by Alistair Noon,
Nine Arches Press, Rugby, U.K., 2015,
64 pages, paper, £9.99,
ISBN:  978-0-9931201-6-9
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Alistair Noon is a native Brit who has lived mainly in Berlin for the past twenty years or so, and along the way mastered not just German but Chinese, Russian, and good bits of several other languages.  His poetry, as his recent collection The Kerosene Singing reveals, is a product partly of a deft sense of logopoeia — or “dance of the intellect among words,” as Ezra Pound instructed us — and, moreover, a masterful skill with the musical properties of words, or melopoeia, and the dreamlike states music coaxes from reality.

Noon’s subject matter covers, in a British ex-pat idiom, the gist of the postmodern sensibilities of this era: the relationship of personal to sociopolitical life; the ironies of power, especially in foreign lands; the strangely meaningful emptiness of the everyday; and the general ridiculousness of practically everything.

These subjects are bound mainly into little narratives that tend to start out as some kind of a foreign excursion, journey to a friend’s apartment, or shuffle home.  At the outset of “Riding Home with Michel Foucault,” the speaker is on a train platform peering at its surrealistic announcement board.  Then:

I run for the doors

to take my temporary seat

and read the origin of laws.

The books beside me speak:

“Where are you now on the market?”

“Are you sure you’re on the right diet?”

This State is my life, it asks me

to ride and read by night . . . .

Here, and often in Noon’s world, the everyday is permeated in dreamlike ways by sociopolitical pressures.  In “Ode on a Bottle of

Maotai,” the packaging itself becomes a wry, ironically nightmarish figure of a Chinese communist approach to the politics of marketing:

Rip off the red plastic, friend, unscrew

that top!  Now pour.  Downstream of the Dam

the engineers have raised their toast,

a hint of vomit in its scent and taste:

     Oh hold your drink and don’t fall down.

Likewise, “Khakassian Masks” takes us on a dreamlike journey through Central Asian history, with all kinds of implications about the Russian present.  “Dream,” he writes, “and the narratives arrive. / There, in the smoke, the souls rise.”  No coincidence here, either, that one of Noon’s explicit guides in poetry and politics is Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry he has translated.

The tenor of all this is conveyed in exquisitely wrought sonic patterns.  In the lines from “Riding Home with Michel Foucault,” the slant rhymes in “seat”/“speak” and “diet”/“(life)”/“night” form a sonic thread.  These assonances also are not accidents.

The best example of Noon’s music from The Kerosene Singing might be “An Update on the Status of Frost,” in its entirety:

Windows make fine translators

in cold, white morning light.

Gingko leaves, barbed wire lines,

rivers when viewed from space.

About our future, I would say:

the management of forests,

new languages of frost,

the constant labour of status.

The slant rhymes “light”/“lines,” “forest”/“frost” are immediately chordant on the ear, and a subtler thread is the assonant long A carried across “translators”/“space”, “say”/“status” (in the British pronunciation).  These patterns shape the melopoeia that, in Pound’s words, creates “the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even unsentient universe.”

Despite these poems’ persistent ironic humor, it sometimes feels like history is the proverbial nightmare from which the poet is trying to awake.  But he says the emphasis is in the opposite direction: “I am slowly trying to emulate Mandelstam’s futurism, in the widest sense,” he has said, in response to a question about history and poetry, “and redirect what I write that way out of the present, if possible.”

The Kerosene Singing is well worth looking into, as are his previous collection, Earth Records (Nine Arches Press, 2012), and his chapbooks, like Swamp Area and Across the Water (Longbarrow Press, 2012), Out of the Cave (Calder Wood Press, 2011) and Some Questions on the Cultural Revolution (Gratton Street Irregulars, 2010).

— Dana Wilde

by W.E. Butts,
Adastra Press, 2015,
26 pages, paper, $17,
ISBN:  978-0-983-82387-2
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“W.E. Butts understands . . . what the great jazz man Charlie Mingus meant,” writes David Allan Evans, “when he said that ‘anybody can play weird, but what’s difficult is to be simple.’”

Fundamentally sound, a poet of immense depth and consideration, Butt’s work is primarily informed by two seemingly different eras.  One influence is the post-WII period, with its well-earned nostalgia for home life and its attachment to honest living, dignity, and tradition, which makes for a poetry highly reflective and quietly infused with the language of his Catholic upbringing, ever reaching at earnestness, and given over to a lower-case truth-telling.  A second influence is the 1960s, with its inherent tensions, upheavals, and mad rush into experiment and text-distrust, resulting in a heightened engagement with the world, more questioning, and even some strands of ambivalence and disillusionment — though all of it tempered by a Near-Eastern economy of gesture and preoccupation with the thought-ordinary image, this idea of writing-as-practice or inquiry, and an almost noir-ish nod to the past with a loosening up of his diction and lines.

Eventually, he would combine the two strains into a lyric-narrative hybrid that is remarkably thoughtful and wise, clear-eyed and urgent, and mightily concerned with humanity and its shaping, ongoing push towards the ideal.  Regardless of what stage in his evolvement, Butt’s poetry is always unfailingly devoted, ever-measured and studied, to the rooting out of one’s voice, the perfecting of form, and the demands placed on us by being: the self-made-poet.

So it’s fitting that Story & Luck kicks off with this house brand of mysticism from another great jazz man, Fats Waller — “One never knows, do one?” — with its makeshift narrative, this strut of sorts, trained as best as it can on uncertainty, fate.  While still interested in the same time-tested matters of his earlier work, Butts’ delivery feels even steadier, more determined, as he knowingly metes out this wisdom that, while modest, risks being dismissed by a younger audience seemingly addicted to the slickest of skill sets, power pointed-ness.  Unlike the mass of writing today that opts for either stylistic overkill, cleverness (for not even cleverness’ sake . . . ) or these lists making much too much of one’s (you must forgive me . . . ) listlessness, he can always be counted on to meet not only memory, and all it asks of us, but his readership, more than halfway.  Butts does so from the opening poem, “Primary”— a short and rarified briefing on politics, both local and not so, that draws more from the natural world than it does from the humanly legislated (“Weather reminds us / we too will settle”), its final gesture more bent on firming up and abiding-in, bringing to order, than it is about resignation, putting desire to rest — to the last, “James Wright’s Horses” which signs off with a familiar blessing still essential even when stared down by a battery of ailments (“There are certain words / that will transport us / to that other, flowering self ”), a benediction not only in mind of the words but the breaths that go into it.

Yes, grief figures in some way, in all of these poems, how the letting go of things, living, is both sired and resisted in the telling of it.  But while the mood is meditative, tenderly voiced, its cast is democratic and masterfully commanded, whether it be the near-metaphysical trek of “The Cabin” with its half-imagined

gaining-on (“ . . . the higher you go / the cooler the air, the more / you feel elemental / and necessary”) or the tenaciously summoned reminiscences of loved ones in “Story”:

You look at the photograph hanging on your wall,

the one your friend took after a snow storm

of you and your wife, alone on the street, remote,

dark figures

that could be anyone, and above your heads

the Rosa’s sign in red script glowing against a

colorless sky.

Butts also gives numerous shout-outs to art — to music (“Some Small Blessing”), sculpture, photography (“In the Hand of a Graveyard Angel”), and, not surprisingly, literature.  It is here where Story & Luck gains its hardest thought insights, its final

three poems registering one’s first and furthest initiation into that most noble of start-ups, where our words are forever working their way out from the dark:

First, “Lucky Deer,” a poem, which Walter’s wife S Stephanie explains in the Introductory Note, was “inspired by his grand-daughter Catherine, and his reading aloud a book (Brothers of the Senecas, which was actually written by Walter’s uncle Walter E. Butts Jr.) to her and her sister Chloe.”  He reads the poem reverently, stirring to the line “Because history holds us to who we are,” before retiring, after several beddy-time misreads, with “The story changes, but it is always ours.”

And next-to-last, “Learning Williams,” in which a teacher’s animated lesson sells him on that most lyric of doctors, leading to this sermon-like moment: “I had come here an outcast, a kid in trouble but / one who loved / what words could do, how they silenced poverty / and shame, / and showed me things for what they truly were.”

And then, finally, “James Wright’s Horses” where that earlier seed-planting pays off with a wealth of what is most pressing.

And so, let us all say it now.  With new meaning: Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.      

— Mark DeCarteret

by Katherine Towler,
Counterpoint Press, 2016,
282 pages, paper, $16.95,
ISBN:  978-1-61902-712-1
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In the hands of the most gifted memoirist, (seemingly) ordinary lives are shaped into extraordinary lives; their subjects becoming through the telling of their stories larger than life — perhaps even mythical — when taken in full context, to include post-scripted entries made during those immediate years after the subject has passed away.  You’ve heard of The Great American Novel?  Well, this is The Great American Memoir, one that does not have to depend upon hyperbole and invention to make it a compelling read.

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth is not simply an amassed collection of anecdotes and stories about Robert Dunn as told by the author.  Dunn is very much alive and speaking throughout the entire memoir in his own words via actual spoken dialogue between he and Towler, between the quotation marks.  If but one sentence spoken by the man himself defines his destined purpose on this earth, it would be from page 200: “Without poetry, I do not see that life is worth living.”  Towler’s relationship to Dunn could arguably be defined as the role of Zen student to Roshi master.

Towler manages also to reveal to us the full spectrum of how a writer must live in order to produce a lasting and valuable body of work, the daily balancing act of securing the critical alone time to write while having to accomplish the necessary mundane chores and still find the time for spouse, family, and community friendships.  It should be stated here that Dunn, though an amazingly gifted poet and genuine fey presence in his own right, was not a saint.  He could at times be very demanding and passive aggressive, and that in turn imposed an ongoing burden of guilt upon Towler, who was not only a friend but took on the role of errand runner and caretaker to Dunn during his last few years, as his health began to rapidly decline.  From the notebooks of Robert Dunn:

The most hideous moments of the last judgment might be the

discovery that I had barely tolerated people who are much

better than I.  It would be such a loss not to delight in the

differences.  People are strong and weak, wise and foolish, here

and there.

Towler’s memoir (she is also a novelist and poet) is almost as much about the growing pains in the evolution of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from circa 1990 to the present day, as it is about Robert Dunn, a recognizable fixture who could almost daily be seen strolling the downtown streets or sitting on a public bench. Dunn was a throwback, a modern day Basho, and a Luddite of sorts.  Though physically diminutive, Dunn was a cerebral titan: “He was able to read French, German, Latin, and Greek, though he never studied any of these languages, except perhaps briefly, in school.”  He composed each of his poems in his head over a period of two to three months and was able to recite all of his poems from memory.  He committed a certain number of poems to paper in the form of small handmade books to sell for a penny to his friends (hence the book’s title) or to send off to literary magazines.  One can only imagine how many poems died with the man, poems that were never captured on paper.  Dunn was amazingly tough as well, having stoically survived through COPD, a collapsed lung, pneumonia, a broken hip, and congestive heart disease before passing away in 2008 at the age of 65. The Penny Poet of Portsmouth includes many excerpts from poems, complete poems, and notebook entries.  Here is one poem in full, and typical of most all of Dunn’s poems, untitled:

Walking by day through the

Historic District you feel uneasy,

as though someone was trying to

tell you something, and that untrue.

But at night the whispers tell

how Flash Charley passed out right

in Pig Turd Alley, and what

Gimlet Alice said to the piano

player before she and everyone else

stopped being.

For those who wish to obtain and read a well-edited selection of Dunn’s published work, one need go no further than to pick up a copy of his 2016 Selected Poems, One Of Us Is Lost, from Hobblebush Books.   

— Wayne Atherton