Selected Poems 1962–2012, by normal,
LUMMOX Press, 2013,
111 pages, paper, $15,
ISBN: 978-1-929878-80-2
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My favorite poem in this book is “green buses,” set in Newark, 1963, when men began thinking of ways to flunk their draft physical.  The narrator shows up as: “98 lbs / pigtailed, silver fish ear ringed / gold lamé coat.”  He recalls, “crew cut guys yelling / ‘sweetheart! hey sweetheart . . .’”

but I was naked

& my dick was average

your typical run of the mill medium sized Jewish dick

Asked what he does for a living, he responds “imam jazz poet.”  The sergeant says, “section 10 — GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!!”  Soon the narrator is laughing with an old friend, also “section 10,” who wore “. . . a sandra dee skirt / an annette funicello hairdo / & a joan crawford dinner jacket.”

This poem captures the nascent counter-culture / anti-war movement from the perspective of a streetwise Jewish kid — part Allen Ginsberg, part Lenny Bruce — laughing back at the unenlightened macho boys.  He already knows it’s better to make love not war.  This poet understands how the world works — or at least how America works.  In “American Child,” “the baby is diced up in dinty moore stew” and “the newspapers are shouting from sea to sleazy newspaper sea . . . from the sands of sam’s club to the halls of home depot . . .”  His poem “awakening —1967” has this epoch-defining passage:

the summer of love saw all the brylcream

boys I used to play chess with go to

viet nam & go to my lai & come home

in body bags & throw bricks thru the

windows of 7-11s & take hideous lsd

trips & have satoris in front of the

tasmanian devil pit at the san diego

zoo —

Although the collection opens with the seven-page title poem, I prefer the shorter poems like “at the end of the beam with mick and lou,” the story of a twenty-three year friendship between two construction workers, one of whom gets cancer.  There’s a Philip Levine-like setting with Richard Price-like dialogue.  Not long ago, Tony Hoagland wrote a piece for Harper’s about “imagining a renewed role for poetry in the national discourse — and a new canon.”  This poem, which shows us the awkward ways men, especially working class men, try to be friends and express feelings, no matter how inarticulately, would be a contender for my list.

In the introduction, publisher RD Armstrong calls normal a spoken word (italics his) poet before the phrase existed.  Some of the longer poems in particular would seem to fit this description.  However, in my experience, many of today’s “spoken word” poets could afford to spend a little more time with the written word. Spoken word or not, no one can doubt that normal is a reader.  One of the delightful details in this volume is his choice of epigraphs, from Brecht, Camus, Lorca, and Vallejo to Sri Rama Krishna, Gandhi, Thomas Merton, and Bob Kaufman.  (“Crossroads” is a wonderful poem about him and Kaufman listening to jazz and getting high together.)

It would be easy to typecast normal as another post-beat iconoclast tossing barbs at everything coarse, crass, and greedy about America, but this volume also contains some very tender and compassionate poems.  In “luna and the late sun” he writes of the relationship between his dog and his neighbor and how much he enjoys watching them cavort in his yard:

luna is last stages middle age

plump almost hairless no make-up

lost 2 kids — one to cancer

one to aids

luna is single & what she calls

a “late in life lesbo”

quiet no money torn gray parka

shuku loves luna almost as much as

shuku loves me

This tough guy from Passaic can do more than shoot salvos.  Bio notes tell us he’s spent 35 years as an RN.  He has a heart too, conspicuously on display in a poem dedicated to the late singer Suzannah McCorkle, “where the songbird sang”:

last yr I heard you killed your

self —

something about depression & that

empty void where the songbird sang

i would gladly have flown into

that void & filled it with

my own singing

This is not the voice of the grizzled survivor, the unbowed cynic, but the caregiver who, in “The Request,” says, “God asks nothing more of a poet / Than to chart the rain.”

I did a double-take at “Appalachian Cabin.”  The title is so different from “don’t rape the singing bird,” the bucolic locale a bit far from “upstairs at the hotel dante” (the first line of “the shooting gallery”).  It concludes:

The place has survived:

A supreme testimony to the

Genius of a hammer —

Long ago, when the world was

Still trying to live a simple life.

This poet has seen a lot, most of it not very simple.  Readers of this book are the benefactors.

— Kevin Sweeney  

by Ken Fontenot,
Pinyon Publishing, 2012,
73 pages, paper, $15.00,
ISBN: 978-1-936671-07-6
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Can ordinary lives be written simply?  Too much mundane detail, and readers drown in trips to Walmart for cat litter, or must grapple with prose poised like safety pins on used clothing, as if literature is a Goodwill bin of the past.  Then again, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s great novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, among the almost mind-numbing repetitions — similar sounding names, the descriptions of the family’s house being freshly painted or going to seed — there resounds a single, clear bell of loneliness.  That kind of purity recalls Ken Fontenot’s poetry.

There’s a contrast in Fontenot’s work between enduring daily routines and a longing to transcend boundaries.  He listens for “the high-pitched sound the universe made when it began.”  He startles readers with these lines from “Let’s Go Out,” a poem with a clearly stated challenge:

Listen again.  You missed it the first time.

Your thoughts were elsewhere.  We say,

enough of love, and we mean it.  We say,

enough of money, and we mean it.

I wouldn’t give one solitary cent for a new car.

You neither?  Let’s go out.  The lightning bugs

are as bright as your eyes.

The night is as young as the world.

Fontenot’s narrators in these poems speak from solitude.  Their observations are given to readers in a bright, colloquial tone that often contains undercurrents of irony or despair, creating poetic tensions.  Family life is also described, with memories of an aunt who says, “The dust has gone to Heaven,” along with Evangeline Parish, in Louisiana, and all the hard-working men with “their belts six or seven notches / on the good side of hunger.”  A poem called “From a Son Who Knows Only Books” is a meditation on men who do honest, skilled work with their hands, and on the narrator’s father:

A man is happy with his gun, his boat.

A man is happy with his lawn, his dog.

Just think.  I’ll not grow up to be my father.

A childhood full of light and shadows permeates the book, as well as the keenly observed movements of birds.  Their cruelty is noted, such as their raiding of nests, but birds also serve as quirky, unpredictable metaphors that imply transcendence.  Idealism is never entirely destroyed, even in adulthood.  All of us, says Fontenot, hold the kingdom of birds within us, as in these lines from “Our Lips Are Gates”:

Grief: that child in cold weather without

a coat.  It sings dirges.  It writes elegies.

We with half our noses in shadow, half in light.

We with our bodies soaped and scrubbed.

The dark houses.  Conversations in other rooms.

A fireplace.  Of two doves

both will forage.  Neither will wait.

Perhaps solitude begins to be valued in childhood as well, clarifying perceptions that often conflict.  This is something readers can identify with, just as we do in Marquez’s novel.  And Fontenot’s moths — they could be the cousins of Macondo’s butterflies, as in these opening lines from “The Words for Containment”:

In my dream, moths are pursuing me

the same way they always have to touch us

in real life.  Daylight brings the dream to an end.

Memories of the poet’s childhood, savored as an adult, are turned over like beautiful oak leaves pressed between pages.  In “The World Without Me,” as throughout In a Kingdom of Birds, Fontenot’s voice transcends sure boundaries:

I am close to my bed.  I am close to my book.

I am close to my chair.  And my silence lights the room.

— Sharon Olinka

by Lee Sharkey,
Tupelo Press, 2013,
60 pages, paper, $16.95,
ISBN: 978-1-936797-26-4
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“Why do we war on each other?  This is an unanswerable question we should never stop asking,” writes Lee Sharkey in the reader’s companion to her latest book of poems, Calendars of Fire. Weaving together images from multiple wars, mythology, and personal accounts of grief, this collection of poems addresses the writer’s outrage and disbelief at a world of humans who enact violence upon one another, while also grappling with the inescapable truth we all face: mortality.

The poems often take the form of elegy, prayer, or vision.  The theme of transience, introduced in the volume’s first poem, “In the wind,” creates an ominous feeling at the outset:

If you walk the same path everyday through the woods

clearing the way in your coming and going

you know when branches have fallen.  Each branch downed

has a trace of the wind of descent vibrating through it.

Immediately Sharkey establishes an eerie sense of fate in this forest of “coming and going,” a barren container for the short experience of life itself.  This is a timeless space where “you can read the night, the wind, the lack of it / what has happened back to happening,” a place through which every human and their ancestors have passed.

Desolate images of war proliferate throughout the second section of the book, with many poems formed in sequences of one- and two-line stanzas whose emotional and thematic strength resembles that of a ghazal.  In “Hunger recounts it,” she presents the raw desperation caused by war in a scene where personal belongings and furniture are burned for temporary warmth: “Burned the books, first the history, last the poetry, page by crumpled page /No no, give that to me, a neighbor insisted,

trading Akhmatova for 2x4s from graveside crosses.”  This haunting parataxis creates an unsettling and believable depiction of starvation during wartime.

Juxtaposed against this despair comes the series “Tiresias at last,” where the Greek god appears: a transgender, blind prophet who sees what others can’t.  Strikingly more accessible in style and language, with shorter lines and a sensual tone, the Tiresias series offers respite from the hardship that’s come before.  In a tighter, lyric narrative, Sharkey begins with a poem about his transformation from male to female, and continues with “Tiresias tells it”:

Desire is the snake that courses the body

The mouth is one door of its house, the vagina another

When you lie down you lie with the snake

When you rise up you rise with the snake

To insert a shape-shifting, sexualized being at this point in the book seems, at first, an odd choice.  However, as Sharkey explains in the reader’s companion to the volume (which is accessible on her website), “All poets are at least in part Tiresias, senses attuned, listening from the sidelines; coveting vision, powerless to make that vision come to pass or prevent its coming.”

Indeed, Sharkey introduces a new strength with the sensuality and prophetic perspective of Tiresias, who, unlike humans, can see beyond the grip of war.  Whereas the powerless subjects that appear in preceding poems evoke helplessness, Tiresias accepts human weakness without becoming the slave of it, as in “Seer in vigil”: “Tiresias stands in winter wind / doing nothing but stand in winter wind.”  In submitting to the truth of human violence, s/he can rise beyond, redeemed by a broader knowing, as in “With birds on his shoulders”:

Violation rises like a planet

its own sound something quiet

like sliding bodies into water

Altogether, Calendars of Fire offers an evocative redefinition of what we might conceive as “war poetry.”  Sharkey’s careful interweaving of language fragments and white space — to connect the personal and global — is most effective when a simple narrative emerges, and is not quite as successful in longer poems, like “Possession,” in which too many worlds and memories are merged to be easily grasped.

Her lyric becomes most clear and beautiful in section III, which presents the aftermath of war, the ruin of sacred places, charred and broken musical instruments, psychic demoralization, grace, and the rebuilding of lives.  Amidst the rubble, there is “Listening”:

sleep with me now under the clouds

with your lucid eye open

What is it that I love when I

form the letter with an arc and a down-

stroke

The curve of your head,

my hand rounded to stroke it,

habitat, sphere of a new planet.

Indeed, with her keen vision, Sharkey honors the brutal suffering of the human world while still managing to seed hope for a new, more whole one.

— Kristen Stake