Saint Vitus Press & Poetry Review
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| Hey, I have a new chapbook out, called "Garden of Rocks." It was published by Kendra Steiner Editions, who also published my other three chapbooks. I'm sending three poems to share and for consideration to a future issue of St. Vitus Press and Poetry Review. Be well, By Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal West Covina, CA LIKE CLOCKWORK By Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal The bells startle the birds once again like clockwork. I despair each hour you’re gone. I despair this quiet. Who abolished love? Who prescribed its death? How your absence has all, but killed me. The days linger on. I hear the birds singing, staving off my death, like magic of a different kind. NO MORE By Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal Once I was someone who I really wanted to be. One summer gave way to fall and I said farewell to me. I worshipped a love that’s gone. I adored a love I thought would last forever. Once I was someone, no more. LIFE IS UNFAIR By Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal I am far from lovely. I am of the opinion that I am ugly. My lips are too thin. Life is not fair. I shaved off my eyebrows. My nose is too big. My skin is too white, too pale. Life is not fair. My breasts are so small. My arms and legs are mere toothpicks. Is it any wonder I’m sad? Life is unfair. I have no suitors. I’m far from elegant. My legs are too hairy. Life is unfair. I have two left feet. I dress like a slob. I am too shy and homely. Life is not fair. I stutter when I speak. I spit sometimes too. I have too many pimples. Life is not fair. I’m in a deep depression. I have various maladies. I always find my weaknesses. Life is unfair. A lover won’t come for me. A lover won’t come to my door. I would not mind being in love. Life is unfair. I swear I will die lonely. I don’t know why I live. I will remain here loveless. Life is not fair. I am not kind to myself. I don’t treat myself so well. I will not give myself hope. Life is not fair. This is far from paradise. I have no reason to smile. My song is a not a pretty one. Life is unfair. |
| ELECTRIC GENIUS, DANGEROUS HAIR, AND DAMAGED FAME By Todd Moore I wish I had known about David Lerner about fifteen years ago. That kind of knowledge probably wouldn’t have changed his life or mine but it would’ve given me the privilege of knowing his work while it was coming out and he was alive. THE LAST FIVE MILES TO GRACE, Zeitgeist Press, 2005, $12.95. with a Foreword by Bruce Isaacson, brings together much if not all of Lerner’s published work. While David Lerner was closely associated with the Café Babar poets, the Poesy Fall 2005 issue is devoted to the Babarians, Lerner could have and most certainly would have been a major poet anywhere in this country, he was that good. At his electric genius best, Lerner could write as well as the best of them. He had a line that could suck the power right out of thin air and shove it into a high voltage poem. The only thing I can say is that most of the poems in LAST FIVE MILES work off some kind of huge duende, some cracked, damaged but still functioning power circuit that only a few poets ever tap into. The two poems that really work for me are The Future Task Of Language and Mein Kampf. “the future task of language/is to/drive a cherry-red Mercedes Benz/into the heart of hell/and place a bet on God.” You just gotta love that line. If you have any pretensions about being a poet, any kind of poet at all, you gotta love that line. And, this from MEIN KAMPF. “how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a/machine gun.” It doesn’t matter if you call Lerner a Café Babar poet, a Baby Beat, or what. What he absolutely was, was, he was truly a major poet and a natural Outlaw. Brian Morrisey’s ACCIDENTAL LANDSCAPES, Poesy, 2007, is visually a gorgeous piece of work. Morrisey, who edits the magazine Poesy, has a natural eye for the visual image and demonstrates it in the book with some really fine photography. And, I love the way he starts the book with a poem/letter to David Lerner. He writes … I borrow from your promises/raindrops that fall on the face of truth. In this poem Morrisey catches just the right feel for elegy and remembrance. It’s his attempt to understand Lerner’s brokenness and furious beauty. The poem is also a strong beginning for a collection that maintains a wistful and elegaic tone throughout. What I especially like about Morrisey’s work is the natural feeling he gets into the poem, as though each line he writes is as lyrical and easy as speech. Most of Morrisey’s poems deal with private moments like walking into Brady’s Bar, Drinking With Robert, In My House. The interesting thing about this last poem is that Morrisey senses a real change coming. He writes, change is in the crosshairs/right between the eyes/and I am trigger happy. Alex Gildzen’s latest book, IT’S ALL A MOVIE, Otoliths, Rockhampton Australia, 2007, is easily one of the most daring piece of works I’ve received in the last year. Gildzen’s poetry and life have been hugely influenced by the movies. In fact, I don’t think there is a major American poet living whose work has not been somehow influenced by Hollywood. However, Gildzen has made movies and movie stars a kind of central metaphor informing most if not all of his work. And, that central metaphor is very evident in IT’S ALL ABOUT A MOVIE. A casual reader might think of this book as a collection of personal remarks about movies, poems about film stars, snapshots of Gildzen with assorted film celebrities and writers, a section on Marilyn Monroe, and a closing section from Gildzen’s long work Alex In Movieland which is a kind of running diary from 1981. However, all of these sections taken together form a kind of memoir/diary/novel/poem. What I like best about all of these pieces is the way everything runs into everything else, the way disparate moments in time coalesce into each other and form something beyond the way they were when they were separate. Sees Breaker Morant in the last section has something secret and subversive to do with the fact that Ed Field was not allowed to go to movies in the first section. The cliché everything is connected does work when you write this way. If the central metaphor of IT’S ALL A MOVIE is movies, then the central speed of the book is Chuck Workman’s vision of the way that movies really move. And, the way that Alex Gildzen watches them and writes about the way those images hit him. I’ve been reading Big Hammer for a long time and am never disappointed. Out of the sweat of Big Hammer come two chapbooks from Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books. The first BUYING A SUIT ON ESSEX STREET by Ed Galing, 2006, is a collection of Galing’s memories of his childhood and early manhood in New York City. We’re talking about life on those city streets about seventy or eighty years ago because Galing has to be close to if not ninety now and still writing. Think about that for a moment. Talk about sheer survival in the small press and still being able to get it all down. For years, i have admired Ed Galing’s work. His poems are straight forward, no bullshit stories. Most of his poems are absolutely free of imagery, no similes, no artificial crap. Just talk about what his life has been like. He isn’t Bukowski. He just tells the stories. The snapshot on the book’s cover is of Galing say early 1940s all spiffed up in a topcoat, a white shirt and tie and a snap brim stetson hat. Reminds me a bent photo of my father at about the same time. Galing’s poetry has that kind of specific detail about it. You are given a picture or a story and that’s it. You take it from there. Somebody needs to put a big clutch of Ed Galing in a goddam big book and put it out there because Ed Galing is a man who should not be neglected. Another Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books chapbook that deserves reading is FALL & ALL by David Roskos. To put it briefly and right up front, I’ve never read a Dave Roskos poem I didn’ t like. They are all rough hewn pieces of work, as though they’d somehow been chopped out of tree stumps or big slabs of cement. Sometimes he uses titles and sometimes he doesn’t. The poems themselves are almost fragments. “Noon/with Ayler/at Manasquan Inlet/a clam boat/slowly approaching.” Roskos, above all, wants to give you a picture, almost like a painter. In a later poem, Roskos ends a poem with these words. “where to end a poem/like this,/ and how.” Another poem ends with these lines. “this poem has a blown/valve cover gasket.” What I like most about Roskos’ poetry is the jagged feel they all have. Roskos’ specialty is being able to rescue the language from the fact that it is so damaged. He has discovered the lyrical in the fragmented, the broken. WRESTLING WITH MY FATHER, Doug Holder, Yellow Pepper Press, six bucks, 2006, is the classic father son story. Which occurs in, of all places, Somerville, Massachusetts. Naturally, this brought back memories of reading Robert Lowell’s LIFE STUDIES, especially the section entitled 91 Revere Street simply because 91 Revere is mentioned in Holder’s poem My First Poetry Reading. In the poem, Holder breaks into his father’s liquor cabinet, drinks the Chivas Regal, and delivers a long rant on the front lawn before the police apprehend him. This poem and the poem entitled Wrestling With My Father In The Nude give the reader an intimate look at Holder and his father. Every poet no matter who he or she is somewhere, somehow, sometime must struggle with the father just as surely as all poets must wrestle with the angel. This is a rite of passage, a ritual that we all take part in. Some poets have fathers who present real challenges. Bukowski’s father must have been a real son of a bitch to live with. Kafka’s father was probably not much of an improvement either. However, Holder’s father comes across as more of a human being, someone that Holder admired and loved. This must have been a difficult book for Doug Holder to write because it deals with the intimate moments of a very close father son relationship. These are well crafted poems and I think the book itself became Doug Holder’s rite of passage. DANGEROUS HAIR by Misti Rainwater-Lites, eBuLLieNce press, no price listed, is a driveby of a book. Your Balloons Offend Me is a poem that is more of a declaration of war on everything which is mediocre, stupid, tame, correct, and fucked. From the first line to the last line Misti sends barrage after barrage of rage directed at the kind of poetry that infests the commercial market place. And, I would love to see Misti read the poem Voracious Cunt. The cunt in the poem pretty much tries to eat everything. I love this poem because of its sheer gusto, its energy, its appetite. It’s horney, angry, and has huge sexual intentions. And, it is visceral. I love it at the end when the cunt burps. In a way, it is a metaphor for the whole book. Misti Rainwater-Lites has a powerful emerging voice. She’s the toughest kid on the block and she’s ready to take on anyone anywhere anytime. I admire this bravado and the fact that she can back it all up with the poems. I have seen hundreds if not thousands of books of poetry over the last thirty years, some of them masterpieces, some just missing the mark but still great reads, many pretty much forgettable. Masterpiece or not some titles and some books stay with me, haunt me, refuse to let me forget them. THE URINALS OF HELL by Joe Pachinko is this kind of book. The title alone is a knockout. My initial reaction to reading URINALS is that Pachinko’s greatest influence is Charles Bukowski. But, that’s an easy stroke. When I take a closer look at these poems I realize that while Pachinko very likely read Bukowski, he didn’t get bitten with the bug. He didn’t try to sound like the man. The wise guy sound of these poems races hellzapoppin across the page while Bukowski’s sound is laconic, part W.C. Fields, part Bogart but slower, part bartender weary. Pachinko is more carny hustler, fast talker, something like a door to door Bible salesman who is moving guns on the side. I especially get that in a poem like O.K. CLITWICK, or I AM THE WINE GNAT OF GOD. My two all time favorites are DOGGY WITH A FINGER IN THE BUTT and IMPOSSIBLE CHEESEBURGER PIE. Both poems are raunchy takes on sex and marriage. The thing that I like most about Pachinko’s voice is that ultimately it reminds me of an updated version of Philip Marlowe, no longer a private detective, but still a private eye who sees everything. Pachinko is what Charles Baudelaire would have called a flaneur, an observer. But he is anything but objective. He carries an enormous rage into a wrecked urban setting. And, the reason he has survived is that he knows if you…”Show any weakness/…they will kick your teeth out.” If I didn’t know any better, i’d say that Pachinko writes with a shot glass in one hand and a pair of brass knuckles on the other. Book reviewing is about all that is left of literary criticism in the twenty first century. Unless you count the essays that Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom write and these are almost always meant for books and the subjects of their reviews are incredibly famous and well known poets, Pulitizer Prize and Nobel Prize winners. Which means if you haven’t got those creds, please don’t apply. When I review books I try to be honest or at least as honest as I can. Honesty is absolutely necessary for any critic or book reviewer. It’s no good writing about a book that you don’t like unless you are planning to attack it or the poet who wrote it and that really isn’t my style. I reserve the energy of my rage for the demons who haunt me. And, more often than not, I am haunted. Like book reviewing, poetry is a tough game. The poetry prizes are reserved for the privileged, the MFA poets, the university based poets. For everyone else, it’s a slog. It’s sort of like public school teaching or working in a post office or in law enforcement. There aren’t any prizes for high school teachers. You go out with mostly what you came in with, maybe a stapler that you stole, maybe a beer someone bought you on your last day, maybe a clipboard that you won’t really use. And, this after maybe thirty years talking about Stephen Crane and parts of speech. Also, don’t let anyone fool you. High school teaching is not for the meek. If you believe otherwise, then take my advice, try it. Poetry is like that, too. It isn’t for the meek. Small press poetry, that is. Unless you luck out like Bukowski. For all of Bukowski’s down and outedness, he lived a middle class life until eighteen when he hit the road. And, he worked many jobs until his mid to late thirties when he finally got into the post office. With me, it was the other way around. My father became virtually destitute when I was twelve and our family landed in a fleabag hotel. And, lived there for nearly twelve years. That was where I lived that was what I became. I knew many hookers and street thieves by their first names. I knew them all and liked many of them. One of my friends went to the chair for killing a deputy. And, I was lucky not to have been with him. The three things that will kill a poet faster than anything are addiction, fame, and rage. Lets forget about addiction for the time being and concentrate on fame and rage. You need rage if you are going to write because you create out of that reservoir of sheer anger. The poem comes howling out of that dark well as surely as it comes from some sort of collective unconscious. But, sometimes the rage becomes overpowering, crippling. The rage takes over, becomes somehow entwined with envy and then look out bro because the poet starts to lose his sense of the gorgeousness of the language, his sheer love of being alive in the song. That kind of rage eats you from the inside. It’s an acid that there is no Zantac for. Rage slopping into envy turning into that harrowing lust for fame. Fame is the motherfucker and fame is the bitch. And when rage becomes overpowering and the lust for fame sets in, it’s nearly all over. The trick is not to want what Bukowski had, both the fame and the money. The trick is not to want what Ginsberg had, both the fame and the money. The trick is to try to achieve whatever outlaw grace that Micheline did those last few minutes on that BART train. The trick is to write the poem. Years ago a friend of mine said, Yeah, Moore, these are strong poems but where are the ideas? I think I said something like, Ideas, I don’t need no fucken ideas. This was in a bar at the time. If I want ideas I’ll crack open BEING AND TIME. More often than not, ideas are for people who can’t write in the first place. I’ll just take the poem. |