MiPOesias Magazine

New and Notable (October 2005)
Reviews by Marcus Slease

Kate Greenstreet, Learning The Language
(Etherdome press, 2005). $7. Order {HERE}

Kate Greenstreet’s chapbook is a cookbook for language. A text OF living. An ocean in a bucket. It is “not about ecstasy, / merging, or being unusual, / believe me. / What we’ve done so far / is like assembling ingredients is / to hunger” (“Pupil”). Greenstreet’s use of language is a cup that runneth over. Various poems in Learning the Language employ italics suggesting vocalized language. The movement between vocalized/oral and written speech is like a loaf that fails to leaven. A double that constantly pulls the text away from any kind of static latching (this is not to suggest there isn’t static electricity).

The book opens with a poem called “Introvert.” This poem suggests a possible map of reading. Here is the poem in its entirety:

Deep in my own green element
I met a friend—
my double, my dearest.

Others
pulled me out of the sea,
placed me

in this pan of water,
added salt, and taught me
to eat bread

The comparison between bodies of water (the sea as large, uncontrollable, and impersonal) and a pan of water (much more contained, personal, and controllable) is an apt metaphor for the central tensions of Learning the Language. The poems are intimate and occasional in that forever-resilient “NY School” style, but they are also dense and mysterious and move away from the personal. In a poem called “5/19” we are given a found piece of text that suggests conversational/vocalized speech. But this conversational textbit declares a hesitancy for public conversation: “This note in a book: I don’t need / to talk. Please— use me only if you must.”

There are also small fable-like narratives embedded throughout Greenstreet’s Learning the Language. One is a dream narrative about a pile of sticks that walks around like a little dog, walks into fire and, being inflexible because it is made of wood, is unable to put the fire out. The narrative ends with a mysterious “you” who moans and the speaker proclaims, “and we were in another story.” This layering, or better yet overlaying, is a method employed by Greenstreet throughout the book. It is more than irony or strange little stories. In other words, this is not James Tate or some of his offsprings. The stories are a traveling song. A pitched (and pinched) language. As the title suggests, language requires a continual learning.

Blurry images are scattered throughout the chapbook, which, in one way or another, demonstrate the desire to connect word and object, even as the language acknowledges the impossibility of such a task. Sure this is a well-worn theme (“ a word is elegy to what it signifies etc. etc.), but Greenstreet manages to enliven this dilemma in a playful and provocative way. Her use of language is trans-formative via the movements between different registers of speech/writing. Speech can never fully translate to writing and image can never be fully translated in writing. As the caption for one of the photocopied images says, “Nothing can be translated exactly.” Greenstreet manages to work within this beautiful impossibility in a new and interesting way.

Mairéad Byrne, Vivas
(Wild Honey Press, 2005). $5. Order {HERE}
An Educated Heart
(Palm Press, 2005). $10. Order {HERE}

Mairéad Byrne’s poetry has fascinated me for some time now. I first encountered her poetry via audio at the Wild Honey Press site (a small press out of Dublin focusing on experimental Irish poetry). I was enchanted with the vocalization of her poem “The Pillar.” Bryne’s range of diction/discourse, combined with the NY School exploration of “everyday life” and her use of the oral tradition, make me feel a little less crazy, alone, and cut- off from my life. Her poems suggest a way of writing as a practice. A day-to-day activity integrated with making grocery lists or taking care of her children. The “domestic” is not a sphere. It encompasses everything, including the political.

In both Vivas and An Educated Heart there is a real mutiplicty of forms including list poems, mapquest poems, sound poems, concrete poems, and chatty poems. This multiplicity of forms is not only playful and fascinating, but they are also deeply political and heart opening. In “The Eaten Bagel,” for example, there is repetition and longing in the common ritual of eating breakfast (in this case a bagel). The common bagel is always already eaten via anticipation and is a “lump in the throat.” It also becomes a symbol of regret and longing felt in the body: the “small space between the neck and throat,” and the breasts. Byrne intermingles tragedy and comedy in a surprising way. In Vivas some of the poems are little sculptures that suggest a whole emotional world. Here’s a poem called “Small Sculpture # 1:”

On the couch the whole family sits
Strapped in with safety belts.

Bryne’s poems really amaze in how they combine ready-made forms and the personal as political. In An Educated Heart Byrne tackles the current debacle in Iraq and the personal pain of divorce. In both cases there is rubble, debris, and broken lives. In one poem called “Long Distance Relationship” Byrne uses mapquest directions to a lover’s residence 1075.54 miles away. This idea of a distant lover also extends to the war in Iraq. The war over there is brought home. Like Kent Johnson’s book Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, both pro-war and pro-peace activists are equally implicated as two sides of the same coin. Yet, again, the political is made intensely personal. Here is Bryne’s short poem “Choose Your Husband:”

         War Activist: You should be shot in the head
   Peace Activist: No. You should be shot in the head

An Educated Heart opens with an incantatory poem called “Baghdad.” The obsessive repetition of the word Baghdad suggests the emotionally distant use of the media loop, but Byrne manages to personify and humanize this devastated city. So the repetition heightens, rather than deadens, an emotional response. Emotions are given their rightful complexity with pain, compassion, and tragic laughter, rather than overly- simplified sentimentality or elegiac longing. One of my favourite poem in the collection brings together these playful, serious, personal political, and erotic elements in a fascinating way. Here it is:

HEADLINES
TINY ORGASM POPS OVER BAGHDAD
PERSONS RISK GENTLENESS
WOMAN BRINGS MAN TO BRINK AS MISSILES LAUNCH
NO SEX SAYS PRESIDENT SINCE 1993
TROOPS SEEK PRIVACY TO HANDLE COCKS
STRANDED BODY PARTS WEEP
BRIT SEMEN SPARKS DESERT FLOWER
PILOT NAVIGATES BY VAGINAL ACHE
FINGER SLIPS INTO INTIMATE ZONE
CITY RUMMAGED FOR GUERILLA KISS

There are a lot of ear and eye opening poems in An Educated Heart. Many of the poems are intimate, gut wrenching and wildly playful. I highly recommend Bryne’s An Educated Heart and Vivas. I know I will re-read these books (especially when I need to remind myself of the possibilities of poetry IN the world). Writing as a daily practice has never been more convincing.

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Marcus Slease is a native of Portadown, N.Ireland. He currently teaches at UNC Greensboro as an adjunct professor and is a member of the Lucifer Poetry Group.

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