Quaker Guns

Quaker GunsCaroline KnoxWave Books, 2008Caroline Knox is a serious goofball. In Quaker Guns, her sixth and latest book of poetry, her over-the-top whimsy pays off more often than not, sometimes with big dividends.Though Knox’s poems are often downright silly, there’s an intellectual heft behind them that keeps this collection from feeling like novelty poetry. Like a literary analogue to Jeff Koons (the sheer delight of his giant Mylar balloon), she’s working largely on a conceptual level, though the work is also beautifully crafted. Her “conceptual” poems include one where the title (which is “The Title”) appears mid-poem, another that functions as the “source text” for two E.E. Cummings poems (had they actually been erasures), a recipe for a really fucked up Jell-o salad, a ten-line poem whose couplets adhere to a pointless eye-rhyme scheme: “A Jesuit / appeared in an apesuit” (suggesting that rhymes do not a poem make).In general Knox makes a bit of a mockery of form. “A Lot of the Days I Wake Up” is an abecedarian whose N and Q lines are, in their entirety, “Nerf” and “quiche”—but lest we think these words serve only to fill out the form, the concepts return in the final lines:

We couldn’t tell what was really going on in the photograph of thexebu, because of overexposure.You see, we’re in the Nerf quichezone again.

Don’t think Knox must resort to such gags because she hasn’t got the skills to dazzle with lines alone. She can also pull off major sonic fireworks, as in “We Beheld Two Nebulas:” (“These were atomized rotor-thrown / specks pocking a fresco— / a marks and sparks assay // in spume made out of rays”), and sparkling philosophical inquiry, as in “My Husband Sat Up”:

My school friend Annieis descended from Garrison,so Garrison is hidden in Annieas mica is hidden in vermiculite.Garrison famously said, “I will be heard.”What weight would you give to this.Do you want to know more.

I wanted to know more and kept reading.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney is Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found in Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.

Analfabeto / An Alphabet

Analfabeto / An AlphabetEllen BaxtShearsman, 2007Dictionary lists intersperse the fragmentary text of Analfabeto / An Alphabet, but they are always incomplete. We have the English, but we don’t have all the Portuguese. So, for the letter J, we learn that “judia” means “jewess,” and “judiaria” means “ghetto,” but we do not know how to say “It was a good play,” or “boa constrictor (feminine).” The untranslated English pops up here and there throughout the text (along with some of the Portuguese we’ve learned and can now, partially, apply). Later, when presented with a landscape: “tarp / thatch / bags // jagged bottle halves against the pigeons,” we’ll only know what to call it (“judiaria”) if we’ve been paying close attention. That is, if a ghetto in Brazil is also a ghetto here.Ellen Baxt’s Analfabeto is one of those books that teach the reader how to read them, and so it correlates with Baxt’s own life in Brazil, where she had to learn to read more than just the language (“the buildings have two addresses, one above the other so you are always at the wrong building”). Eventually, the idea of translation becomes the glass through which we read the text and everything seems related to it: handwriting, culture, religion, gestures:

Both handssnappingmeans very.Come bythe housemeans we’llsee eachother again,but is notan invitationto come bythe house.

Along with the dictionary entries, lists, and fragments, Baxt gives us what look like short entries in a journal or traveler’s notebook. In this, a short, sharp book, Baxt creates poetic language out of mistranslation (“Sit next to me, blacklist flatterer. Slow my lion”) and poetic encounters out of the enchanting and frustrating confusion of a foreign place:

She spreads her blanket over my geography, pushes the latch. At dawn she asks if my family knows. In the van she covered our legs and held my hand underneath. Você tem vontade? But I don’t know vontade.

Life, in fact, moves too swiftly for even the best translations, and it is the moments in which Baxt captures that alluring and maddening mix that are the reason to pick up a copy of Analfabeto:

The wind is picking up. A plane lands over the water as the ferry departs. Christine is at her desk in the Palisades plotting Grimano, Italy. The kids stand up and pump their swings. Intermittently, a bell rings. Across the water they’re trying to get read of the winter clothes. The mannequins’ shirts say “Liquidçāo” across their torpedoed breasts.

___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Human Resources

Human ResourcesRachel ZolfCoach House Books, 2007Having read a little about Human Resources, I suspected I might “get” the project pretty quickly and not need or want to finish the whole thing. It combines corporate language (“I took it offline”), machine-generated poems and unsettling numeric codes (based in part on a database of the most frequently used words in English, as explained in an end note) – which gave me the impression that the poems would be soulless and creepy by necessity.But I surprised myself by reading the entire book in one sitting. I can’t think of a time I’ve digested a 90-page book of poetry so quickly, which is a testament to its sustained liveliness and accessibility. And while it’s not not creepy, it’s funny and true in equal doses.Zolf rotates through a handful of different “forms,” none longer than a page – prose blocks, PowerPoint-style bulleted lists, short poems of about a sentence per stanza, and poems generated by a Flash poetry program – and this variety keeps things interesting without losing the reader in an overly chaotic system. The voice of the poems, more an un-pin-down-able uber-voice than a single persona, reads like a ticker tape of office-ese:

We’re in a bit of a holding pattern right now providing you with a pulse on ‘inquiring minds’ I’d kill this sentence entirely.On our side of the family my day got totally blown out of the water push back if you think this is a ‘must have.’

As you progress through the book and learn its codes (“Include a link to the Code,” a list titled “How to write for the Internet” advises), gradually certain words are replaced with the number presumably representing their frequency of use. (If so, the last word in the line “Ambiguities of the human condition are a threat to surfeit of 1267” is “meaning.”) This turns the book into a kind of interactive game – readers can look up the words (the URL to the database is supplied in the back), guess at them or simply enjoy the robotic effect of the alphanumeric lines as they stand.This isn’t just a comment on what it’s like to work in an office, but what it’s like to live in a culture flooded with office-generated artifacts. It’s a daring experiment – Zolf risks unreadability but never succumbs to it until the very end, and then provocatively – that raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions: How do machines speak? Are corporations machines? Are humans machines (merely “resources”)? Are they corporations?____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney isDon’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found inColorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.