Half a List

Technically speaking, can there ever be half a list? Lists of ten are a form more ingrained than sonnets. Here are 5 books being shuffled and reshuffled on my desk—at the risk of sounding blurbish—
Jasper Bernes, Starsdown
“The following are urban samples uncovered during crisis drills.” Thus begins our ride through a visionary L.A. As a former New Yorker, I think I experienced some version of Jasper’s quandary: how to describe a city which has become such a symbolic construct that the “concrete” (an old metonym for the urban experience) — disappears. What stands in its place is everything you know about finance, real estate, infrastructure, gas prices. So the book replicates that freneticism; it delivers you “boulevards of vertigo” (driven, it seems, by morphemes mutating virally into near-rhymes and near-anagrams). But I think my favorite moment in the book is its stillest: “Desiderata on a Desert Island.” Stillest, and most majestic:

Impossible to gauge the time it takes
To pen these notes, with only the empty
Amphitheatre of the ocean, with only subtle
Inflections to distinguish one thought
From another, blue from green, gulls from pelicans,
Where exactly and how the water becomes
Symbol of a common, consanguinous solitude.
Is that love? God? Justice? What I feel
Seems to name the others farther and more pure.
I could have read pages & pages of that with pleasure. An island in a maelstrom, it gives the lie to the idea that the self can’t be thought-felt in the matrix of urban systems. I think it will make a good double-bill with Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, also on my desk.
Charles North, Cadenza: Poems
I read, and loved, Charles’s book earlier this year; something in a Krzhizhanovsky story made me want to return to it. Because it occurred to me that North, in his philosophico-comedic scenarios, has something in common with the Modernist novel and the Cornell box. I’ve always loved the balance he achieves between the loose, personal tone and the rigorous, impersonal observations. But it only now occurs to me that he extends the “poetry of the imagination” by creating these miniaturized poetic set-ups that put the reader in beautiful, invented spaces with a family resemblance to Walser’s spaces or Krzhizhanovsky’s or, in art, Cornell or (of course!) Brainard collages.
Anthony Burgess, One Man’s Chorus: Uncollected Writings
Burgess was so prolific I can’t say I’ve made a dent in his oeuvre, but I think of him as someone whose word-hoard was so good I can pick up anything and get a frisson just from the sentences alone. On Gaudi’s Parque Guell: “The dilemma is how to reconcile the curvilinear with the rectilinear. Or, putting it another way, how to make a building seem more than a submission to the geometrical datum of length, breadth, and height. The mediaeval builders of cathedrals knew that God was big and that a tiny temple was an insult. They also knew that God was a circle and they tried to exploit the arc while accepting the necessity of rectilinear height. Gaudi found arcs and full circles everywhere — in coins and curls and breasts and eyes. …” This reminds me too of the Islamic architecture I was so intrigued by: the round mosques, the arched doorways, the undulating filigree. Circling the square. Try transposing: “The poet of the imagination sees arcs and circles everywhere in the prose of reality.”
Simon Perchik, Rafts
O, a sad book. Perchik was born in 1923 in Paterson, NJ. The rigor and simplicity of this long poem—whose stanzas come to resemble their title, life-rafts against the elemental page—is an almost ascetic response to death (impending death, death of the author’s sister while still a girl). I love the way different thought-lines are interdigitated:
You belittle the directions, this paint
needs thinning—it’s not safe
though for now you hold on more than ever
the way a flower inside another flower
spreads out when you add rainwater
as if this wall was still on fire
surrounding you, yelling at you to paint
with the window open, jump! the air
has nothing left, needs time, years
I read everything Parsifal Editions publishes (they publish the brilliant Tom Whalen) and The Modern Review is my favorite small magazine.
Mary Kinzie, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry
I’ve never read a more nuanced account of the techne of poetry than this! It’s like being sixteen again and discovering the art for the first time. “Some techniques must recede in order that others stand out.” This refers to her own concept of “Recession of Technique,” which features in other arts like piano-playing and painting. Kinzie stresses an attention to balance, the continuum between simplicity and complexity, and the constant precarity of reading—akin to the notion that walking is a species of falling, reading is a process by which you are anticipating meanings before you get to them. In that split second of anticipation, possibilities point the way to the future of poetry. This book is genius. It gets pride of place beside the Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry & Poetics and the OED!