Stacy Szymaszek, Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals

you ate

all the

cured

meat

__

Rachel’s cat

licks my

knuckles

never a parody

of care i.e.

when there

is ground

everywhere

sleeps in

own beds (“austerity measures”)

New York poet Stacy Szymaszek’s fourth full-length poetry title is Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2016), a collection built from five extended poem sequences of short lyrics composed as sketched out notes and fragments: “austerity measures,” “late spring journal [2012],” “summer journal [2012],” “5 days 4 nights” and “journal of ugly sites.” Her journal/ notebook poems favour quick thoughts, overheard conversation, observations, description and complaints, and the occasional list, all set up as an accumulation of collage-pieces reminiscent of the work of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, as well as various “day book” works produced by Robert Creeley, Gil McElroy and others. There is such an incredible immediacy to the quick notes in this collection, one that manages an intimacy while, as she says in her 2013 “12 or 20 questions” interview, dispenses with persona:

My recent work has dispensed with persona. The longer I live in NYC, the more autobiographical it gets. One idea I have about this is that I had always wanted to live here but I was convinced that I didn’t have what it took, so in my mind this was a city of especially savvy people, a city of heroes—so being here I’ve become heroic, or the persona is now the hero named Stacy. The book I just completed is called Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals and takes up the idea of poetic journalism in different forms. The centerpiece is “Journal of Ugly Sites” which is a year-long journal I kept which documents, among other things, the life, illness and death of a Beagle that my partner and I rescued.

One could say that Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals exists as an exploration of the private and the public selves, writing on and around daily elements of internal and external being, from the meditative and the sublime to stretches of grieving and frustration to the mundane, routine and even magical, as she writes as part of “austerity measures”: “cut self / slack day // org. better / be sea- / worthy // five years / before / the mast [.]” Through such quick notes seemingly, and deceptively, jotted down into these accumulated narratives, they begin to provide intriguing portraits of this semi-fictional “Stacy,” in these, as she calls them, forms of “poetic journalism.” How different is this, one might wonder, to the “I did this, I did that” poetry of New York School poet Frank O’Hara? Both poets moving their art through their days in similar ways (his first drafts were also written relatively quickly during lunch breaks), although Szymaszek’s poems read more natural, somehow, which could easily be as simple as the difference between her journal-poems and his poems composed more traditionally as “poems.”

What is interesting, also, is in how Szymaszek shifts the format slightly between each section, as the first section is dateless, but with the note that it was composed “during the months that followed the death of my dog Isabel on July 8, 2011,” the second and third sections include a scattering of dates within, and the final section is composed more as a straightforward (in comparison) poetic journal, with dates opening each section. As the “3.30.13 – 4.19.13” section of “journal of ugly sites” ends:

East Village: breathing into a paper bag before checking email any phone ringing increasing heart rate // photograph revealing how tired I am appearing on all the hot poetry sites with Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe” sure rub my ugliness in my face // publishing my shit list as a list poem? “Better to keep two chronicles?” (Harry Mathews) // when the poet said thank you for inviting me most people knew he hadn’t been invited so much as he wore me down // “do you make a livable wage? // Arlo as bearer of bad news today announcing “a bomb just went off”

            if burnout is disavowed grief will I come back to life if I publicly admit how bereft I am?

An extension of this project (and its structures) has already been seen in her short chapbook JOURNAL STARTED IN AUGUST (Projective Industries, 2015), making me curious to see just how far she might further her exploration into the poetic journal. Might there be further volumes?

therapist lets me take

notes in session now

that she understands

it’s not distancing

jot down

“stoic”

*

in 6 days I will be a 43 yr. old

lacking emotional outlets

a protégé

the wasp incident

glory of suffering

burden of an EpiPen

in your purse

get a holster (“summer journal [2012]”)

Ali Power, A Poem for Record Keepers

(33)

You want a location.

But you really mean a telescope.

I hand you the champagne from no occasion.

Should I keep going?

In certain rooms we can only look ahead.

Looking ahead is fun.

When you’re delusional.

New York poet and editor Ali Power’s first full-length poetry collection is A Poem for Record Keepers (Argos Books, 2016), a sequence of forty-nine numbered poems cut into seven sections. Composed of seemingly disconnected lines and phrases, the poems begin to accumulate after a while, and form a series of shapes, especially through the way sections appear to have been grouped, citing connections in tone, subject or phrasing. As Stacy Szymaszek writes on the back cover, this collection emerges from a “[…] poet who maintains a history of one’s activities.” There’s a fine tradition in such a consideration, from the “I did this, I did that” poems of New York School poet Frank O’Hara, the conversational observations of Toronto’s David W. McFadden, or even the life-long expansive journal-poems of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert (as well as Szymaszek herself, of course). What intrigues about A Poem for Record Keepers is in the short-form note-taking form that the poems appear to be composed in, allowing the connections between activities and poems to occur almost naturally, providing a more subtle series of threads throughout to hold the poems together as a single unit of composition. What appears somewhat scattered and random over the first few poems begins to cohere and shape in quite lovely ways. Her notes move from history to personal observation to completely mundane observations of daily activity and pop culture, and cohere into a portrait of the narrator in all her contradictory and complex ways.

(8)

There is GPS.

There is Florida

There is pinecone.

There is trampoline.

There is olive oil.

There is getting to know you.

There is never getting to know all about you.

Fence magazine #30 (Winter/Spring 2015)

Vienna

You keep your cities

in the water. In the wood

stand islands and clearings.

You are running

with the jewel box by water.

Your dreams

provide the key. Your ocean

awaits. It waters your dreams.

Enter the thatch you old

suck-a-thumbs. Enter

the boat. Wake up. Eat

this shattering pastry,

exotic unreachable

hysterical girl.

A girl, a plan, a canal:

Vienna (Melissa Ginsburg)

I’m always gratified to see the new issue of Fence magazine. The latest issue of the semi-annual poetry and fiction journal Fence is issue #30 (Winter/Spring 2015), and has so much writing in it that poems are included on the front and back cover, and the author biographies are only available through either scanning the code through your phone or writing the journal directly (which I understand, logically, but simply find annoying as a reader). Either way, it is remarkable to see a journal inventive enough to include the two poems by John Ashbery on their front and back cover instead of inside the issue, thus solving the frustration of lack of space. I really can’t think of another journal that has done such, although I know that the text of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1987; Coach House Books, 2004) [see my review of such here] was constructed (and produced) to begin on the front cover, and end on the back cover.

One thing I’ve always appreciated about Fence is their adherence to publishing the work of any writer only once over a two year period; coupled with their strong editorial mandate, this has meant that one of Fence’s ongoing strengths is the ability to introduce even their long-standing readers to a wide variety of new writers. Some of what leapt out at me included the unapologetically open-heart cadences of Tina Brown Celona’s three poems (“now to sing / so that even you // will stop to listen / in the moonlight // we walk in / I’ve never seen such whiteness // where poetry is the only language / and the only speech we hear”), or the striking staccato of Wong May’s three poems, that include:

How could I cross you

      The only way you would go?

      You shall take my hand

& I will close my eyes,   assisted

      Or assisting

We shall step   —   like so,

Into the traffic.

            Thank Heaven,

You are not blind. (“Cold Heaven”)

And have you read Mary Flanagan? Oh my:

Desire is Rarely Fulfilled

The fur of gorilla is as misunderstood

As a mistaken desire

The palms that are gorilla palms

Are not of fire

The woman standing near the gorilla

Is there by accident

The stairs behind and above do not

Enable gorilla transcendence

Scratches made by the nails

Mark the rolling wine barrel

Blah blah

Blah       peril

As usual, there is far too much to discuss in detail, but the new issue includes some familiar names included as well, including Chris Martin, Carla Harryman, Bin Ramke, Joshua Ware, Seth Abramson, Andrea Actis, Ben Doller, Maureen Seaton, Jeff Hilson (I haven’t seen work from Hilson in quite a long time) and Rick Moody, as well as an extended section of Julie Carr’s remarkable “REAL LIFE: AN INSTALLATION” (a work-in-progress she discussed last year at Touch the Donkey), that includes:

%

Consider for a moment images of the divine, and the ban placed upon them. Since in what I’ll call my tradition there are no such images we depend entirely on language and the body. This means there are many songs, many prayers, some rocking, and much ritual. Children are at once glad and annoyed by this. If we were to construct an image, what would it be? A mother? A goat? A tree? Impossibly, we’d have to have all three, which would return us to something that precedes us, throw us back to fathers who never once knew we were truly theirs and so fed us reluctantly, counting our morsels. Everything we’ve forgotten how to do, any ritual unpracticed or unknown, remains like a residue on the table. Stroking the wood, we retrieve these forgotten things.

Stacy Szymaszek, JOURNAL STARTED IN AUGUST

back to the Project

mis problemas son sus problemas

my love of the word

“project” echoes Sontag’s

as do initials

other SS attributes

dark circles

grey streak

*

my new answer to

how long

“forever”

*

another argument with K

about my tone

*

how can it fly

so full of

my blood?

There is very much a quality I can see in New York City poet Stacy Szymaszek’s JOURNAL STARTED IN AUGUST (Projective Industries, 2015) reminiscent of work done by a variety of writers, from the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, to various “day book” works produced by Robert Creeley, Gil McElroy and many others. JOURNAL STARTED IN AUGUST is a long sequence of short lyrics composed as stand-alone notes, suggesting the journal or notebook, including quick thoughts, overheard conversation, observations and complaints, and the occasional list, all set up as an accumulation of collage-pieces. The author of some half dozen or more books and chapbooks, her at the back of the collection mentions a title, Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals, forthcoming this fall with Fence Books. I’m curious to see if this title includes the poems here, or if the book extends and furthers some of which she’s played with in this short collection. The title suggests the possibility of a separate project utilizing some similar approaches to the poetic journal, and then one catches this on the second page, suggesting that this is, in fact, the continuation:

memorial portrait

of Cass as transition

object grief reemerges

upon finishing “Journal

of Ugly Sites” how

will I feel when

I pay off her bills?

This is also something she discussed in her “12 or 20 questions” interview, twoyears ago:

My recent work has dispensed with persona. The longer I live in NYC, the more autobiographical it gets. One idea I have about this is that I had always wanted to live here but I was convinced that I didn’t have what it took, so in my mind this was a city of especially savvy people, a city of heroes—so being here I’ve become heroic, or the persona is now the hero named Stacy. The book I just completed is called Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals and takes up the idea of poetic journalism in different forms. The centerpiece is “Journal of Ugly Sites” which is a year-long journal I kept which documents, among other things, the life, illness and death of a Beagle that my partner and I rescued.

Szymaszek’s small text plays off the mundane and even arbitrariness of its own format. Does the suggestion of a daily journal make much of a difference if begun in August or any other month? Gil McElroy’s ongoing lyric sequence “Julian Days” manages to bury specific dates by utilizing an unfamiliar calendar, the Julian Day Calendar, as poem-titles; he presents the dates, but they are unknown to the general poetry reader, and therefore, read as arbitrary numbers (one could look them up if one wishes, but I suspect only a rare few might). The temporal aspect of Szymaszek’s JOURNAL STARTED IN AUGUST is a curious one, with very little in the text to offer any kind of specific placement: if the journal really was begun in August, how long did it last—weeks or months or years—and does that even matter?

hoping the high

potassium is another

mystery my body

has authored

where no-

body dies

*

I guess she thought

the alternative

was to bomb

my inbox

*

it’s true

no one

should read

after Anne

Boyer

*

grassroots

autocracy

*

Final balance pd.

euthanasia bill

and I think it’s going to

rain today