Lina ramona Vitkauskas : How Your Canary Tethers

(The City Visible, pub. Cracked Slab Books)

plum knees,
door jambs undone
for now his reach as tiring as

the circle of circadian death,
the geometry of homonym
or as blotto breath through a

pale understudy of Minsk.
She has been Eros, his
chambermaid this long,

an even cog and spoke,
trusty gale and centerpiece,
rubicund permafrost,

misty delinquent damsel.
How he has calibrated woman
with the livered beak,

one that could not
be whet once more! How
each filigree innuendo

a phonograph torte
misguided lips a tortoise
she has hared anonymously.

@

Bill Allegrezza kindly sent me a copy of The City Visible, subtitled "Chicago Poetry for the New Century" and co-edited by him and Raymond Bianchi. At just under 250 pages, it's a curious volume in many ways. The most striking feature on a first flip-through is the extensive biographical material; for even though many poets have no more than two or three poems reproduced, all have at least a half page of biographical information, a photograph, and an artist's statement.

I've talked about this before in relation to the Legitimate Dangers anthology, where the same practice of extensive biographical information -- mostly a question of where the poet receievd her MFA, where she publishes and where she teaches now -- was in place. I don't like the practice, but I can't ignore it, and when I do encounter a poet I like, I enjoy having the picture and narrative handy. (Everyone should know that Joel Craig is way cuter than his photograph indicates, by the way.)

In the end, it is probably as harmless for the initiated as it would be harmful to the neophyte -- but few of the latter will encounter the volume. As I was giving the volume a first read at -- naturally -- Jimmy's, the Hyde Park bar where many of the poets in the volume have presumably knocked back a pint, I had one of those filmic moments where I saw the extensive cirricula vitarum fade gradually into the page, leaving only a murky residue between the poems: a visual demonstration of ars longa vita brevis.

Ray in the introduction describes the book as a compendium of "poets writing on the edge -- experimental, multi-lingual, internationally infused writing at the heart of the United States." It's hard to see, though, what is experimental about the untroubled lyric-I in work such as "63rd and Pulaski", by Erica Bernheim, which begins

It has been you I have wanted to look at,
proving my faithfulness to my home away
from home: the appendix: something I can
live without. I had forgotten there were stars . . .

or the didacticism of Johanny Vázquez Paz's "Our Revolution"

Since there are no longer wars for noble causes
and they have forgotten about defending the rights
of the poor, of women and children.

The anthology, in other words, is more defined by community than by any kind of poetic approach; more a sociological document than an aesthetic one. That said, Erica and Johanny are both somewhat out of place; the majority of writers appearing in the volume publish in many of the venues that serve as resource for rhubarb: Diagram, La Petite Zine, Shampoo, Moria, the Chicago Review and so on, and fit more comfortably into a notion of poetic project and experimentation.

But even with that in place, the work balances on a narrow beam between what might be called the mainstream engagement with be vivid and describe things, on the one hand, and the syntax detonation of the heirs to the 1970s. Here's the opening of neighbour Tim Yu's "I'm Pretty Sure Bison Art"

rules the rails, pretty

tracings holding
in the darkened station.

No smoking gun
from the shitpile, nor

hard-bore lender dubbed
man-in-charge.

Tim's work slides gently from that high-MFA "holding" -- the animation of aesthetic objects a classic move in that game -- to a rapid rattle of alliteration and syncopation that peels away from ordinary sense. Lea Graham is another middle term: her work is far more interesting that one would be led to believe from the Louise Glück quotation in her poetic statement:

I tell him "wine has no rudder" & so
we drink vodka tonics, watch the motions

of a bay: See how the current now moves
out, a sweet broom of moustache into

a collar.

Again, there is this sense of walking past the fulcrum of a see-saw aesthetics, in this case in the other direction, from the disclarity of rudderless wine to the descent into suburban narrative of drinking by the bay and the in-your-face lyric observation (coupled with nature-jargon) of "sweet broom of moustache."

At the risk of pressing the point too far home, here's Simone Muench, another aesthetician of the pivot-point, opening "Viewing Rain from a Hospital Bed":

Something sidles
up to me in the dark, I

taste it; this disease
I can't speak.

I listen to rain, tangled
branches, scar on my chest.

It shoots. You
lick it.

Like Tim and Lea, Simone plays both sides of the field, hustling the ball for a vividness and clarity of feeling-in-the-dark and writing-on-the-body before running interference for a distinctive, troubled eroticism that one places -- Its shoots. You / lick it -- in the territory of the experiment. Where she begins as a describer, a narrator of sensation, she modulates to the more-radical position of provider.

Two of the most interesting poets in the anthology are both Eastern European, and perhaps it's not a coincidence that they fit most carefully into the triple-niche Ray sets up as the thesis statement of the book. Ela Kotkowska's work -- too long to type in full, but more than excerptable [update: avaliable here] -- begins (after the unpromising title, "Song Without Words")

You always store pebbles under your tongue. There is no difference between root and cheek. Sublime collector without an archive, please forget the taste of milkweed and my face in the morning.

It's a sharp intelligence behind and between these words: something understated as a paring knife. The archive resonates with hints of a learned backing -- to me, archive is coterminous with Derrida -- without bashing you on the skull that we are talking about deeply intelligent things. The poem continues, lifting off like the skilled pilot of a rickety Aeroflot puddle-jumper:

In the dream, we dance off tempo. The chorus of gulls spits abject syllables and we pick up pearls.

You have anaesthetized numbers and defied heavenly calculus. Divine excrements forge new generations. Arctic lamp nourished by gale, don't judge the bone by the weight of flesh.

Lina, whose poem heads the review, is the other; not Polish, as Ela is, but Lithuanian, she with Ela generates some of the same feelings of too-casual fluency: her words unstabalize just as they are read. Given my affinity for Eugene Ostashevsky (look for my review of his work in the upcoming second issue of CAB/NET), it might be said that I have a circus-freak approach to poetry these days: I am fascinated by the queer deformations of language that seem to be coming from behind the curtain.

When Lina writes, in other words,

the geometry of homonym
or as blotto breath through a

pale understudy of Minsk

it's the collisions of homonym-blotto-understudy-Minsk that are both deeply strange -- new, unexpected, in extreme contrast to Erica's tired "home / away from home" linebreak -- and deeply right. It feels like a world is being assembled from the distinct bricks of the second-language intelligensia.

Both Ela and Lina are characterized by the above-mentioned fluency and not, as in much of the contemporary experimental work I read, by hesitation and erasure. Contrast these two writers with Jesse Seldess (or Laura Sims, reviewed on rhubarb awhile ago) -- Jesse's poetic statement claims an attachment to dynamicism, but his large and empty lines seem to press stuttering and hesitation instead:

End




And end


By past will




Hand talking

By Past will



Tend

Unfortunately, Lina and Ela are the only two examples of their kind of writing in the anthology, which does indeed function as a sociology more than an aesthetics. There's a lot of fantastic writing here -- beyond Tim and Lea and Simone, on the one hand, and the Eastern Europeans on the other, there is a diversity of expression that makes it a fantastic sourcebook. Perhaps the best way to end is with Ray's rattling "Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli," one of the few distinctively Chicago poems in an anthology defined more by academic than El-stop affiliation:

The pungency of those men who use bear
grease to keep their hair down while discussing
the Bel Canto. On that Saturday afternoon,
breasts were heaving and Comiskey Park green
was in my nose and cigarettes burned the vinyl
chairs. Hordes of monsters, offering plates of
food to garden statues next to faux
ponds . . . While talking and listening to Offenbach,
I think "fuck art, let's dance." I make a full
lunch of an Italian Beef Sandwich with nice
sport peppers and a really wet bun and date
stamping. G-string bikinis and a great piece of
steak, rare and bloody, give me indigestion and
a need for tea. The stripper's smell is in my
nose and the roof is leaking yellow National
Geographics.