Portrait of John Yau by Charles Bernstein, 5-30-07, NYC

A Sheaf of Pleasant Voices
--John Yau

There are rooftops
made of cloud remnants

gathered by a trader
dabbling in car parts and burlap

At night, I dive onto the breeze
fermenting above the dirt

and dream that I am a crocodile
a tin of shoe polish, an audience of two

In the morning, before the smallest yawn
becomes a noodle, I am offered

a ribbon of yellow smoke
I opt for fuzzy rocks and clawed water

and, of course, the perishable window
I am one of the last computer

chain errors to be illuminated
I tell you there are rooftops

on which the moon stops
being a cold jewel

And one by one the mountains
begin their descent from

the chambers of a lost book

[Lie-Light; Bill Jensen, 1989-90]

My tutors and I passed the hours watching rain gather its bubble in the saltshakers our ancestors placed on the limestone altar behind the stables. I discovered that salamander is not a language you can learn in a reflecting pool. Their itinerary was neither heroic nor glittering, and they preferred to congregate in the muddy lanes encircling the arsenal. When you are made of invisible ink, I told my last bodyguard, you are pursued by vexations, but you are not yet the sordid creation you will one day inhabit, comfortable as fur wrapped in muslin and carried down from the mountains. I became the animals that appeared in my dreams, their longing remains my guide.

Listen, Little Magdalena Snowdrop, don't you think it's time we prepare another canvas?

--from 'In the Fourth Year of the Plague'; John Yau

"A few years ago I read a number of books on Multiple Personality Disorder, language acquisition, and recovered memory. And during this time, I considered (as I did before and still do, which is not to say "conclude") that one might no longer be writing a poem addressed to one person (Rilke's angel) out there. Rather, it might be that one is trying to write a poem addressed to all the voices (manifestations) one hears in one's head. Or maybe, and here I am thinking of Jack Spicer, one is trying to register their different tonal registers, the range of sounds they make, the inchoate emotions. In a taped conversation of Stan and Jane Brakhage and Hollis Frampton (avant garde filmmakers), Frampton says this about the well-known image of St. George slaying the dragon: "The dragon has often been emblematic of what is unwarranted and surprising, and thus undesirable, in perception and imagination." Stan's response speaks, I think, to the question you've raised. He proposes that Sergei Eisenstein made the "mass of people" into "the hero," and that until then they existed in history as a "pretty ugly apparition." Baudelaire would agree. The other dilemma the artist faces is "to find a way to make manifest to the general air [one's] own socially unacceptable particularities." --John Yau, in a Q & A from Rain Taxi, Fall 2006

As one might be able to garner from the title of John Yau’s 2006 publication, Paradiso Diaspora, that he draws upon numerous writing styles for the crafting of his poems, including lyric, collage, paragraph and absurdist narrative. In order to keep the material manageable for the reader, the collection is divided into 6 different sections and with each comprised of its own particular mode and subject matter.

However, what all the poems do have in common is Yau’s extensive lingual playing field which pushes words out from their literal meanings and into associative and structural developments. And while the poems appear abstract, isn’t this what poetry has always set out to do? Despite whatever contexts which may have surrounded poetry through the history of its existence, there has always been an imparted effort to extend human experience and understanding into new directions through the imaginative use of language. So too with Yau.

While Yau’s reason for his writing style could be simplified to aesthetical choice, it is also grounded in a philosophical rationale, one comprised of the social and political. Being born to Chinese immigrants in 1950, a year after their move to the United States, Yau grew up in a home that was culturally half Chinese and half American. With Yau not being quite at home with either one of them, he was forced to come to terms with the pressures of assimilation within a country which is supposed to be a multitudinous Republic. Combine this background with what appears to still be pride for his citizenship as an American, Yau (at least in this volume and other more recent publications-- I haven't read his earlier books) replaces the “I” as it is used within the center of European-based poetry with a language style that exists in uncertainty and void of egocentricity. Within the first introductory poem for Pardiso Disaspora, Yau makes his position known that to single out a leader, a voice for the people, is a ‘hierarchical construction’, ‘undemocratic and antihumanist’. So Yau looks elsewhere.

Why not to human beginning? The second section of the book concerns the birth of his daughter and includes probably the strongest poem in the collection, 'Conversation after Midnight'. It’s a work modeled after Coleridge’s 'Frost at Midnight', but with the noticeable difference being that the voice of Yau’s work is not the ‘I’ of the poet, but a mercurial mixture of his baby daughter and the poetic muse. It’s a poem that holds a beauty because of its inspiration, but at the same time ironically humorous as the voice which emerges cuts through the usual sentimentality and while still hungrily screaming for its existence:

... I am the poem yes I am the one
you want to write or be written by
you boob or should I say Boobus Sanctimonius
I am the poem
you need to write to and for...

right now I am hungry
so go
get me something warm to drink
will you Bud

This is the tabula rasa state from which to enjoy the section that follows, where the writing turns more abstract and to the point where at times there is only the flow of the language and its recurrent patterns. Poems which sometimes ask to be enjoyed foremost through their surface qualities, such as sonic placement, bizarre imagery and nonlogical associations-- where you have to simply enjoy the presence of the words in your mouth and the surprise for where they may take you.

However, as Yau's non-ideology actually is a sort of ideology, Yau recoginzes the need for the self to take a position. But simultaneously with this, Yau places into question all forms of thought, symbolized partly through ‘the library’ and reminiscent of a reoccurring idead within W. C. Williams’ Paterson, "setting out while the libraries were still burning on the vast plains surrounding the artificial craters, plumes of aquamarine smoke dissipating in the cool westerly breezes". From here Yau goes into how we comprehend the historic events of our time. As Yau lives in New York City, 9/11 looms in the background and bringing the event into his poetry takes up the paradoxical challenge of not forgetting the atrocity while also keeping clear from the firmly centered interpretive ‘I’ to understand one's relation to the event. Which is not an either or proposition, but one which encourages the protean over the ideological, as is repeatedly suggested in all of Yau's poetry and the varied approaches he brings to his craft.

High Wind
--Jacques Dupin

We belong only to the mountain path
Winding in sunlight between sage and lichen
And hastening to darkness, mountain-top road,
To meet the constellations.
We have brought the edge of our cornfields
Close to the summits.
The grains burst in our hands.
The flames enter our bones.
Let men shoulder the dung and carry it up here.
Let wine and ryebread answer
The age of the volcano.
The fruits of the pride, the fruits of basalt
Will ripen under the blows
That make us visible.
Flesh will endure what eyes have suffered,
What wolves have not dreamed
Before descending to the sea.

Rumor has it, this is both Bolaño and Rimbaud approved. Flowers for a Lady; July 28, 1974; Umbria Jazz Festival, Todi, Italy Charles Mingus (bass), Dannie Richmond (drums), Don Pullen (piano), George Adams (tenor sax), Hamiet Bluiett (baritone sax).

from The Drunken Boat*
--Arthur Rimbaud

I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas
Where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers
In human skins! Rainbows stretched like bridles
Under the seas' horizon, to glaucous herds!

I have seen the enormous swamps seething, traps
Where a whole leviathan rots in the reeds!
Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm
And distances cataracting down into abysses!

Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs
Where the giant snakes devoured by vermin
Fall from the twisted trees with black odours!

I should have liked to show to children those dolphins
Of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.
- Foam of flowers rocked my driftings
And at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.

Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea whose sobs sweetened my rollings
Lifted its shadow-flowers with their yellow sucking disks toward me
And I hung there like a kneeling woman...

..
..
..
..
..

I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to sailor:
- Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights,
Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future?

*translated by Oliver Bernard

...a stretch of highway that must have been about five kilometres away, maybe less, maybe more. She even wiped the inside of the windshield with a cloth so I could see better. I looked: I saw the headlights of cars. From the way the beams of light were swivelling, there must have been a bend in the highway. And then I saw some green shapes in the desert. Did you see? [she] asked. Yes, lights, I replied. [She] looked at me: her bulging eyes gleamed, as do, no doubt, the eyes of the small mammals native to the inhospitable environs of Gómez Palacio, in the state of Durango. Then I looked again in the direction she had indicated. At first, I couldn’t see anything, only darkness, the sparkling lights of that restaurant or town. Some cars passed and the beams of their headlights carved the space in two.

Their progress was exasperatingly slow, but we were beyond exasperation.

And then I saw how the light, seconds after the car or truck had passed that spot, turned back on itself and hung in the air, a green light that seemed to breathe, alive and aware for a fraction of a second in the middle of the desert, set free, a marine light, moving like the sea but with all the fragility of earth, a green, prodigious, solitary light that must have been produced by something near that curve in the road—a sign, the roof of an abandoned shed, huge sheets of plastic spread on the ground—but that, to us, appeared to be a dream or a miracle, which comes to the same thing in the end.

--from Gómez Palacio; Roberto Bolaño (full story available at The New Yorker)

The title story to Last Evenings on Earth is one of the most memorable in the collection. A nameless protagonist, only identified as ‘B’, is going on a vacation with his father to Acapulco. B is engrossed in an anthology of French surrealist poetry while his father does his best to ‘live it up’ a bit, in the ways you would expect from a former boxer in Acapulco. While the whole story keeps you glued to the page, the section below is nothing less than pure poetry, seemingly effortless, magical poetry:

Do you know Longfellow? Asks the woman. B shakes his head, although in fact he has read some Longfellow. We learned it at school, says the woman, with her invariable smile. And then she adds: It’s too hot, don’t you think? It is very hot, whispers, B. There could be a storm coming, says the woman. There is something very definite about her tone. At this point B looks up: he can’t see a single star. But he can see lights in the hotel. And, at the window of his room, a silhouette watching them, which makes him start, as if struck by the first, sudden drops of a tropical downpour.

For a second, he is bewildered.

It’s his father, on the other side of the glass, wrapped in a blue bathrobe that he must have brought with him (B hasn’t seen it before and it certainly doesn’t belong to the hotel), staring at them, although when B notices him, his father steps back, recoiling as if bitten by a snake, lifts his hand in a shy wave, and disappears behind the curtains.

The song of Hiawatha, says the woman. B looks at her. The Song of Hiawatha, the poem by Longfellow. Ah, yes, says B.

My experience with Roberto Bolaño’s writing was previously limited to a three to four week voyage around the holidays through his magnum opus, 2666. While I had a general idea of the book’s content, I was not familiar with Bolaño’s writing style which, to my appreciative surprise, was far looser and associative than I had been expecting. The depth though was all I had hoped for and a more formal approach would have significantly taken away from the visionary gestures Bolaño used to estabish his artistic momentum, not to mention also limiting the reader’s personal interpretation and getting in the way of Bolaño’s aversion towards all things autocratic. When Bolaño does bring in the specifics, they are only brought in to the extent to which they help to honor the fictive lives (and deaths) of characters within the stories-- never for the broader implications.

But if I were to recommend a Bolaño book, I would probably be quicker to suggest Last Evenings on Earth though (or another one of his short story collections, once I have those read). Often compelled through an unspoken anxiety that is prone towards finding ‘significance’ in a world where such hierarchical qualities aren’t to be found (what does it mean? what Does it mean? ...therein lies our rich vulnerable madness Bolaño loves to explore....), these stories contain the same nightmarish dream-scapes of 2666 but in much more compacted form. With this in mind, it should be no surprise that Bolaño writes these stories from the fragments of ‘the outside’, eschewing the point A to point B inner narrative for the seductive illusoriness of hallucinogenic atmospheres, intonations of violence that are as inevitable as they are random, the bizarre relationships we have between control and chaos, the mind's labyrinth of knowing and not-knowing.

While literature and art are common subjects in the stories, generally the types of characters to be found are so random, a reader has to look for a descriptive commonality that goes beyond the immediate of personal biography, such as the banalities of background, time period, age, locale, etc. Instead, from a larger perspective, what these characters and stories do have in common is the quality of being in a surreal state of ‘exile’, which is most appropriate considering Bolaño’s own itinerant nationalities after leaving Chile and his lack of allegiance to other Latin American writers, as well as his enjoyment of surrealistic poetry. And while these can be found in Bolaño’s books as well, his use of exile is actually a much more comprehensive quality within the characters’ lives, their existence, permeating both the internal and external worlds. It’s a notion that is even emphasized through Bolaño’s ‘deadpan’ use of language, opaque because of its flat descriptiveness but then also, via contrast, translucent with dizzying questions that may or may not have answers. Comparisons can be made with Haruki Murakami.

When you combine all this together, what you have is -------------. Meaning, its something I can’t tell you. Instead, you have to go for the raw experience yourself, wating for you once you drop all expectations on your approach to begin the adventure of a Bolaño story. I can hint though and say that what awaits is modern, unruly, grotesque, sublime, disenchanting, empowering, unforgettable, and eventually humane, because of the writing being so honestly complete.

[Schiffe im Dunkeln; Paul Klee, 1927]

XI
A distance crossed, an uninhabitted city. In a lost city,
an inhabited city-- time never was.
The rain's reflection, another rain.
A greeting, a sign-- they greet you and they go.
A melody heard, a forgetting-- a forgetting and who knows what,
a spell of emptiness,
a scent,
a glance
--which memory does not drain off, which memory does not wash back.
And that is all.
Nothing and no one remains; it is one.
It all remains with one, and nothing remains
--matter, the earth. What is not touched, what is touched,
what is not,
everything is and remains.
What has been, what is, what is to be, there is no time
--there is nothing-- everything is.
Don't feel hurt
--don't hurt one bit.
Time never was; nothing has ever been; the human has everything
--hope is a grave thing.
To say farewell and become the farewell,
that is fitting.

--from To Cross This Distance; Jaime Saenz, 1973 [via wood s lot]

Happy Valentines Day. What could be more appropriate than a Wong Kar-wai film? From his 1994 Chungking Express:

[Petit's Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, 1974; George Tice]

Poetics
--August Kleinzahler

I have loved the air outside Shop-Rite Liquor
on summer evenings
better than the Marin hills at dusk
lavender and gold
stretching miles to the sea.

At the junction, up from the synagogue
a weeknight, necessarily
and with my father--
a sale on German beer.

Air full of living dust:
bus exhaust, airborne grains of pizza crust
wounded crystals
appearing, disappearing
among streetlights and unsuccessful neon.

An aspect of Kleinzahler's poetry that I haven't mentioned yet is found in his shorter poems. In the longer ones, those that extend further than a page, a more oratorical voice takes a presence within the language. But in Kleinzahler's shorter efforts, a more precise intent-- to nail the scene down into words that are as direct in their descriptions as they are loaded with emotional complexity.

Blue at 4 P.M.
--August Kleinzahler

The burnish of late afternoons
as winter ends--
this sadness coming on in waves is not round
and sweet
as the doleful cello

but jagged, intent
finding out places to get through the way wind
tries seams
and cracks of the old house, making
the furnace kick on

or the way his trumpet
sharks
through cloud and paradise shoal, nosing
out the dark filet
to tear apart and drink his own

Below is an excerpt from Kleinzahler's speech for the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize (link), the honors given because of his being the 2004 winner. But I was hesitant to post it because Kleinzahler is quite vocal about his cynicism towards the institutionalization of poetry, and in most people's minds, contests and awards are only a half step away from the ivory daddy of them all. But, its a good quote, and I think I've made my point through this preface. Note that the 21-line poem referred to is read in full at the end of his speech.

It is a far more difficult and worthy job to write one 21-line poem about a June twilight in Toronto than 42 novels, many of them large successes, some having been made into movies, about low characters behaving badly and being chased by those only somewhat less badly behaved. That is, if the poem about the June twilight is carried off so well as to be almost unforgettable and remain so for a good long time. How often is this sort of poem carried off? Rarely. How rarely? A few times a decade in any given language, perhaps a score of times a generation. It is what all poets aspire to: all writers, in truth, as novelists, even James Joyce, usually begin as poets and fall short. Poetry is the most difficult and demanding of the literary arts. It is also the oldest and most enduring, and despite rumors to the contrary, is not about to go away anytime soon. There is something about poetry that deeply inheres in human nature, like song and impassioned speech, and this need we have of tying language to experience, capturing as much as we can of it, getting it right and giving it a shape and a tune to carry it in the air. Long after the art novel, as we know it, is gone, we shall have poetry. Or at least as long as the ardent lover tells the beloved, “Darling, I love you, I love you desperately. I want to be with you.” And the beloved responds coyly, “Yeah, and …”

And who will read this 21-line poem about a sunset in Toronto? 50 people? 200? Perhaps a battalion of sophomores after the poet is long dead, 98% of whom will experience nothing at all of the magic of the poem, only mild irritation at having to expend the effort in reading and trying to understand it, or understanding it so far as having something sensible to say about it come exam time?

August Kleinzahler, chronic observer of the urban experience, with phrasing chock-full with such distinctive attitude, comparisons can be made with other macho writers such as Hemmingway and most notably, fellow poet Charles Bukowski. When voicing his annoyance at the middle aged complacency with Garrison Keillor's approach to bringing poetry to the general public, Kleinzahler is quoted to have said, “Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not”. And now in his newest collection of both new and older poems, Sleeping it Off in Rapid City, being published in a time when Change is supposed to be sweeping across our nation, unhealthy disgruntledness never sounded so right or so good.

Kleinzahler’s approach general derives from categorical listings that place strong emphasis upon the poetic line, bringing vivid, descriptive scenes to new life to become uniquely Kleinzahler's. Much of this is accomplished not from Kleinzahler interjecting his own thoughts on what he has experienced, but demonstrated through personalized syntax and word choice, coming up with such phrases as "putrefactive velcro", "epistemologist parks", "arsenic's perfume" and "griseous branches"; poetry that is precise in its dictation and word choice in order to reveal Kleinzahler's specific emotional gestures and vision.

His other techniques are quite American, such as the incorporation of both high and low culture, the symbolic use of pop figures, real and imaginary characters, travel, temporality, displacement and nostalgia. And despite being a native of New Jersey and a long time resident of San Francisco, these poems are particularly American with respect to the experience of the immigrant. Not 'immigrant' as a sociological study, but as one of the working myths in American arts and culture. From the title poem, about a visit to the “exact center of the Oglala known universe/ Cante wamakoguake”, he advises that “this old heritage hotel/ this is a sacred place/ the tour buses are lined up outside it/ awaiting the countless pilgrims". Even when Kleinzahler bridges outside of the United State, the world perspective seems to be the same for any post-industrial, capitalist nation, void of any final destination, the ‘migratory’ being the world's new home.

While this current publication is a collection of new and older poems, interestingly, Kleinzahler doesn’t advise as to which are the older poems and which the newer. But, the stylistic changes are noticeable and after reading through the book a few times, I actually don't want or need to know when they were written because they all end up working together to reveal a voice that has become uniquely Kleinzahler's, spread evenly across the palete with humor, bravery, anger, romance, cynicism, ludicrousness and artistic development. From Sunday, Across the Tasman:

Bartok liked to pick out a folk melody
and set it, a jewel in the thick
of hammered discords and shifting registers:
not unlike this dippy Mamas and Papas tune

floating along nicely among this debris.
The rain turns heavy, and the first
of the night's wild southerlies keens through,
laying waste the camellia and toi toi.

[photo from NYT]

['Four Dancers' (after Degas); Neil Folberg]

With snow on the ground since the end of November and the average temperatures falling well below normal, it has been an unusually cold and harsh winter in Michigan so far. But the past two days have had highs in the upper 40's and with blue skies and sunshine as well-- a too uncommon sight in this area at this time of year. We have probably had more minutes of sunshine in the past two days than all of January and December. A nice reprieve. Still a month to go though.

Portrait of Peter Gizzi by Charles Bernstein, 06-04-07, NYC

Nocturne
--Peter Gizzi

To know is an extreme condition
like doubt, and will not rest.

Even the dailies unravel in the end.
The aperature shut tight.

Is it so difficult to admit light
in its unconditional noise

its electric blur, its red
cherry red, red of the advertisements

or yellow, cool as yellow gold
flat as mustard yellow.

And bright-bright Gatorade green
green dusky as gray forest-shade green.

All, under blue, a prison shirt blue
that torch song blue of the crooner's eyes

or the blue between tenements
between trees, kids, air.

The throaty blue
in a doorway after a party.

There is one problem that I have with The Outernationale, which is that the cover photograph uses the Watts Towers without properly accrediting the work. These intricate structures, located in Los Angeles, CA, took 33 years to build and done so by an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia. When asked why he built the 'Nuestro Pueblo' (Our Town), Rodia stated, "I wanted to do something big and I did it." The reason for why this architectural and mosaic wonder has become a first rate piece of American naïve art is self explanatory. Still, not so many would be able to recognize them for what they are and putting some type of identifying note within the pages of the book would have been appropriate.

From Poetry Daily, a recent interivew with Peter Gizzi:

RC: In another interview you quote William Carlos Williams, "If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem"—can you describe the ways you find a poem pleasurable?

Gizzi: It is an experience of an inner emotional and intellectual life alive and unfolding. It has a sense of numinous reality that is open. The deep, satisfying, symphonic mind conducted through the sonic frequency oflanguage. When a moment—when either reading or writing—lights up and reveals consciousness itself free of expression, implacable, impersonal, alive and singing.



RC: What do children, and a child's view, mean to or allow for you as a poet?

Gizzi: I have often wondered that myself. To me, childhood is not a stable condition—certainly not safe, and certainly not unaware. More a condition of sonar, an emotional sonar of sorts....

If the condition of adulthood means being able to make choices that shape personhood, then we live in a culture in which we are infantilized—i.e., not allowed fundamental choices in the direction of the government—and therefore we remain in an unstable, dangerous state. This dangerous state feels metaphorically "out-of-doors" to me, outside the discourse of power and this out-of-doors (or outer) position or voice has proved useful to imagine selfhood or to make a voice that is at once neglected and empowered because of it.



RC: Can you talk more about that poem (The Outernationale), and the title in general? Is it in any way a response to the famous French socialist song "The Internationale"?

...title behaves in many ways—its meanings are still evolving as I continue to read the poems in the book. It's about making meaning from the outer edges of meaning and peripheral observations, how the outer and inner or fleeting and vast correspond. For me, the outernationale is a territory—a kind of lived vocal fabric, a material sound that might have sculptural dimensions, as in a habitable territory of the poem or the book, as it were....

...outer also implies the extreme of a boundary, and I imagine when I am working I want to compose just at the boundaries of the known—to find a way to write at the edge of an already impacted history and world which is where we always already are at all times. . . part of a vast, unstable, multiplying narrative. . . the ongoing story...



RC: Who is the "I" in your poems?

Gizzi: Well, it's me and not me. When I write, it's something just next to me—the observing I. To speak with an honest interplay of knowing and not-knowing. For me if a poem is a closed, contained vessel, it's dead on arrival; instead, I want to leave some part of the poem open so that I or another reader can enter it again and again. In a poem the I is always the reader as well as the poet. Poems that work for me have a kind of stereoscopic depth. With a stereoscope, you have the illusion of seeing all three dimensions, but it's unstable, or elusive, and yet it's there, right in front of your eyes.

The title of Gizzi's most recent publication, The Outernationale, requires a reader's consideration. Typically when a person thinks of poetry, the assumption is that the voice is being spoken from the poet to the reader. But if somone were to proceed with The Outernationale from this viewpoint, much of the book would be incomprehnsible. Instead, the poems are spoken from outside and towards the individual poet or reader, from the possibilities of the outer world, not the inner, a voice of the ephemera which the more typical poet speaks to or about.

Within the first section of The Outernationale, through words that flit down the page with simple but immediate descriptions, Gizzi establishes a poetic framework for the reader with a scope comparable to Whitman's myriad multitudes or the fields summoned by Robert Duncan ("often I am permitted to return to a meadow"), but through lingual techniques that are more similar to the brevity of George Oppen or the Projectivists. Associated with all of this though is the undivised innocence of a child bathing in plurality, "a child I became a question sitting on the grass".

In the sections that follow, Gizzi adds to the work a metaphor based upon cinematic projection, the light necessary to illuminate the object and the necessary reduction of what is brought into view, "to sculpt the empty blue", that choice of language brought into this focus for the artistic crafting of the poem, "indeed, symphonic dailiness is felt order". A complete metaphor to incorporate the experiences of the individual person through personal qualities like memory, experiences or universal desire. In this, the outer world becomes somthing else, but still part of a larger whole, a "utopia bent and snapping".

While this makes for a poetry of exquisite lyrical sensations, summoned through the glissade of Gizzi's use of language, The Outernationale locates a deeper significance when incorporating social and historical issues within the poetic conceit. History, the development of myths, national flags, bolshevists, shopping malls, self-significance, war, all aspects which have been brought into the landscape of human experience and lyrical poetry, and so to Gizzi's pages as well. Gizzi doesn't intend to offer opinions on these subjects, only how they can be both deconstructed and constructed through the reframing of the poetry, the moral emphasis then landing upon the choices made, that which the lens focuses upon.

Ultimately, what makes the book work is the poetry itself. I first ran across Gizzi's poems on the internet and was immediately drawn to the the lyrical sense in his writing, of the sort that makes reading almost effortless. The poems in The Outernationale are more spacious, open, but like a good jazz album or symphony, once someone has a working familiarity with the works, the enjoyments increase tenfold. Or to use Gizzi's own lines from the poem 'Beacon':

The most distant sound
might be the truest
when nerves resemble
summer rain at 2 A.M.,
the noise in back of things,
its deep seeding.

[A Park In Winter; Fairfield Porter, 1950]