JUST AS, AFTER A POINT, JOB CRIED OUT a poem by K.A. Hays from Motionpoems on Vimeo.

You can read the poem and see other offerings on MotionPoem’s website: Just as, After a Point, Job Cried Out.

The Pushcart Prize is the “best of the small presses” and includes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Each small press, which includes most literary journals, nominates up to 6 pieces to be considered for the Pushcart’s annual anthology. Nominations are submitted by December, and winners are announced in June of the following year.

The six nominations are generally considered by the editorial staff of each journal to represent the best of the journal’s published material over the past calendar year. The poetry editor at LAR, Tanya Chernov, had this to say about Jim’s work:

Though LAR does not often publish the more experimental forms of poetry, we were enchanted by James Allman’s “Corpus Delicti” and the notably sharp, tight-fitting corners of both the poems’ lines and the author’s wit. Form, thought and rhythm come together to make a strikingly vivid and at times even chaotic masterpiece. The combination of raw, visercal details and intellectual accuracy makes this poem fodder for much haunting thought long after the page has turned. Not for the lighthearted and not for the novice, “Corpus Delicti” embodies exactly what contemporary poetry should be: powerful, well-crafted, and smart.

The other LAR nominees are identified on their blog which can be seen here: LAR 2011 Pushcart Nominations. You can, also,  read the nominated work, “Corpus Delicti”, at Jim’s blog: DiatribalArts.

First published in Smartish Place and the poetry collection, The Needle.

“Not a formless sublime exceeding and annihilating the beautiful, but an endless display of beauty, surpassing the beautiful as the ever more beautiful.”  – David Bentley Hart

Sola Scriptura permeates the portion of protestant faith I have grown up within. It is a term which tends toward an epistemology that raises the written word above everything else, after all John 1:1 tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is powerful, the word—both the spoken word that made everything that was made and the Word through whom life and light was given to “all mankind [as] the light [that] shines in the darkness” that cannot be overcome. But within that same tradition, the word is often eviscerated.

The artist Makoto Fujimura was recently commissioned to illuminate the four Gospels in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. It is the first time the Bible has been illumined in centuries with gold and silver leaf, verdigris, vermilion and azurite. Far different from the bibles I have owned—starkly black and white, pages diaphanous, perhaps the binding is leather but the gilt is suspect. Similarly, the early Reformers white washed church walls, eradicated icons and images and alter pieces and simplified architecture all to convincingly enunciate the great importance of sola scriptura—the word. They did this because there were abuses—great abuses and tragedies where the word was undervalued, beautiful as it was, but unknown. Maybe all they did was necessity. I do believe the Protestant Reformation has done much good for the Church; after all, it is much closer to the concept of the priesthood of all believers, now, then when under the exclusive domain of the papacy. But it was a reactionary movement, nonetheless, and like many reactions it conceivably went too far to value only, as Jerram Barrs says, that which exhibits “bare simplicity, barrenness, and even ugliness” as if these things were “somehow considered more pleasing to God”—more spiritual, even.

It did not help that along with the Protestant Reformation strutted the Enlightenment, both at times made bedfellows. One can almost hear the likes of Voltaire, Hegel, Kant, Hume and Rousseau singing along with Rabbit of Winnie the Pooh fame,

Never trust your tummies, tails, or toes
You can’t learn a thing from any of those
Here’s another fact I must disclose
From the mighty pen true wisdom flows.
(“If It Says So”, Winnie the Pooh)

In so much we have the proliferation of reason—that abstract portion which constructs texts on texts. In Christian circles we call these Systematic Theologies. I am no anti-intellectual, but know enough of philosophy from Plato to Descartes to Derrida to know where reason alone takes its travelers. I know enough to assert that an epistemology which assumes we are merely “minds on a stick” (James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom) as opposed to tummies, tails, toes, minds, ears, noses and eyes (amongst other things) is deficient. After all, we are called to know what surpasses even knowledge. (Ephesian 3) And the only way I know to accomplish this is incarnationally.

This is the evisceration: that the Word is not truly flesh, full of grace and truth (John 1:4) and “the [very] image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15) Rather that it is just a word flattened into 2-Dimensional space—made just an excerpt, an abstraction of text. When C. S. Lewis wrote of human nature, he called it amphibious; that is, we exist simultaneously as physical and spiritual beings like a salamander lives in water and on land. But somehow the spiritual is not just coexistent along with the physical; it is intertwined with it and accessed by means of it. Martin Luther wrote of God that He cannot be seen directly, but He can be seen through the “face or mask” of creation, (Martin Luther, Commentary on Galations) which is echoed when Ravi Zacharias mentions, “we make a cardinal mistake if we look only at the [external of a thing]. We cannot stop like secularists do by looking at something; we’ve got to look through it and beyond it.” We must consider the physical and spiritual, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, as a surface folding in on itself which creates a continuous, unseen interior that is not incomprehensible because of its concealment but knowable through its tactile surface exposed for all to perceive. It is much like the Orthodox Christian concept of Icon, which is defined by their tradition as a window into the unseen world “where the visible and invisible embrace each other from a fire that no longer destroys but rather lights up the divine face for humanity,” (Jean-Luc Marion) and the Incarnation creates this economy in which material reveals the immaterial and transcendent.

This is the very reason why Romans 1 can emphatically assert:

Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. (Romans 1:19-20)

Nature itself bids testament to the unseen. Psalms, Job, the prophets all tell of God’s greatness, power, beauty, justice, goodness, truth and mercy, and creation is often the evidence for it. Imagine the power of the sea even when pacified, even at low tide—the pounding surf, the unremitting sound of waves, amplified in the tempest, and at times devastatingly destructive. Nevertheless, it is a place of peace and relaxation, of bounty and of infinite, creative diversity. There is a Buddhist saying which states that every stone has a sermon to disclose. Yes, every stone and grain of sand, every krill and whale, too, point back to God, themselves icons. Imagine a place of praise no longer contained within the four walls of a church building but extended into the world; this temple as large as the cosmos and all of its contents sacraments. It is equally full of wonder, this place, which is always fresh because of the creative pervasiveness redolent from dappled and variegated things like shells, bejeweled and spun in delicate Fibonaccis, to the expedition into that ever telescoping realm of atomic, subatomic, fermion, quark, lepton, Higgs boson.

This is the world the artist attempts to preserve and enlarge; he does so through his vocation regardless of his faith, but that is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say, the artist works at the nexus of the physical and spiritual creating and identifying icons whether to God, or to an unknown god resident in the Aeropagus, but always inescapably to the Transcendent. Artists work incarnationally; in so much it is a form of cognition often revealing what could not otherwise be known or qualified. The art historian, curator, author and Christian Daniel Siedell calls the practice and consumption of art a form of “non-rational knowledge”, but he just echoes Thomas Aquinas. It can make visible the invisible. It can teach us things that the rational scientia find difficult, or mysterious or down-right impossible, to affirm and believe. The scripture attests to this fact in its structure. There is but one didactic sermon  I am aware of in all of scripture, the great majority of which is song, poetry and story. And even so, the scripture emboldens us to look outside of it.

My favorite example is Psalm 34:8, “Taste and know that the Lord is good.” It is my favorite kind of sermon, one found in the delight of food. Far from being an extravagance (or more likely because of its extravagance), good food (the culinary arts) is a means to participate in the goodness of God. It is a goodness that cannot be known in any other way; it is a pervasive goodness, the kind to be enjoyed and remembered at every meal (for as often as you eat and drink). It is to be known in a satisfying cheese burger as well as foie gras micuit strait from a street vendor in Sarlat, in a glass of Spanish, spiced lemonade, or a cup of coffee or in a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti “La Tâche.” With each sip or bite, with every hmmm, we lift up our voices in praise acknowledging God’s goodness.

Never doubt it is a goodness expressed through artistry. I would never take a bite from an onion as if it were an apple, but sliced with a bit of garlic, salt, olive oil and carrots and the scent becomes splendid; add to it apple cider vinegar, jalapeños and a blend of spices and you’ll have escabeche (for fish, chicken or pork); one of my favorite meals. Much of beauty is latent, like this, in need of cultivation, exploration, experimentation and craftsmanship to fully render. And though I can praise at every level of artistry, I find that some burgers are more effusive with it, as they are more lavishly exemplary of God’s unmatched goodness.

There is so much more that can be said of food as icon. The corollary between it and Christ as bread and wine or, as the Gospel of John points out, living water and living bread, which quenches all thirst and satisfies all hunger. Good and satisfying food is anticipatory of our ultimate satisfaction at the wedding feast in heaven, but even its lack speaks, too. For hunger pangs are our regular reminder of our great need—our thirst for God.

The psalmist directs our attention also to the category of the sublime—that Romantic era word for greatness beyond all possibility of calculation or measurement, like the psalmist describes:

You answer us in righteousness, with awe-inspiring works, God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and the distant seas; You establish the mountains by Your power, robed with strength; You silence the roar of the seas, the roar of their waves, and the tumult of the nations. Those who live far away are awed by Your signs; You make east and west shout for joy. (Psalm 65:5-8)

So it is, when I look at the photography of Ansel Adams or Richard Hoesel or Frans Lanting, I see sublimity. There is power in Ansel Adam’s images; consider “Canyon de Chelly”, “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome”, “Winter Sunrise, from Lone Pine” or “Tetons and the Snake River”. Each celebrates God’s awe-inspiring works, intentionally or not; they speak of majesty. Ansel describes Yosemite Valley as “always sunrise, glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.” The valley captured his imagination, and it needed to be shared. With his heavy large format, Korona View, camera and magazine of 8 x 10 glass slides he ascended mountain sides and often perched precariously between rock-face and abyss to capture these incredible images. But as anyone who has snapped a picture knows there is a knack to translating the three-dimensional onto photographic paper. It only begins with ISO, shutter speed and aperture. For Ansel it was knowledge of filters, light, lenses, papers and enlargers, dark room technique but most of all an imagination in order to visualize the final artifact. Half Dome had a story to tell that day in 1927, just as the psalmist says, “Day after day they pour out speech” (Psalm 19:2), and Ansel Adams listened, heard it and had the capacity to translate it for all to see. When I sit to listen to his or another’s retelling I wish to mingle with its splendor; I am raptured and left stirred with a deep longing “to find the place where all the beauty came from.” (C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces)

The response of the psalmist to such moving splendor is oftenest, praise in the shape of music: “Praise the Lord with the lyre; make music to Him with a ten stringed harp. Sing a new song to Him; play skillfully on the strings, with a joyful shout.” (Psalm 33:2-3) A new song, the anonymous author writes. Why must it be a new song? The theologian, David Bentley Hart postulates it is out of music’s innate ability to represent the polyphony of being, specifically the infinite music of the divine Being “whose beauty and variety can never be exhausted” (David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite). Take Bach’s Art of Fugue which is an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject. Each of the 14 fugues develops from a single, deceptively simple, musical theme.

A very good friend of mine, Roger Lowther, is a Julliard trained organist who is intimately familiar with the works of Bach. One evening he was explaining his love for this collection of music which ends mysteriously with the “unfinished fugue,” Contrapunctus XIV. Early musicologists surmised that Bach had died before its completion; modern scholarship has its own and different theories, but Roger told me he believed it to be intentionally left so. The idea behind the Art of Fugue is the richness of variety possible in a lone musical theme. By Contrapunctus XIV, it becomes evident that this theme’s contours cannot be exhausted; it could progress, infinitely building and extending itself. So the composer prematurely ends it as a statement of this disclosure. Unfinished it is arresting; for to perceive the infinite one must be yanked from time. If this feels like an unnatural terminus it is because the listener has left the familiar for the unfamiliar, or as Lewis tells us in The Last Battle, “The dream is ended: this is the morning”, and temporarily we have awakened to the morning whilst in the midst of a dream.

But regardless of where Bach chose to end the Art of Fugue, it would have been left unfinished even if musically resolved. For, there is an infinite reserve in the notes A, B, C, D, E, F, & G, even if further constrained by one simple theme. We see this in the Jazz scales, which open up endless provisions of improvisation such that each performance of Brubeck’s Take Five is marvelously unique. Then there is the joke that all Rock ’n Roll is achievable with just four Barre chords; humorous as it is, it smacks of the possibility contained even within the most modest of sets. After all, aren’t these just repetitions unbounded by imagination? Consider the possibilities of color variation from just three hues: red, yellow and blue. God’s imagination conceived of an eight-legged octopus, a bipedal man, a horned narwhale, and a creepy gulper eel all from 4 amino acids. What the musician achieves is an echo rumbling with the resonance of the infinite God, himself an ever renewing song. It is a modest set, yet the variety intrinsic to it reveals emphatically the truly boundlessness of a God whom, himself, has no limits.

To this point we have over looked the most ancient of the arts—poetry. Or have we forgotten that the word poet derives from the Greek, meaning “maker” or “creator.” Thus God in his act of creation penned poetry when he uttered “Let there be light.” Imagine figurative language doing more than just implying something else metaphorically but becoming the figure and form of the word, itself. Imagine it having life and breath. “For we are God’s workmanship” (Ephesians 2:10 a) made in the “image” and “likeness” of God. We are his poema the Greek says; we are God’s poems and as such we are tangible symbols of the Creator—we are body and spirit like he is, we are little creators, we are vested with authority. But consider also that God is known through every face and fingerprint, every personality and aptitude. He is both Achilles & Odysseus as he is also Paris; he is both the lion and the lamb, and no less one than the other.

Imagine God created everything in like manner. Imagine that instead of stumbling on “wine and vine” as apt figures of speech, God created them to allegorize himself even when he said in Genesis, “Let the land produce vegetation.” Imagine bread, likewise—lamps, doorways, lambs, lions all created to anticipate the person of God, to give us insight and understanding into his nature and being and not just in the “wow” of it all. And all we must do is look to see God all around us.

Enter the poet. The poet demonstrates the relationship of things. He takes what at first glance appears to be completely other and unifies it. Take for instance these lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains…

Only a poet could see the feline in fog, but once he reveals it, fog forever becomes animated as such. Perhaps this is just an exercise (I do not believe so), but if it is, it exercises the muscles of our own intuition that we might more easily perceive the analogic reality about us—that all things are little metaphors of God. I wish we could all see like Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins perceives the warm glow at sunrise as the very manifestation of the Holy Ghost. He sees God descending in the golden light of morning hovering as if over a nest of chicks. The 20th century Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain, reminds us that the “intellect sees by conceiving, and conceives only to see.” (Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism) If it is all Poetry, we do well to understand poetry; we do well to seek poetic knowledge that we might see what is just below the surface though at first it is obscured; for what is there is often the Holy Ghost.

But poetry plays another crucial role. It fuses the object back to the word—affirming sola scriptura. It reminds us that the Word is interstitial tissue knitting objects together, binding them to spirit and memory alike, otherwise they are just objects, or things. According to Maritain, art is connatural as a person is connatural, bridging body and soul. Maritain’s use of connatural is akin to Lewis’ use of amphibious, except even broader extending to all of reality. A poet’s poem becomes for him a special communication and means of knowing the spirit through the formative—ergo all form; such that “the soul is known in the experience of the world and the world is known in the experience of the soul.” (Maritain, Creative Intuition) Maritain posits, in an ontological argument beyond the scope of this article, that participation with beauty engages the whole human being in the “two substances [soul and body] that function as co-principles of the one existent reality.” (Maritain, The Person) The whole being, including its senses, memory, reason, intellect, heart and will, become engaged whether in the production of art or in the aesthetic experience of it. And not just these portions within us, body and soul, but also, as Tolstoy tells us, the greater community of bodies & souls who have and will yet participate along with us in mutual love of the form wherein splendor is revealed

to become conscious of union and mutual brotherly love. Each glad that another feels what he feels; glad of the communion established not only between him and all present (not only between him and the artist or him and God), but also with all now living who will yet share the same impression; and more than that he feels the mysterious gladness of a communion which reaching beyond the grave, unites us with all men of the past who have been moved by the same feelings and with all men of the future who will yet be touched by them. (Tolstoy, What is Art?)

We know, now, that all love, all relationships (between God & man, man & man and man & World), are mediated through Jesus Christ. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship). Poetry is formed and formative—shaping our very desires through the mediation of love; “poetry unwittingly gives us a foretaste, a hidden desire for supernatural life.” (Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge)

Not just poetry but all art accomplishes this feat, but poetry does so via the spoken word (for poetry is a collection of chosen sounds). Aloud, poetry preserves the word as it reinvigorates language by rejuvenating disappearing, unspoken speech—words as well as metaphors—conceives of new ones, and even realizes genuine poetic utterances in everyday vernacular: at the coffee shop and water-cooler (just as a musician hears notes in train whistles and birdsong). As the word first transformed the spiritual into flesh when it was spoken into the void, poetry transcends the “thingness” of flesh that it might return to the spirit world where once there was only void.

Consider this short poem by Emily Dickinson:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

This simple verse reminds us that even in the absence of things there is no void. Notice how the words “bee” and “revery” are connected through their sounds. First we find the sound “ee” in the final syllable of revery in an imperfect rhyme, but there is also the reverberation of the buzz of the bee in the first stressed syllable—“rev”—and again repeated in the next line as if emulating the Doppler of wing-beats. The bee exists even if it does not exist because it finds itself in revery—in a word; in like manner, “bee” and “prairie” are imperfectly rhymed, also, becoming signs for one another. If the bee can be found in revery, there is a whole prairie there, as well. But the poem goes on to reveal a love for nature one which is known even when it is absent. There is a deep longing to return to bees, foxglove and hyssop; a longing, after reading it, I too share. But it is a desire for more than just bee and prairie. It is a desire for rest; spiritualized, it is a desire for escape into the idyllic. It is a spiritual emotion by which the author, as an embodied soul, and the reader, likewise, come to know each other.

But we have just barely scratched the surface, here. The ancients identified nine muses governing the arts; we have mentioned only a few. We have not yet to comment on painting, sculpture, film, fiction, drama, or comedy, which are each expressive as icons in their own right. There is too much here to flesh out, but needless to say each art form has its own language possessing its own vocabulary and richly communicative—appealing to and speaking through the different senses. Each form expresses a knowledge inaccessible by other means, or at least dulled in its translation. Marshall Mcluhan gave us the phrase “the medium is the message;” it is a wisdom the artist has long known even if left unarticulated. So much is gained from engaging them which would otherwise be left silenced.

But God has seen fit to reveal himself in the infinite variety of his Creation along with all of its perpetuating creations—along with all of its opulent but transitory moments (consider the bee in the prairie or the endlessly changing face of Half Dome) which all exist for “an instant and will disappear forever, and only in the memory of angels [and artists’ souls] will [they] be preserved, above time.” (Maritain, Creative Intuition) God rewards those ardent-hearted who understand that “to love God is to invest the world with significance, a significance which deepens the mysterious presence of things” (Graham Ward) and results in an ever watchful eye and ever transforming hand that helps us all remember that beauty is the radiance of all the transcendentals united.

What is written above is by no means exhaustive. Rather consider it a groundwork on which to build. For the God of the Bible is an inexhaustible sea of splendor, and each singular piece of art possess the capacity for something unique and never to be stated again. This is the nature of the infinite. The Word is much more glorious then ever surmised by reason alone; it is a much brighter light then we first believed, and we must be about the business of chasing after its abundant expanse as it overcomes the darkness with truth, goodness and delight—stirring up our passion to know the God of Beauty. Let us consider ourselves, now, without excuse.

Robert Duvall as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from the movie, "Apocalypse Now"

Pudding House Publishing*
81 Shadymere Lane, Columbus, OH 43213
www.puddinghouse.com
ISBN 1-58998-825-6
2009, 32 pp., $12.00

Plain and simple, 1969. I knew nothing of Tony Gloeggler except that solitary poem, which I first read on RATTLE’s blog a few months back.**  I suppose Greatest Hits was an inevitable first purchase, then; just as knowing nothing of Dave Brubeck when I was 16 obliged me to buy a 2-disc greatest hits of the jazz master. This was before I knew that Darktown Strutter’s Ball was never supposed to follow Take Five, or, even, anything of the magic of the famed Brubeck/Desmond chemistry that I now hold in holy awe. Greatest hits, I believe, are about impatience or ignorance. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I really wanted to buy a Brubeck album that day, thumbing through stacks at the music store but perplexed—Time, Time Out, Time Further Out, Time Way Way Out, Time In, Time Changes—but I left with Dave Brubeck The Legacy Jazz Collection instead, a 28 song compilation of his “mainstays” that can be skipped if you are a longtime collector, but a good introduction, otherwise. Back to Tony Gloeggler Greatest Hits 1984 – 2009.

Back to 1969, which begins the chapbook and my interest in the author—is like a radio single that ends with a quick trip to Tower Records, in that way. I cracked the book open to read a short introduction by the poet, then quickly moved on to the first poem whose title is seemingly as nostalgic as all those radio-hits, albums, compact discs, brick-and-mortar-record-stores and retrospectives I remember. Rife nostalgia is an overall theme of the Greatest Hits series by Pudding House, and this poem—which speaks of Little-League baseball, first kisses & cigarettes, World Series games, Communion and Mustangs—is an appropriate opening. The poem seems, on the surface, to be about loss & death and a family’s grief & coping, thought its theme is actually something quite different. In the poet’s introduction to the chapbook, Gloeggler says, “While I have two younger brothers, none of them have died in Viet Nam or anywhere else. Sometimes that fact has surprised, disappointed and pissed people off.” Maybe it doesn’t piss me off because the war in Viet Nam is not a direct memory of mine, as I wasn’t alive during that era. Nevertheless, the indirect memory of it is part of my psyche: 58,272 names carved on polished black granite, flag-draped caskets, Nixon and Johnson speeches replayed on PBS specials, F4 phantoms & Huey helicopters taking off and landing ad infinitum on TV, and Robert Duval proclaiming, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Rife nostalgia, or not even nostalgia, or nothing but nostalgia—Gloeggler admits it is a fabrication, though brought on by the symbols and liturgies of war that have affected him much as they affect me, as we are all affected by them. The poem shook me the first time I read it; it still shakes me, the way Johnny’s Mustang with his father sitting in it revving the engine shook “every tool hanging in the garage”. A host of car songs comes to mind, including Marc Cohn’s Silver Thunderbird: “Me I wanna go down/ in a silver Thunderbird…”

One thread connecting the poems in this collection is loss. Well, loss and something gristly. Greatest Hits is full of vulgarity and sex and masturbation and one very descriptive account of an abortion that made me cringe, uncomfortably. Despite that, Scraping is a good poem, packed with self-doubt, inner turmoil and rage, and, yes, the ability to turn my stomach. Quite good because I get the genuine sense that my discomfort in reading it is Gloeggler’s own—that here we have honesty that hurts and a subconscious that is haunted. He’s unsettled, but at the time he “was young and dumb/and in love, and would have done anything/for her”. Like the Antlers’ Bear, “We’re too old/We’re not old, old at all…We’ll be blind and dumb until we fall asleep”. Gloegger continues, “she wasn’t ready to be a mother”.

[And] I was happier to stay
boyfriend and girlfriend, sit in the waiting room
and turn pages in magazines while the doctor sucked
and scraped her insides clean.

The Antlers sing on as if in echo,

We’re not scared of making caves
Or finding food for him to eat
We’re terrified of one another
And terrified of what that means
But we’ll make only quick decisions
And you’ll just keep me in the waiting room.

It would be easy enough to question the morality of it all and the author’s complicity, but he appears, like Duvall’s character in Get Low (is this for real? 2 Duvall references in one article?), to have already passed judgment on himself. He lives with profound guilt for which being “young and dumb” isn’t enough of an excuse. “I want to know what it will take to stop/that god damn shovel from scraping the ground again”. It isn’t the shovel he hears. And there’s all the cynicism to remind him, and us, that there are no simple solutions. What if the lost “daughter or son” had grown up? Would he and the girl have worked harder to stay together, or as likely stayed together and “hurt each other even deeper”? Which takes us back to Bear, “When we get home we’re bigger strangers than we’ve ever been before/You sit in front of snowy television, suitcase on the floor.” Gloeggler wrestles candidly, and we shouldn’t intervene to add to or detract from it. We can instead share in the pain of his grief-stricken spirit; we can sing along.

There are a few truly heart felt moments, though no less gritty. Take The Last Good Thing or Goodbye. These moments are transcendent breaks in a compilation dominated by love defined by first-flushes of passion and sex. Here, Gloeggler is at his best, as he sutures frankness to vulnerability. In The Last Good Thing we see a father and son in an intimately, sad space. A man once strong and looked upon “like he’s some God”, now needing to be undressed and held in the shower by his son and “soaped under his arms, between/his legs”. The son’s response:

…I tried not to cry
when he said he could stay
like this forever, stay
until he died, until
the hot water got cold.

And, as if in a role-reversal, the narrator in Goodbye is the father-like figure, still as caring as he was when a son—now doting on the autistic child of a lover. We know Joshua as the narrator picks him up from school for the last time, as we discover that the relationship which brought the two together has fallen apart, as she is moving with Joshua to Vermont. He wonders:

if he remembers that I moved
down the block, kept visiting him
while everyone I know told me
to let go and move on,
that I didn’t owe him a thing,
and no one seemed to accept
or understand I love Joshua,
that the way he will never fit
in the world reminds me of me
and I wish he was my son,
my eight year old boy.
My, my, mine.

In his introduction, Gloeggler tells us, “I still can’t get through it out loud without my heart starting to move differently, my voice catching and getting shaky.” It is my favorite poem in the compilation. It deserves a rest afterward like a moment of silence just like the silence necessary after the part in Bruce Springsteen’s Highway Patrolman where Sergeant Joe pulls over and watches his brother Frank’s fleeing “taillights disappear” into Canada all the while reflecting on how “nothin’ feels better than blood on blood” and when a “man turns his back on his family well he just ain’t no good.”

A humorous respite is required after something so heavy: something like a Cake song, something like Stickshifts and Safetybelts. One Hit Wonder and Mid Life Poetry Crises will do. In the former, Gloeggler tells us “no one remembers anyone for anything good” and the children of washed up rockers “cover their ears and say ‘Oh Dad no, not again?’” every time fingers are drummed to ancient rock standards. Bleak? Perhaps but comical as he ends the poem with “five fat bald guys…hurrying home from work/to meet in somebody’s garage…plugging in amps, picking up drumsticks,/strapping on the bass and guitar…nod” then count off “‘One.’ ‘Two.’ ‘Three.’ ‘Four.’” The poem ends there; how perfect! In Mid Life Poetry Crises, Gloeggler rants:

I’m tired of song titles,
retards, autistic kids,
old and new girlfriends,
battered valentines, baseball
metaphors, not getting
laid, subway stations,
working class families,
drunk drivers, dead fathers…

Aren’t these the very things he writes about? I believe a chortle is required. And he goes on “I want to open my mail/to submission requests/from the New Yorker and Poetry…Sell more books/than Billy Collins”. And when he dies torture school kids as they recite his poems during National Poetry Month. Two chortles in one poem!? What fun.

The one thing I struggle with in this book is the vulgarity. It initially turned me off. I was told once by a comedian that vulgarity gets the easy laugh; what is challenging and artful in comedy is eliciting laughter without the crutch of the “F” bomb or crudeness. That has stuck with me. I’m no prude; vulgar words don’t register to my ears in movies or music, but in poetry I demand more. I’ve read that poetry is an attempt to constantly rejuvenate the language—to make it young and virile and exciting. As a poet I scoff at clichés and overused idioms. They mark an inferior poet. What are four-letter words but overused idioms? Yes, I’ve read poems in which vulgarity makes sense (the rules aren’t cut-and-dry here), but I believe it is the rarer instance. Of the 12 poems in the Greatest Hits collection, over half have swearwords or flat-out crude or offensive diction. It doesn’t seem judicious enough to me. Tony Gloeggler is talented, at times brilliant. I expect these tricks, I suppose, but from a mediocre poet, which Gloeggler is not. Of course, if I were him, I’d quote Duvall from True Grit (1969) at me, “I need a good judge!” Or better still, “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”

I can’t say that I’ve ever liked a greatest hits collection straight through. It’s been pieced together and is meant to be an overview of a career, rather than a stand-alone body of work. It’s like an amuse bouche at a fine restaurant, meant for whetting an appetite as opposed to satisfying it. Perhaps it is a sound check. Either way, after digesting a best-of album the next right step is a return trip to the record shop to hunt for the tracks you “dug”, only this time on an honest-to-god full-length record. Applying that maxim here, there are four such poems I’d look for: 1969, The Last Good Thing, Scraping and Goodbye. They were enough to keep me interested in Tony Gloeggler. The chapbook might not be for everyone. It is gristly and bawdy, but so, too, is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. My advice comes from Duvall (by this point it’s too late to quote anyone else) as Felix Bush in Get Low: “If you don’t listen, you can’t hear nothing.” And some of Gloeggler’s work is music worth hearing.

* The Greatest Hits series has since sold to Kattywompus Press. 2696 W Saint James Pkwy, Cleveland Heights, OH 44106. www.kattywompuspress.com.

** Gloeggler, Tony. 1969. April 2011. RATTLE. http://rattle.com/blog/2011/04/1969-by-tony-gloeggler/. (27 April 2011).

This review was first published August 20, 2011 in RATTLE.

Alfonse Borysewicz - Your Own Soul

And what, friends, is called a road? If there is, friends, an island, akin to a river, resembling a fence, used in the purpose of swiftly moving bodies and goods, a hallway lined in names, an aisle through counties, a duct in webs, a gangway to seeds, a traveling of beings, a river composed of islands, a place of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, a place for the finding of place, an area of exchange like unto an immense abacus. This, friends, is called a road.

And what, friends, is a car? If there is, friends, a metal corpuscle, a small room in which one cannot walk, a kind of peregrine room, a metal corpuscle battened to wheels, with an interior fitted with instruments used to control its movement, purposed to haul bodies from place to place with minimal exertion on the musculature of those bodies, being thus a small room on wheels that metallizes the human body, being a small mobilized building, a portable shack, conveying of hairdos, children, coins, drinks and fuels across the air and into the surface of hills and athwart old and dull and glittering rivers. This, friends, is called a car.

And what, friends, is called a daughter? If there is, friends, a little girl, impressionable, precious, complex, in need of love, desiring of security, warmth, kindness, giving of kindness, who is brave, who witnesses storms in awe and in fright, who enjoys big trees, has seen the fighting of her parents, owns a teddybear, goes with a teddybear, carries a white stuffed polar bear throughout her childhood, who is five, who is six, who is nine, who makes little camps in livingrooms, or in the backs of great cars, who is as an enfoldment of joy and whose life, despite her parents’ efforts, is still surrounded by the causes of death, who is ten, who still finds grief, whose small hands are growing away, whose large eyes are growing away, whose funny way of talking is growing away. This, friends, is called a daughter.

And what, for us, is called a long-distance relationship? If there are friends, or any two people separated purposefully by a distance, whose history of interaction is characterized by misunderstanding, frequent fighting and interpersonal pain, such that the factors of their differences of age, culture, their styles of temperament and the scripts they were taught (in which they may seem imprisoned) have exercised them to a distance, of say eleven hundred miles, and who, despite compatibilities, and because of incompatibilities, find themselves frustrated yet willing to try. This, friends, is called a long-distance relationship.

And what, at last, is called a notebook? If, friends, there is a road through emptiness, a sea sewn to a spine, placed on tables, laps, or on the passenger seat of a car, used for palliation in a wash of disappearances, in haphazard recording of minutiae, road conditions, the recording of road condition and aggregates of thought that occur while driving on a condition, the invitation of emotion and radio, the notation of sign, a setting down of compendious or incidental note, in the grammars of back and forth going, the traveling from period to period, the coming from west to west, a sending between, a going in weather, whether between Illinois and Rhode Island, whether Normal and Providence, or between any several places normal, providential, for the purposes of trying to be happy, or of saving one’s relationship, with one’s estranged partner, or of seeing one’s small daughter, during a separation, or of seeing her during a divorce, or of seeing her, during her swift youth after a divorce, or of driving to participate, even briefly, in the life of a sadder and less buoyant daughter, a little daughter, who is brave, who puts her chin up, who is kind, who only wishes to be happy, whom one cannot find a job near, for the recording of any elemental time of alienation, for the chronicling of any emotional pain, evoked by any unnatural distance, from a small daughter, one might love, with all one’s understanding, such that, by a collection of scrawl, in an accrual of insight, some use be invited, to recollect painful things, that they may not become misery, and the refusal, to be steered by pain, or to recollect, and in fact insist, the living, with awareness, to joy, to recollect this way, for a daughter, when she is grown, or for oneself, or for anyone else, who may have found, to whatever degree, in this place of orphans, this endless humility, in our sorrow for lost homes. This, friends, is called a notebook.

First published in Action Yes Online Quarterly and Best American Poetry 2010.

Ken Weathersby - Inset Canvas

However innocent your life may have been, no Christian ought to venture to die in any other state than that of penitent.
—St. Augustine

I have been sodden with wine.
I have been confused by wine.
I have been lied to by men,
And yet, I lie down upon such men,
Still and willing in the manners that they please.
Lord, I’ve been the blemish at your love feast.

And I’ve been tangled in nettles and brambles,
Have dwelt in seamy hotels, have ambled
Down roads that once, so necessary,
Seemed. And I’ve prayed, hot and overloadedly,
Having meddled in such matters
That ought be closed to me.

Darkness. I have done dread deeds in,
Hearkening to apocalyptic heathen,
Even as I cocked my lips to yours. And I have slept
On floors. And I have crept along on all fours.
And. More. I have lived briskly in nice houses.
I have swigged whiskey in icehouses.

I have been June, July, and August.
I have been riotous when I felt like I must
Or I could be. And I’ve hung on your tree like a ripe fig.
Desiring to be plucked. And I’ve flung my body to your bed
Like a white bride pining to be rubbed up against.
Like a suckling child hungry in a viper’s den.

And I have been Dismas, the penitent
Thief. And I have been Judas. And I’ve spent
My plenty silvers chiefly on my hells.
In that, I have seldom, if ever, failed.
It’s just as well. For as the ibis devours her carrion,
I feed upon what queasy defeats I carry on

My back. Thus the beggar becomes her bowl.
And the hangwoman surrenders to the scaffold.
And irrevocable acts of god and doom consume me.
Can this be mercy? I fear there isn’t any
Left. Even the chrism is bereft.
Wretched, most wretched it says.

While my guilt unfolds like a napkin in your lap.
Will a dog grow fat on crumbs the master drops?
I have been a grabber at your garment hem.
And I have been a Magdalene outside your tomb.
And I’ve bathed atop roofs, have pounded with rue,
Have pooled my pearls, the sorrowful few—

Like milky mea culpas they rattle fragile on a string.
Christ: Forgive me everything.

First published in Image and Best American Poetry 2010.

Erica Grimm-Vance - On the Question of Being

I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet
whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye;
I was born across the river where I
was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth,
broadsides sewn in my shoes. I returned, though
it please you, through no fault of my own,
pockets filled with coffee grounds and eggshells.
I was born still and superstitious; I bore an unexpected burden.
I gave birth, I gave blessing, I gave rise to suspicion.
I was born abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air,
air drifting like spirits and old windows.
I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry;
I was an index of first lines when I was born.
I was born waist-deep stubborn in the water crying
ain’t I a woman and a brother I was born
to this hall of mirrors, this horror movie I was
born with a prologue of references, pursued
by mosquitoes and thieves, I was born passing
off the problem of the twentieth century: I was born.
I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves;
I walked a piece of the way alone before I was born.

First published in American Poetry Review and Best American Poetry 2010.

Hieronymus Bosch - Garden of Earthly Delights

May my enemy be assuaged by these waves
because they are beautiful even to his evil,
may the drizzle be a benediction to his heart
even as it is to mine; they say here that the devil
is beating his wife when the sun shines through the wires
of fine, fine rain. It is not my heart that forgives
my enemy his obscene material desires
but the flare of a leaf, the dart of a mottled dove,
the processional surplices of breakers entering the cove
as penitents enter the dome to the lace of an altar;
beauty so shaping neither condemns nor saves
like the tenets of my enemy’s church, the basilicas
of tumbling cherubs and agonized saints
and riots of purpureal cloud; though I have cause
I will share the world’s beauty with my enemies
even though their greed destroys the innocence
of my Adamic island. My enemy the serpent
as much as he is in the fresco, and he in all his
scales and venom and glittering head is
part of the island’s beauty; he need not repent.

First published in A Public Space and Best American Poetry 2010.