shady side review summer 2010 issue

Today is the Day -- Ben Kehoe

We've just released our summer 2010 issue at shady side review -- with cover art by Pittsburgher, Ben Kehoe. I love Ben's work. It's dark and surreal and playful. A nice combination. He paints creatures that beg to be touched, but look dangerous to touch, that look as if they would talk to you, but speak in another language.

I'm very excited about the literary work we've published for this issue. The fiction and non-fiction editors featured one author each. Our featured fiction writer is Amber Larson, whose work has a sharp voice and a way of drawing breath in a multitude of ways. Our featured non-fiction writer is Joshua Foster. Foster writes of rural landscape. His work makes you want to meet both him and the people in his life.

For poetry, my co-editor, Athena, and I chose a variety of writers, including: Peter Kline, Kristin Ravel, Besty Snider, Kiki Vera Johnson, JS Walter, and Joseph Reich. I'd like to think we chose work that both shocks and delights. The poems here are about boners, shoes, egotism, and strange love.

That being said, my advice is chose your drink/ cigar / lawn chair / shady place of choice and read: www.shadysidereview.com

Online Literary Magazines as Clubhouses & Spotlighting

What I like about the online venue is the freedom to go from one poet's/ writer's spot to the next. Each online literary journal is like a writer's clubhouse/ fort (this can go for print journals too, but one has to pay their "entry fee" as in subscription to get into print land-- something I am willing to do when I have a steady income or if I fall hard in love with a publication).

I've been looking at reading as play lately. Mostly because when I'm on the internet, I think of it as play, and this past month I've been reading a lot of online literary journals.

And even though, as a reader, it's really easy to get into the online literary clubhouse, it's still fun to be inside. I'd like to start spot-lighting some of the writers I've fallen upon through online journals.

First Spotlight

Whilst internetting this past week, one of my favorite emerging writers I've fallen upon is Melissa Broder. Her book, When You Say One Thing, but Mean Your Mother was released by Ampersand Books in Feb. 2010. The work I've read of hers on On Earth As it Is must be shared: I fell in love with lines like: "I believe god knows these things about me/ so I needn't say them with heart." (From Pennsylvania Prayer). And "She’s been/a bad babysitter. Deliver us/from Burger King with In Touch magazine" (From Prayer of Teenager Waifs).

I am also a fan of her piece on The Del Sol Review in which she again riffs on teenage magazines. I like Broder's work for this reason: it embraces pop culture, and (unlike a lot of the pieces I've been reading lately) she uses narrative while playing with inventive language. She's not trying to be avant garde in the wrong way and she knows how to depict angst as a bittersweet thing.

On the Book Purchase List

I'm very excited about Sara Ries' new book, "Come In, We're Open," and here are the reasons why:

1.) Sara's poetry = very human. Her poems are like those security mirrors in pharmacies, constantly scanning people passing by or checking themselves out to see if everything is alright. And I like that.
2.) I haven't read the book in its entirety, but I read the manuscript as she worked on it at Chatham University. I like to know a little bit of what's behind the cover in also knowing I will be surprised by revisions and what I haven't read.
3.) I'm a huge fan of Sara's work. I can proudly say I was a part in publishing her in shady side review's issue 2, which can be read here: http://shadysidereview.com/i-want-my-city-to-find-me/

I really really can't wait to order my own copy, and when I do I will go here to do it: www.sararies.com
And you should too.

The Applicant

In my recent move to Tyler, Texas I have found myself thinking about my past a lot. My poems have all been reflective pieces that look back.

The air conditioning in my car isn't working, which limits me to my feet, and my feet are mostly swollen. There also aren't many places to walk in the vicinity. My present is at stand still. And I've been experiencing what feels like ennui.

So, I've been applying to jobs. Any job. Recently I applied to The Bank of America for a bank teller position and I failed the personality section of the application. I drank a Rum & Coke to quell my rejected state. I wanted to smile politely and tell people to "have a nice life." (Some of my favorite Ben Folds lyrics.) I want a sense of placement.

In response to my complaint to the world, via facebook, my MFA mentor, Sheryl St. Germain, reminded me of Sylvia Plath's poem, "The Applicant." Listening to Plath's repetition of "will you marry it?" reminds me what it's like to be in customer service. In this search for a job and for placement I've forgotten how important it is to look at the present moment for poems. Rejection can be a good reminder of many things. (Thanks Sheryl. Thanks Sylvia.)

Jimmy Santiago Baca's Black Mesa Poems

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Black Mesa Poems evoke nostalgia: a nostalgia that strikes a vivid figure in time and place, Baca does not let in the grey haze that often times falls over memory. The reflection and environment illustrated are personal and informed by a distinct voice, but this does not alienate the reader, instead Baca reflects in an invitational manner.

Black Mesa Poems delves into and grazes across landscape, both internal and external, and as New Critical metaphors suggest, looking at each poem as a container, the reader finds the words as a crate that carries a large array of emotion and environment. The emotion seeps into the environment, the environment causes the emotion, reminding us we cannot separate what we feel from where we are, even when we are dreaming of escape. A dreamy tone sometimes seeps into these poems; an example of this is Main Character:

Red wine streaked
Blue sky and take-off smoke, /
Sizzled cowboys’ campfires, /
Dripped down barbwire, /
slogged the brave, daring scouts /
who galloped of to mesa buttes /
to speak peace with Apaches, /
and made the prairie /
lush with wine streams. /
When the movie /
was over, /
I squinted at the bright /
sunny street outside, /
looking for the main character. (35-36)

The blending of imagery here creates a sense of mental retreat, which works as a theme that appears and reappears throughout this collection. The leave the poet takes is often traditional as he escapes in nature, in poetry, through muses. Baca’s work has a traditional air to it; one might call him a Chicano Whitman. Baca utilizes crosshatched English, Spanish sentences to illustrate the people of his place. Similar to Whitman also in that he calls to mind the everyday lives of people joining and interconnecting. Both poets are not directly political, yet in focusing on community the message is clear: a beautiful world exists in the same place as ugly injustice. Celebration of individual comes out in all of this as well.

Baca’s El Sapo demonstrates the profound impact of losing a loved one—the reaction in this poem is to reminisce, to celebrate the life before death. The poem takes on the nostalgic tone mentioned earlier. Baca reflects on the life of a loved one in a romantic tone, yet one that tells the truth of El Sapo’s beauty and destruction.

He was robust, /
extravagant and extraordinary. /
Bred from tractor smoke and rows of tobacco, /
his laughter rustled deeply, /
corn leaves in windy afternoon, /
his exuberance for life /
flower-topped alfalfa opening to sun /
and harvesting blades. To him, good /
with bad. If you couldn’t take one, /
then don’t expect the other. /
He drank white liquor, /
left a jar on the porch a year. /
Spoke words full of fire, clean white fire from the heart, /
Made space glow with human radiance. (90)

El Sapo also serves as a good example of Baca’s confident use of familiar metaphor and devices. The poet risks the use of flowery language, yet the “heart” in his poetry always beats for the unexpected; “loneliness and love/ on the darkness” have their place as the poet combines the emotions with a “chalky pumice” of a man’s heart.

Without Black Mesa Poems, what do we know about America in the Southwest, but what we’ve experienced or imagined? Baca illustrates the dusty and raw reality of New Mexico in this collection, he takes us with him, gives us voz de la gente, gives us his preference for red chile over eggs; Baca presents poetry con duende, but never bombastically, only with manner.

Ai: Vice

Being a human is scary: the memories that swell inside, the lives (other than our own) we carry within ourselves, the pulse of want, the pulse of power, fear, the want, the want, the want. Not only the want, but what happens because of it: a new invention of self-- a self that is just like any other, a self with flaws, a self that leaks need in all of its inky mess.

Ai's Vice poems delve deep into the throat of dark desire. These poems are secrets turned confession. The confessions are not the poet's alone, but instead the persona she invents or imagines, yet each voice plays as an extension of self, somehow. This extension of self happens in channeling a plethora of voices. A good bit of the voices in Ai's poems are unusually lurid, so sinister the reader wants to ask why.

Why a murderer? Why an evil priest? Why a child beater? I asked as I read, as my stomach turned, as I wanted to peer further into the poems, as it no longer mattered who wrote the poems as the voices within the verse began to echo, agonizing echoes. In the echoes, the voices bounced off of me, and I got why. It's in us. These monsters are part of every single person. We are the news we listen to, we are the stories we've heard. This is how self becomes everything surrounding.

Ai's use of voice creates setting; the persona in each piece illustrates not only character, but environment, and culture the same-- a good example of this is in The Hitchhiker:

We stop, and as she moves closer to me, my hands ache,/

but somehow, I get the blade in her chest./

I think a song: "Everybody needs somebody,/

everybody needs somebody to love,/

as the black numerals 35 roll out of her right eye/

inside one small tear." (14)

This poem has vivid enough language to play across a television screen. The voice of the perpetrator, the tear of the victim, the music he sings (why do I hear it crackly and on the radio?) takes us straight to the place, straight to the time; we can feel the car seat against our legs and remnants of the dry Arizona heat mixing in with the cool desert night.

Ai writes brave poetry: poetry with fear that doesn't fear, and she gets it right, but this collection isn't only about the boldness to say what hasn't been said. The collection works as a time travel machine too, a way for the poet to change history, to re-imagine history.

In Blue Suede Shoes (A Fiction) Ai tells her own Joe McCarthy story. And if ever a favorite baseball poem this one could be it for me-- because we are not at the game, but instead in the life after the game. And it hurts here: on this stoop where social class does its divide, and it hurts here where 1923 is no longer, and Joe just wants to be in the time when he was a golden boy. Damn, it stings in the yesterday, damn it stings:

Yesterday Bill comes by the hotel /

and he sits on the bed, but he can't relax. /

Uncle, he says, and points to my feet, /

All I ever wanted was this pair of blue suede shoes. (56)

And it just keeps stinging:

Remember Dorothy and the Yellow Brick Road? /

There's no pot of gold at the end, /

but we keep walking that road, /

red-white-and blue ears of corn /

steaming out of our minds: America, /

the only thing between us /

and the Red Tide. (56)

In the same way that it's scary to be a human, it's scary to be an American. Ai's poetry examines this, this anomaly of being, existing in collective memory, invented memory, media memory, memory that is instilled in us. Her poetry demonstrates that we are everything that happens in history; when we read about a murder we become a murder; when we think about being a mother we are first woman, woman that is "born with Eve's sin between her legs, / and inside her." (67) Vice is about identity, examining oneself and pulling out the parts of others, and living with those others within us.

lucille clifton: good woman

Humans be-- If I were only allowed to use two words to describe Lucille Clifton's poems those would be the two words: humans be, and maybe I would repeat them again, but not without some time and space between the first two times.

Clifton's poems make the reader simplify thought-- this isn't to say that her poetry is simple because it's not. However, the poet reveals that the world can be told with minimalistic language. Clifton's verse makes all other literature appear verbose, yet she possesses story-telling qualities as much as she does poetic, and she tells stories that can be dived into and swam around in. Her sparse verse illustrates that we can't let what appears to be shallow water fool us; we must know that we can't always see when water gets deeper-- sometimes it just drops off.

Lucille Clifton's collected works, good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980, contains unshakeable re-envisions of religious, mythological, and social texts. The poetry here is small enough in size to have been made from magnetic poetry, and if we can imagine Clifton using magnetic poetry for the entire book, the refrigerator would only have to be about 100 feet high. This is how her poems ask to be read: side by side and on one plane. The pieces interact with each other in extremely complicated ways, and flipping from one page makes less sense than would a refrigerator on the ceiling; Clifton's poems might be stared up at and and read one at at time. This Clifton poetry magnet-ing is all very logical as the poems are a cover for what stores nourishment.

Let's start with a song of mary:

somewhere it being yesterday.

i, a maiden in my mother's house.

the animals silent outside.

is morning.

princes sitting on thrones in the east

studying the incomprehensible heavens.

joseph carving a table somewhere

in another place.

i watching my mother.

i smiling an ordinary smile. (201)

Reading Clifton's persona poems happens seamlessly, no stopping to think about how the poet channelled Mary's voice, no wondering if this is Mary speaking. The broken language provides an archaic mood, and the small details a setting as vivid as a plastic manger scene (but without the mass produced feel). mary's song explores a religious figure's reflections. The speaker, Mary, remembers a yesterday before stars and light and visions from God became her life. She distances herself from the symbol of the animals, religious philosophers, and even her husband in order to travel back into her past where she is "watching her mother," and enjoying an ordinary moment. The poet explores the act of happiness or contentment as occurring in the most banal of moments.

Clifton's "Mary poems" delve deep into the psychology of the figure, illustrating the way that stars and prophecy begin to haunt her, the way that light becomes her, the way "light beyond sun and words of a name and a blessing" (198) permeate even her dreams.

Whereas in the "Kali poems," Clifton keeps a distance by moving in and out of third person, and in this way the poems are less of a meditation and more of a series of investigations. The theme of fear creates commonality between the "Kali poems" and "Mary poems." In the "Mary poems" the poet explores fear as it pierces the thoughts of Mary, whereas in the "Kali poems" the poet demonstrates fear of the goddess: a fear seeped in Kali's all-knowingness-- this is demonstrated in the coming of Kali.

it is the black God, Kali,

a woman God and terrible

with her skulls and breasts.

i am one side of your skin,

she sings, softness is the other,

you know you know me well, she sings,

you know you know me well.

running Kali off is hard.

she is persistent with her

black terrible self. she

knows laces in my bones

i never sings about but

she knows i know them well,

she knows.

she knows. (135)

A person could run amok with explication on this poem as it makes commentary on race, the body, identity-- all this in 15 lines, all this and a foreboding sense of the fate of being known by God. Being known, by a higher force, means being known as a figure in time. The poem approaches the inescapable reality that while humans are familiar with the forces of change and time, yet when we question our existence, we have a lost sense of control. We cannot control what is within, the "laces in our bones," the internal reality becomes a part of the ultimate reality that is Kali. Clifton's use of repetition in this piece haunts the page until knowledge transforms to a ghost.

The sensation of being haunted holds prevalence in good woman. The characters linger. The lingering effect stems from constant use of sensory detail. Sensory sticks on the skin in this poet's work. As in miss rosie who is "wrapped up like garbage/ sitting , surrounded by the smell/ of too old potato peels." (19) or the implied sound of a television in willie b (2) "today is mama's birthday/ and i'm gone get her that tv/ out of old steinhart's store. (41)

Voice and the channelling of voices makes good woman. Clifton teaches culture in her poetry-- she reminds us that we are not only ourselves, but we are made up of of culture, ourself is our culture. Ourself is religion or knowledge of it, ourself is the history that makes itself difficult to embrace, but we must delve into such knowledge in order to understand ourselves. Her poetry reminds us "to be," but not to forget what we are being.