Little Red Leaves: Kasimor, MacPherson + Davidson

I’m slowly sifting through my stack of elegantly designed chapbooks from Little Red Leaves Textile Editions, designed and sewn by Dawn Pendergast, including three wildly different yet incredibly playful works: The Windows Hallucinate (2013) by Mary Kasimor, Sheep Dip Excerpts (2013) by Doug MacPherson, and Arcanagrams: A Reckoning (2014) by Amanda Davidson. There is the most interesting cadence present in the work of Minnesota poet Mary Kasimor, staggered and staccato through a series of spacings and capitalizations:

multipl e s of              wine

Sin ersshining   s in bla c k e

ye black  s in in multipl e s of

los  t cha nces overt hehil l

&  char co al out lin e s      cert

aintyp  e s o f belief s i n  sin

hl e   fil  e o n a flat ho riz o n

sta r s s pea k  i    n for e

igntonquechangeli

ngba   l  lso f ten  wine

The author of three trade poetry collections—& cruel red (Otoliths, 2010), silk string arias (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and The Landfill Dancers (BlazeVox Books, 2014)—Kasimor nearly speaks in a coded language, hidden within such familiar English. Her poems manage to explore and challenge sound and meaning while moving quickly across the page, revealing an unusual (and even refreshing) cadence that I would be interested to hear her perform, such as in the opening of her poem “a starry night,” that reads:

Plants speak in CODE tongue

WALKERS in desert

talK straight

Dope IS for THOS

Who EXHale A

Starry

STARRY night WHEN the painter

DRoppeD over for

COcktailS

WHEN we GathERED

Around WAITing for Kool Aid

IS an ALLUSION To the PAST

in the JUNGLE the plants

HABITAT was involved IN

A Sting OPERation

WHO knew?

As the colophon of San Francisco/Tahoe poet Doug MacPherson’s Sheep Dip Excerpts reads: “This collection of poems is an excerpt from a larger work called sheep dip, a creative translation of O Guardador de Rebnhos by Fernando Pessoa, who wrote it under the persona of Alberto Caeiro, a shepherd. It is also in conversation with two English translations of Pessoa’s book—The Keeper of Sheep by Edwin Honig and Susan Brown and Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person by Erin Mouré.”

No 16

            for Altus

who would publish me minha living life as an office boy?

squeaking early morning down the road with my cart

returning with my cart at dusk down the same road

i have no tinge of hope i have these wheels

i am getting old without wrinkles or gray hair

i am no longer of service take off my wheels

i am left upside down and broken at the bottom of a drain

While I’m unaware of the Honig and Brown title he speaks of, MacPherson’s translations are certainly far straighter than the work in Mouré’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person [see the piece I wrote on such here], without the vibrancy she worked through her own transelation of the same text. Still, this is certainly a compelling collection, and I’m intrigued to see what the full text looks like, once its published in trade form. MacPherson manages, through his sequence of numbered translations, to respond to Pessoa’s original text in intriguing ways.

No 49

i go inside fetch a channel tracy with candle says night

minha voice content says night minha life sighs to day check

of sun saved rain afternoons pass on channel O last hello

friend soggy trees deposit Os i fetch another channel light a

candle night of withouts course like a river bed and four big

silences like days that sleep

The most compelling of these three works has to be Amanda Davidson’s wonderfully playful Arcanagrams: A Reckoning, which responds, in part, to the works of Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), best known for his book on the afterlife, Heaven and Hell (1758). Davidson’s bio includes the fact that she is “currently at work on a performance novel about the mystic Swedenborg,” and she includes this intriguing fact in the colophon of the short collection: “‘Dromböken,’ on page twelve, is a cut-up poem using text from Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams. This English-language edition was translated from the Swedish by my great-great-grandfather, Carl Theophilus Odhner (Bryn Athen, Pennsylvania: The Academy Book Room, 1918). This book is now in the public domain.” I’m fascinated by her interest in the work of Swedenborg, especially given her personal connection to him and his work, and wonder (in the “chicken-and-egg” way) which may have come first, her interest in his work, or her knowledge of such a connection?

DROMBÖKEN

I was neither in a state of sleep nor wakefulness.

Throughout the whole night I seemed to be

going deep down, by ladders and other spaces.

This signified moving from celestial to natural

understanding

I slept deeply for eleven hours

I dreamt I was being punished

I dreamt of a woman

I dreamt of cages

I was arrested

Whipped

Climbed down

I flew

This signifies inmost affection from the Lord

This signifies the grand man

This signifies natural truths

This signifies the highest heaven

This signifies I had not washed my feet

I spoke long and familiarly with our Successor

who changed into a woman.

What it may signify is best known to our Lord.

In the morning my eyesight was so improved that I

could read the Bible without glasses.

What this signifies I do not know.

Something will happen to me after I finish the first

chapter on the sense of touch.

Whether I am to take one road in my work or am

being prepared for another, I know not; it is dark

to me.

I was not able to have the strong faith I ought to

have. I believed and yet did not believe.

Once again I was thrown onto my face.

I do not know what this means.

Little Red Leaves: Tynes, Alexander + Hofer,

As I slowly sift through my stack of elegantly designed chapbooks from Little Red Leaves Textile Editions, designed and sewn by Dawn Pendergast, today I’m focusing on Jen Tynes’ here’s the deal (2013), Charles Alexander’s SOME SENTENCES LOOK FOR SOME PERIODS (2013) and Jen Hofer’s Front Page News (2013). It is interesting how all three titles are composed out of variations on fragment and accumulation, each utilizing such in entirely different ways to achieve their goals. Michigan poet and horse less press publisher Jen Tynes’ here’s the deal is a sequence of untitled fragments structured as a single, extended chapbook-length poem, reminiscent of some of the work of Washington State poet Sarah Mangold or Vancouver poet Stephen Collis for her use of sequence, accumulation, the fragment and space on the page. What intrigues about her chapbook-length piece is in the way it doesn’t necessarily have a beginning or an ending, but a sense of being an ongoing stretch of narrative, whether one excerpted from a larger structure, looping back to the beginning, or able to re-order for the sake of a different series of connections.

we have more

than enough occupations

between us to register

a dream with a habit

in its middle blood flow

is migration ruby

throated Laundromat never

again having a three-

digit silence

Tucson, Arizona poet and CHAX publisher Charles Alexander’s SOME SENTENCES LOOK FOR SOME PERIODS is constructed as a prose-poem triptych. As he works through butterflies, ideas of perfection, piano chords, Hamlet and ballet, his prose accumulations twist and turn in on themselves in an intriguing way, and the rush of words have a particular level of velocity I wouldn’t mind hearing read aloud, if possible. Each piece appears to build upon what came before, accumulating and piling upon the exploration of perfection. Are there more to the sequence, or does it hold at three?

I tell myself that nothing can be perfect. I tell myself in nothing words that nothing words that can be perfect. I tell nothing myself nothing words. I tell myself words. Once a butterfly, then a burning hand, a memory of a burning hand. Everyone left me at eight years old, so I left, too, walking a road out of the city, toward a lake. Step one and two. A piano next to the mirror. My sister has beautiful red hair, and she plays piano. Notes are sometimes red. Near the piano, I tell my mother’s hard drinking friend to leave the house. After Tennyson, I always hear the bells. The beauty of a liberty (bell). To cry with a beast, truly the only human present. Also lost in Japan, wandering where water goes. The truck knocks me down, and perhaps out.

As the blurb for Jen Hofer’s Front Page News reads: “From one birthday to another birthday (2011 – 2012), Jen Hofer made a cut-up poem using the front page of the newspaper in the city where she woke every day. The result is a beautiful portrait of what ‘daily’ means wen tempered with poetic, political and personal endeavor. This larger than normal LRL chapbook features custom-printed fabric and color facsimiles of a selection of Hofer’s poems.” Knowing that this is part of a potentially far larger structure intrigues, and yet, it doesn’t necessarily confirm that such will appear later on in a larger state (although I certainly hope so). Pendergast wonderfully reproduces from Hofer’s original collages, allowing an imperfect linearity between certain passages and words to float through the text, and her daily ‘day-book’ structure incorporates the cut-up strategies of Susan Howe and others into the poetic journal played so well by Robert Creeley and Gil McElroy, as well as, more recently, Jessica Smith (who utilizes similar strategies in her own current work-in-progress, “The Daybooks”). (Her method, however intriguing, also makes it tricky to attempt to replicate via the blog-review.) As she writes for Wednesday, April 27, 2011, the poem “borders”: “commanders / air war / strikes against / command /// officials / support / drones / to sever / and supply / army units / as / private / official / strike direct // into the heart [.]”

Little Red Leaves Textile Series: Beverly Dahlen + Sara Lefsyk

One of my favourite American chapbook presses, Little Red Leaves Textile Editions are edited, designed and sewn by Houston, Texas poet Dawn Pendergast, with the covers for each title produced by materials found from a variety of sources. Over the past couple of years, I’ve written about her chapbooks here, among other posts. I keep hoping she might even answer the small press ’12 or 20 questions’ questionnaire at some point, possibly. First off: I like very much how the poem/chapbook of The Rose: A Poem by Beverly Dahlen (2013) is slowly pulled and stretched apart:

death rose

                        immortal rose

mortal rose

the stink of dying roses    black at the heart

hedged  edged  etched  each petal browning

failing   falling

                                    the invisible worm

San Francisco poet Beverly Dahlen’s second Little Red Leaves title—after A Reading: Birds (2011)—is, according to the website, “dedicated to Jay Defeo’s 2000 lb work with the same name.” The reference intrigues, and the internet explains that the late San Francisco visual artist Mary Joan Jay DeFeo (March 31, 1929 - November 11, 1989) was considered to be part of the Beat Generation, and “The Rose” (1958-66) is considered “her most well-known painting,” and one that “took almost eight years to complete and weighs more than one tonne.” Part of DeFeo’s piece is replicated on the cover of Dahlen’s small chapbook. Given the weight of the piece, the lightness of Dahlen’s poem is even more remarkable, able to articulate something of Defeo’s painting, writing “ghastly / ghostly / acid light,” to “sacred [sacrificial] star / dark star / im / ploded [.]” Furthering Dahlen’s ongoing series of response texts, “A Reading,” into the realm of responding to visual arts, I would be curious to hear some of the author’s thoughts on composing such a piece, if she would consider such a straight response, or something even akin to translation.

I TOLD THIS SMALL MAN: if I had a mule, a parachute and long flowing locks, I would jump out of this plane, put you in my shopping cart and push you clean to Brazil where we would change our names, cut our hair and join the local militia. After that, we would lead a small army of chickens to the sea and, after many days of floating, I would catch a small fish and name it Pavlov. Then, we would all jump into the sea and swim until we reached the large island of Europe, where we would start a mariachi band with my birth family and yours and the sun would set and we would all drink sugar water and go to sleep beneath a large curtain of black air.

Boulder, Colorado writer Sara Lefsyk’s second chapbook, after the christ hairnet fish library (Dancing Girl Press, 2013) is the utterly charming A SMALL MAN LOOKED AT ME (2014). Composed as a sequence of short prose sections, the design allows each paragraph/stanza to wrap over to the subsequent page, allowing for something far more compelling than had everything been standardized. It allows an interesting take on the prose, suggesting a more organic and linked progression from section to section. An imagistic sequence of self-contained pieces, each prose-section works to accumulate slowly into the realm of extremely short novella, heading towards a subtle and soft denouement. Where is this short work heading, exactly?

Little Red Leaves: Thomas-Glass, DuPlessis and Kaminski

“[D]esigned and sewn by Dawn Pendergast in Houston, Texas,” the little red leaves textile series produces some of the most attractive poetry chapbooks I’ve seen in a while [see my previous reviews of their titles here and here and here], hand-sewn with recycled textiles including bedsheets and other fabrics. Produced in limited edition, these are beautifully-made, and more than worth their weight (I might even be slightly biased, since one of the earlier chapbooks in this series was something of mine, but I don’t really think so). 

In her most recent package, Pendergast sent along Dan Thomas-Glass’ Kate & Sonia (2011), Megan Kaminski’s GEMOLOGY (2012), Lee Gough’s Future Occupations (2012), Kevin Varrone’s Eephus (from Box Score) (2012), Todd Melicker’s King & Queen (2012), Mac Wellman’s The Rat Minaret (2012) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss (2012). It seems as though her productivity has been increasing over the past year or two, which is impressive, especially when one considers that every copy of every book is hand-sewn by the editor/publisher herself. 

Something’s always doubling the double.

Shadows of trace remain intent.

Something explores its own excess.

Something pulses, never spent.

Littler and littler,

seely after seely

only a fine-meshed, mesh-fine net

can deal with this kind of real. Really.

Poetic technology always registers

smallness in the count.

With large-bore machinery, tiny details

are filtered through and out. (Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss)

Ottawa poet Monty Reid keeps reminding me (as though I needed reminding of such) that chapbooks are the ground level of where the best writing is actively happening. I’m paraphrasing, if only slightly; how could I ever disagree with him? If he’d seen any of these chapbooks, he’d most likely be even more certain. But what I’m really looking forward to is more work by Pendergast herself [see my reviews of such here and here]; when might that be happening?

Sonia screams against the order

                days insist on packing

into the stretch: minor

impossibilities like toes

arched up to generate

                 space straining to switch

the switch. This possible world

Sonia screams against. I

glance at Kate—where are

                our options? To lift

or light? Shushing by

reflex my art motions

toward quiet. (Dan Thomas-Glass, Kate & Sonia)

Subtitled “in the months / before our second / daughter’s birth,” Dan Thomas-Glass’ Kate & Sonia (2011) is a meditation on the imminent birth of his second daughter, a subject far too common in poetry, yet rarely done well. I’m interested in writing on parenting, yet have noticed that the poems on motherhood (some of the finest from New York poet Rachel Zucker) far outweigh the poems on fatherhood, nearly to the exclusion of the latter. “Kate, Sonia I wanted to write / a poem for you that a mother would write,” he writes, to open the third section, nearly echoing the sentiment. The poem writes out, as his bio confirms, “his wife Kate and their daughters Sonia and Alma (born 9/21/11).” Parenting is a powerful thing, and too often I’ve seen the dismissal of father-specific writing, and even the fear of attempting such. A sequence of eleven poems plus epilogue, his meditation focuses on the small, and the close-to-home, as a kind of sketchbook of thoughts during his wife’s second pregnancy. As the final pre-epilogue poem ends, “Sonia I am sorry for all this moment’s failures.” I’m glad Thomas-Glass has produced this; not as physical, obviously, as motherhood, how does fatherhood become so easily dismissed?

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been composing her ongoing poem “Draft” for some time, so far collected in five trade volumes. The second of DuPlessis’ “Draft” poems to appear as a little red leaves chapbook (her chapbook Draft 96: Velocity appeared in 2011 [see my review of such here]), this poem exists as a kind of call-and-response, composing a binary piece; each poem is paired with an italicized addendum. Is this a call-and-response, or something more akin to Greek chorus? Paired with the poem quoted above is this, her italicized chorus:

I cannot solve what is done in my name. they send 100 million to the killers from my insistent taxes; I sent $500 to some other side. This has been going on for years now. Cannot solve, cannot absolve… And “orange” is not an absolute; it has been worked with—for it itself is generally hybrid. It comes from bud unions and tree grafts and sometimes spontaneous mutations. Fusions of root-stock with something from elsewhere. Much more rarely from seeds. What then counts as “normal”?

The collage aspect of the piece picks from multiple sources, and her “Drafts” have lengthened since the poem first started, years ago. An interesting question: has anyone attempted to write critically of her “Drafts” work as a whole unit?

Dear cabbie, dear comfort

perchance could you drive faster

ruefully abide your own speaking space

we’ll wrangle sweet nothings through that

window if you like it’s only plexiglass

my dear plastic really that keep us apart

just split the avenue open vivisect districts

flower shops mechanics pantries

glow orange green silver as we pass (Megan Kaminski, GEMOLOGY)

Author of four previous chapbooks and the trade collection Desiring Map (2012) [seemy review of such here], Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski’s GEMOLOGY (2012) is a letter to the city, writing out her neighbourhood in a sequence of short lyrics. “Vowels roll drip down thighs / conjunctions across backs,” she writes, later continuing: “Name me modesty / name me vexation[.]” Kaminski’s immediate city is as sensual as it is physical, composing a lyric love letter for a neighbourhood and even city unspecified. Does her love lie in the immediate physicality of wherever she hangs her hat?

Dear night, dear misplaced images

blanketed silver singed crystalline

cold I gather icicles sew flack jackets

encase late night wonderings

parks shadowed sharply street-lit

dear avenue if I follow floor me

carry me and my lost children

wordspent gangrened unburied (Megan Kaminski, GEMOLOGY)