is so strong that they don’t need barnes & noble or The Oprah to be heard…..the beauty (and ugliness) of their poetry stands alone---beyond the trappings of middle-america and your community’s stamp-of-approval, these sirens have discovered their own distinctive voice…..i listened to their song and i think you should too.
THE POETRY OF DEBBIE KIRK: as i was taking notes, i wrote down: “guns, violence, incest, drugs, suicide, rape, blood, and colors” as themes…..sounds nice, yeah?......i guess what i liked the most about her poetry (since everything ultimately needs to connect back to me) is the manner in which kirk insults her audience in many of her poems…..i did that quite a bit in fat on the vine and to this day, i’m not quite sure why----maybe it should be left up to the psycho-a-trists, yeah?.....my favs: “mortality is for the young” and “don’t read this poem”…..like i think there is a point where kirk could choose to make The Oprah happy or work on being more hunter-s-thompson kool, but she bears down and retains her original ugliness (and i respect that).
THE POETRY OF IRIS BERRY: i’ve never been to los angeles, ya know…..the closest i came was on a family vacation to the grand canyon when my parents drove 5 hours to needles to buy a salt n’ pepper shaker so that they could say that the robinsons had been to kalifornia……julie was from kalifornia as well and the state continues to retain an almost mythic significance for me……it’s almost as if you attain movie star status just for living there…..virginians drink keg beer in a field and ohioans work real hard to convince themselves that the meth they’re cooking is new york quality, but everyone knows that kalifornia is a brand new game……i would argue that the poetry of iris berry has the most “style” (whatever the fuck that means) in the anthology…..her poetry reads like quick, one-hitters of a scene that i’ll never know or understand…..i like the authentic snapshots of neighborhoods that I’ve never experienced and the references to drugs that i’ll never do….my favs: “when the life of the party turns blue,” “ode to sammy glick,” and “moshing with the cosmos, part #2”,
THE POETRY OF CYNTHIA RUTH LEWIS reminds me somewhat of the poetry of debbie kirk….what’s different (for me) is that whereas kirk’s screams seem almost cathartic for her, lewis appears to feel the need for more psycho-analysis----and this difference might seem slight to the casual reader, but i think it is significant in terms of how each poet deals with her own self and recovery….lewis can seemingly objectify herself to the point where she is commenting back on her own idiosyncrasies…..and this skill is most apparent in some of lewis’ relationship poems such as “aftermath” and “afterthoughts” where she is able to comment on the flaws of both herself and her partner,
THE POETRY OF MISTI RAINWATER-LITES: overall, i’d say that these poems are my favorite in the collection…..i very much like the way rainwater-lites free-associates pop culture references and i found myself writing down quotes like “broken-bread girl” and “i want alcohol and heroin and alaska and an unlisted phone number” instead of themes……it made me wanna believe that rainwater-lites had done her fair share of drugs and that her mind was free enough to rework parts of pop culture and make them her own…..i also think she comes the closest to the siren myth that victor thorn describes in his introduction---a lively, american girl singing songs of piss and vinegar and life……my favs: “the abz’s of me,” “more yum than a girl deserves,” “anorexic rant,” and “explaining my pregnancy to anti-breeders”.
THE POETRY OF JUDE LYNN: i was excited to learn from reading her bio that lynn makes her home in kent, ohio (where i did my fair share of damage in the 11 years that i lived there)…..unfortunately, i never met jude lynn, although i’d like to imagine that she was there on one of the nights that i was tripping balls down by the river or shooting mortars at the police station……much of lynn’s poetry pushes up on being prose and there were sections that reminded me of my own work…..i like the fact that her poetry serves as smaller snapshots of the places she’s been and the people she’s met and lynn seems like the kind of person who would find both the beauty and absurdity in stray dog-people……there is also a certain sarcastic sexiness to lynn’s poetry and the message behind “knowledge of diminishing expectations” could serve as a disclaimer for why ordinary women turn siren……my favs: “the life-long philanthropic offerings of the dead boy next door,” “tough guy: a three-part observation in reverse,” and “all the world wants anal”…..
Crazy Carl Robinson is the author of Fat on the Vine
For more information, please visit his website at Out Your Backdoor.
CONFESSIONS ON THE ESTROGEN ALTAR
Sirens: Five Femme Fatale Poets
Edited by Victor Thorn
Sisyphus Press, 2008, 298 pp.
Reviewed by Paul Corman Roberts
“…I’ve got an iron hair stuck deep up my ass
and I’m always in search of just the right set
of pliers to pluck it out.”
- From “Needle-nose or Lockjaw?”
Cynthia Ruth Lewis
Babel editor Victor Thorn has brought us what he calls “the five female representatives” he would choose if he “stood before the Pulitzer Prize committee.” Some of us out here might not completely agree with Victor’s five choices (fair disclosure: your reviewer has unsolicited blurbs and working relationships with several of the authors in the book), but credit Thorn for realizing the need for an anthology of modern, underground female poets and with choosing five who can all easily lay claim: the raw, primal and truly confessional Lewis; the dirty, guilty-and-don’t-really care prose writer Jude Lynn; punk performance legend Iris Berry; trash goddess/post-partum “she-bitch” Misti Rainwater-Lites; and the serrated, tortured howling of Debbie Kirk which proclaims all of the above.
The hard truth is that there just aren’t that many female poets who work mostly as poets. Many often do poetry on the side or as a hobby while working the non-fiction/fiction/performance circuits. The book is slick, sexy and its content delivers on much of that promise, but it isn’t necessarily going to create a wave of fearless alpha girls on the poetry circuit. In theory, it should sell like hotcakes to legions of depressed alienated beta-lit boys … but it’s a poetry anthology, so it won’t.
And part of the reason for that is that there isn’t a whole lot of feeling good to be found in its near three hundred pages (as is so frequently the case with poetry, not just with “underground” or “indie” poets.) It serves as exhibit one that sex, drugs and rock are failures as some sort of commodity salvation but empirically successful in having integrated with the landscape of the apocalypse. You can only take the redemptive moments in the rare cases where they occur:
My therapist said
I absolutely
Could not have
Any more unprotected sex
With strange men
Because it was self destructive
Behavior
So, I shoplifted condoms
And lube
To use
When I have sex
With strange men
Sometimes improvement
Is subtle.
-“Improvement”
Debbie Kirk
But these little “improvements” or miniature calms in the storm are more the exception that the rule:
“…because despite all the insanity
and hard times
we had a lot of good times too.
We did have a lot of fun
scaring the other kids
and playing tricks on them.
It was that whole
us against them thing.
We were bad.
I never discuss it
with my brothers,
we buried a lot of it
with my dad
when he passed away.
Sometimes I think
they don’t even remember.
I’ll bring something up
and they’ll just give me
a real foggy look
and say, ‘God Iris,
how do you remember all that?’
And I’ll think
God how do you forget?
they all came out unscathed
and well, I kind of didn’t.”
- From “Greetings From Branford Park”
Iris Berry
Kirk and Berry bring a heavy punk aesthetic to this collection (Berry has collaborated w/Exene Cervenka and Kirk has toured with the Dwarves), and both hearken back to the spoken word renaissance that barely caught flame, and only then briefly, in the early 90’s. Kirk in particular has kept that flame burning in times (especially post 9-11) when it was not trendy for “girls” to be in “hard” lit, which arguably, it still isn’t.
The good times here though are primarily memories. In some cases, like Cynthia Ruth Lewis, they don’t seem like they ever really existed. Her poems may be the most frightening in the book, full of homicidal impulses that appear to be quite well thought out. Neither is Lewis' work here all give and no take. Her poem, “Aftermath,” is simply the most brutal and dehumanizing piece in the entire book, explaining why this pure rage, perhaps more “confessional” in its plain and honest depictions of unthinkable violence than consciously confessional poetry, stands above the others. In many ways, she is the most outside outsider of this quintet: “I never call myself a poet; I even cringe at referring to myself as a writer, because if you’re talking to the wrong person, that proclamation can open up a whole bunch of idiot question…”
This doesn’t seem to be an issue for the other four writer/poets in this collection. Rainwater-Lites in particular is clearly more comfortable than most in wrapping herself in the poet’s charge. “Anorexic Rant” in particular stakes MRL out as a self-realized prophetess by doing the Whitman thing, addressing history’s most self-conscious and neurotic empire:
“go to jail, America
go to jail and visit
your illiterate single mom on welfare raised
tattooed criminals
go to hell, america
the hell that is your prison system
visit Damien Echols on death row in arkansas
look into his eyes and beg
for his forgiveness
look in the mirror, america
see how ridiculous you are
your hair is a mass of writhing
hissing snakes
your eyes are bugged
your ribs are showing
you have become a grotesque caricature
you are over the hill but still dressed
in a raggedy ann costume
no one believes you…”
This take on manifesting “America” is as old as Walt Whitman, hell; it’s as old as the prophesy “America” by the Reverend George Berkeley in 1726. Rainwater-Lites is immersing herself in one of the oldest dialectics of romanticism (appropriate … she has recently published that she reads Mayakovski to her young son …now that’s subversive parenting.)
Rounding out the collection is long time Babel contributor Jude Lynn, whose poetry is almost entirely confessional style prose, but of course, without the typical confessional “remorse” that one gets with say, Elizabeth Wurtzel or James Frey. If anything, Lynn’s style smacks of a hesher Denis Johnson:
“He calls the next day. He doesn’t sound the same. He’s less
interesting. Annoying. We meet up again. There’s nothing to
talk about. Now that we’ve played the cat & mouse word game
prior to the fuck, there’s nothing to say. He likes sports. I like
foreign films. He likes Heavy Metal, I like jazz. He’s a Republican.
I’m not. He talks a lot about his car, his clothes, his college days
& his wild “buddies.” He no longer gets my sarcasm. My wit. I
put it away and sit there with a bored look in my eyes.
His phone calls become infrequent. Mainly when he’s drunk and
all the other girls have told him no.
Months pass. I don’t even answer my phone anymore. I don’t
go to the same bar. My hair isn’t clean. I put my cleavage away,
hidden beneath comfortable clothes. I spend my nights on the
couch, in the dark, perfecting my smoke rings. And I laugh
thinking about him, him, him & him. Whoever they were. The
boys of my past who hopefully went on to become men.”
- From “A Myriad of Cock-N-Balls: A Brief Study of Esteem, Repetition & Antagonism
At times, Lynn’s vignettes seem to serve as the synopsis for the whole collection here; at times an endless parade of half downed drinks, half smoked cigarettes, and half fucked lovers.
It’s a bit unfortunate that all the poets here are white, primarily hetero, and none from the East Coast. A little more diversity might have made the whole thing seem less repetitive, possibly even less depressing. One wonders if the collection might have benefited from contributions from poets such as MK Chavez, Jennifer Blowdryer, Cindy Emch, Kathleen Wood, Daphne Gottlieb, Lydia Lunch, Danielle Willis, Maggie Estep, or Juliet Cook; certainly hard writing, fast living Sirens at some point or another.
But it’s true that after this list, the number of “underground” or “counter-cultural” females who traffic primarily in poetry gets quite thin. The hope is that this anthology does get into the hands of enough younger, and even older female poets, who might feel the urge to indulge a bit of their darker auras and lower chakras and prevent them from giving up on a world the irrepressible Debbie Kirk herself refers to as “the endless dick dance.”
Paul Corman Roberts is the editor of Cherry Bleeds Magazine
For more information, please visit his website at Cherry Bleeds.
Reviewed by Bill Shute - Kendra Steiner Editions
Last but not least (and I can’t imagine any book following this one!) is the recent anthology SIRENS: FIVE FEMME FATALE POETS, available from http://www.sirens5.com/. With a society built around the needs/wants of males and with so many laughable male tough-guy-poseurs in the small-press poetry world, who can blame these ladies for letting out a howl of indignation, but it’s also a howl of liberation, of self-identity, of creation. A sexual howl, a siren song calling us … into a vortex … a 300 page vortex. SIRENS collects the poetry, art, interviews, and prose of five major femme poets:
Debbie Kirk’s poems are charged with concentrated energy, formed on the page like open wounds … vivid, precise, searing, not a word wasted. Debbie takes us on a guided tour of the parts of life we often choose to look away from out of cowardice while they are happening to us. I feel revived after reading Debbie Kirk’s poetry, as if I’d just seen James Brown or Stiv Bators in their respective primes. She’s also got a great acid wit. This is a dynamite selection, a fine intro to Debbie’s work. “Not even serpents / will keep me company / and this gun / is my four leaf clover.” Be sure to check out her website, http://www.tntkirk.com/. Debbie will have a chapbook of all-new work coming out from Kendra Steiner Editions this summer!
Iris Berry offers a number of extended pieces with a great flow through a world of binge drinking and dysfunctional families and children whose dreams are shot down and characters who are their own worst enemies. Well-known for her spoken-word work and her acting as well as for her fiction, poetry, and non-fiction prose and columns, Iris Berry is yet another L.A-based artist who has not yet gotten her due. Her nine-page, Greetings from Branford Park, is a modern classic, as are a number of her other pieces here. I’m drained after taking this ride with Iris, but I want more.
Each of Cynthia Ruth Lewis’s poems taunts the reader, challenges us to question our assumptions, to look at the arbitrary nature of our “reality.” She also takes the reader into, very much into, personal and intimate sides of the speaker’s life. It’s a combination of hard and soft, just like sex or art or life. Lewis probes into the psychology of her characters, masterfully assembling the daily-life details about what f**ks us up, thus offering us a way to take a step outside of our selves and do the same analysis on our fears and phobias and obsessions. After reading Ms. Lewis, I feel as though I just downed a bottle of scotch over six hours of intimate talk from the heart and from the gut with some passing ship in the night whom I’ll never see again but who will change my perspective on everything. However, I hope I see her again in print … soon!
Misti Rainwater-Lites is no stranger to KSE, having done two chaps for us, with a third coming in November/December. Nobody nails the pain and cheap thrills and existential nausea of American (and, more specifically, Texas) life better than Misti. Reading the poems here, many of which I’d read before but are always welcome back again, I’m struck at how clearly this lady weaves statements of her poetic aesthetic into everything she writes, alongside the empty sex to which we are drawn like moths to a flame, and the images from dollar stores, strip bars, and trash culture, in between the TV-dinner trays and cockroach corpses. Misti is the poet laureate of beaten-down working-class America.
SIRENS closes with the poetry and prose of Jude Lynn, a Guinness-drinker (I’ll raise a glass in her honor!) working out of Kent, Ohio. In her two-page prose piece Swell and Hatch Into The Fold, she captures the development of a three-year relationship totally, instead of wasting our time with a full book as some novelist would do. Images such as the beer-pi*s golden sh*wer will not go away … as much as I may want them to! And the M&M image in All The World Wants An*l — well, you’ll just have to read that one for yourself. The scalding Tough Guy: A Three-Part Observation in Reverse should be required reading for all us guys if we really want to know how we are viewed by the women we hang out and/or sleep with. There’s more useful wisdom about why the world’s the way it is in the three paragraphs of O, We’re All In Trouble than there would be in 15 years of Oprah shows and all the pop psychology books and CDs in the world. It’s there for the taking—Jude Lynn has offered it to us, and it’s up to us whether we’re gonna learn anything from it or continue to be self-absorbed a-holes. I wasn’t familiar with Ms. Lynn’s work prior to this book, but a good anthology always presents writers unfamiliar to us whom we NEEDED to know about but just didn’t know it.
This anthology is 300 pages of raw power for only $7.99 and $2.99 postage ($10.98 total), and you can pay via paypal at the website or send a check to Sisyphus Press, P.O. Box 10495, State College, Pa. 16805-0495. It’s only June, but I can surely say that this is one of the best anthologies of the year, an essential and primal blast of supercharged girl power that will strip the paint from your safe assumptions. Bravo to editor Victor Thorn and to these five poets—-KIRK, BERRY, LEWIS, RAINWATER-LITES, and LYNN—for producing a work of real substance. I have a feeling that this SIRENS anthology will be a defining work of this age, the way films such as RIVER’S EDGE, BLUE VELVET, NATURAL BORN KILLERS, or SERIAL MOM were defining works of the 80s and 90s. There was a seminal anthology put out in 1962 by Totem/Corinth called FOUR YOUNG LADY POETS, best known today for introducing Diane Wakoski (and the ladies in SIRENS are certainly daughters of Wakoski’s MOTORCYCLE BETRAYAL POEMS-period) and the late Carol Berge to the general poetry world—maybe SIRENS is the 2008 energy-drink fueled answer to that classic work.
Bill is a poet, publisher, and reviewer for Kendra Steiner Editions. He is also the author of TWELVE GATES TO THE CITY: THE LABOURS OF HERCULES IN THE LONESTAR STATE
and
POINT LOMA PURPLE: THE LIFE AND WORK OF KATHERINE TINGLEY (1847-1929), AN IMAGINED HISTORY IN MOSAIC VERSE
For more information, please visit Kendra Steiner Editions.
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