Arsenic Lobster poetry journal Issue Six 2004 |
Reviews Jen Hawkins Open Spirit (2nd printing) by Travis Catsull, ISBN#: 0-9644440-7-0; The Temple, Inc., 40 S. Colville, PO Box 1773, Walla Walla, WA 99362; Copyright 2003; 40+ pp; saddle-stapled paperback; $5 A Fine Mess “Somewhere, on some campus in America, a young poet is writing… with all of the totemic words, something like: ‘ The silence of my/blood eats light like the/breath of future water,’ which I have composed in less time than it takes to type…” says Robert Pinsky. And somewhere, in a drafty bookstore in Walla-Walla-Wa, Travis Catsull is, “mumbling in the immortal silence”. “With lonely jargon” he “…evict[s] the sun”. He goes on, “disappearing in the random stream of tragedy,” and on, “with mythological images dancing with the lights”. Until, of course, (alas, alack,) “…falcons of the black and white rainbow collide in quartz pyramids”. Uhuh. Hate it when that happens. Need I say more? Confound it, yes! Because, for all its convoluted images, its water-torture incessant asides; despite all havoc reeked, peril fraught, and chuckles darkly hyenaed; though it treats syntax like a penalty fee for writing too close to the Utah border; by magic or miracle, this book is irreducible. Each poem presents its own unique (bizarre) set of joys and agonies. There is innuendo, “A pirate waits in the emergency room. / Methodically rubbing his hook”. There is slapstick, “Been scared half to death, twice, still /…Swinging like cow tits”. Tone ranges from offhand to awestruck. In a word, schizoid. In another, static: Here, Jazz drips, red birds bitch, wives scream “Jehovah!” But our Hero mostly nurses hangovers. He operates in a kind of baroque fog. His world is a collage. Meaning comes in spatters, incidental -- with all the immutability of a Rorschach blot. For better or worse, hiccup while reading Open Spirit, and forever lose your place. Glance down again, and be instantly engaged. Perpetual distraction. In light of parasomnambulism – sufferers of which rape, plunder, and generally piss off their nearest and dearest while sound asleep – Catsull’s vow, “I am the aggressive sleeper,” makes surreal sense. Sense, as in the smart, sneering, snarl-drawling “Take Me to Texas”. Sense in taxidermy, reticent dimples, “(rubber nipples and a hair tattoo)”. And in “The Lover’s Wage” – esoteric as a wineglass snow-globe, with wax and bone and grape-silt flakes –seldom have sour grapes tasted so sweet. “I promise not to black out anymore,” he says. Likely story. Best to just marry fist to face and seek patterns in the pressure phosphanes. (“got a fish h o o k inya e y e ?ido”) Lacking insight, I ruminate: The bending thunder killed a freak boy with extra ears[…] Substitute children in blue suits and dresses watered the sidewalk in sorrow. Sobs filled their little extra ears[…] – rank mannerism or the next Russel Edson? […]ghosts of pirates […]hide notes to us under the wigs of statues under ala carte trays in prisons. – seer incoherent or Simic’s heir apparent? I’ve cut my fingers on your hair too many times, paper doll(…) (…)Invisible buzzards come for the blood on my shoe. – dilettante Dylan? – Bob, that is (“Tangled up in… It’s alright, Ma…”) Or is this a Frida Kahlo Reader, complete with birthing, scraped-rolling, gold vomit and stillborn tombstones “…cold in the spine of whispers”? Open Spirit could pass for ekphrasis – of Kahlo, blood-caked Chagall, Bosch, or Picasso’s circus blues. And I can’t help but think some illustration, or melody, might lend context, containment, to this bubbling textual crude. Whatever the merits of mood music or decorative painting; language as mere sound or spectacle is, by definition, irrelevant. Small talk. All Tao aside, there is no “meaning for meaning’s sake”. Even dadaism serves a distinct, if kamikaze aim: to undermine the very stuff it’s made of. The stuff of Catsull’s unchecked aestheticism is what Louise Gluck might call “premature linguistic satiation”. Premature ejaculation, if you like. His words can be as pretty, as substantive, as meringue. Long-of-beauty, short-on-brains lines can look rather like mutant genomes. Or those baffling lengths of macramé. Read this clotted yarn: to growl in the alley where cats go and rot towards stars charging the drunkened sky i-wish-i-may-i wish with a penny in the well[…] […]Heartbeat (the sound of silver sparks) Main Street (mouse bones fall from the sky) I am the fallen man bunking with the loafers. …Catsull lacks, not talent, but discretion. His inclusiveness is a species of laziness. This nod-wink alone: ”I knew she was crazy / when that worked,” tells me he has the lucidity to expect more of us as readers. He expects us to expect more of him. Catsull seems yet to know his own powers – how to allow words their rightful impact. He’s an overgrown garden, bright with strangling weeds. Feral, like the mauled cat he invites to live with him, “just next door / very quiet / no cussing”. Or he’s the Incredible Hulk learning table manners... Even as I wish him a doorjamb, a net, a cleaver, a filter – there is undeniable dearness and modesty in Catsull. The Blue Universe has made a magnifier of his eyes; his mouth, its mouthpiece; his ears, appetites, are not his own. He is less protagonist than agape witness, gracious audience; his poems like backstage applause. I can almost hear him – “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…” I hope Catsull gets over the rainbow. Hope he takes off his Oz-colored glasses and lays off our collective last nerve. There is hope for him, past fantasia, beyond those emerald gates… “and the furthest word i’ve begun / is green” The Ghost of Harrison Sheets by Jeremy Gaulke, ISBN#: unknown; The Temple, Inc., 40 S. Colville, PO Box 1773, Walla Walla, WA 99362; Copyright 2003; 40+ pp; saddle-stapled paperback; $5 Sea Craft Please excuse the impending flood of nautical allusions. Jeremy Gaulke’s catching. If you’re anything like me, folks, he’ll get his hooks in you too. Very basically, The Ghost of Harrison Sheets chronicles a young man testing his lures. Fishing, fucking. Confronting the great mysteries in wading boots and bedroom eyes. But from dedication on, this writing is profound, disconsolate, warped and wormy in all the right places. The kid silvers: from line to line and sheet to sheet like sad, salty mercury. (Lines and sheets both printed and carnal. All taut, all lurid.) Gaulke roils from heaving murk to migraine pulse, wincing, quaking, speaking anyway… and blessing. Here, a dirge for slow, useless dying: “…dry inlet filled with dead chad…// they taste like shit and eat the salmon // …over the mass grave…//…i heard the smack of chad on chad…// i was…/ holding my line against the current / silent and hoping for salmon” – hoping maybe for something sacred. Something safe, almost – sure, at least – in its own quick death… Unfettered by gratuitous simile or conspicuous metaphor; these poems are effective, affecting, endlessly interesting… Monosyllables – cry, boy, slime, sin, bed, lap up against sunken expeditions and perpetuations; every assurance an eddy, every question an articulate tangle. Roughly mid-book; Gaulke marks the transition (and tragic link,) of his acquaintance with fresh kill, to that with women: (from “the reservoir”) […] the youngest boy caught a twelve inch wild trout. we wrapped it in a piece of playboy magazine[…] one of the boys took the picture […] he kept it in his wallet for as long as i knew him …And always he, grim Adam, bloody with fish and fruit, sees “…her sunbathing naked /…red blanket” seeping “between her and the earth”. Much of The Ghost… reads apologetic. Even when there’s “…no one left to apologize to”. Not the gilled baby, his mother’s “midsection a time capsule…” not the road kill, Paul Newman, or the names “…on each wrist”. Here is Gaulke frankly sexual but decently random: “her shirt undone and a hand against the window. / she was the saddest girl i’d ever tasted and / i was crying by the time she came…” Or here, at once passive and guilty, vulgar, even – but with very fine manners: “…I ended up in the alley / my belt undone, my hat in my hand”. Of course perfection would be – too perfect, so, like the intentional mis-stitch on an Amish quilt; The Ghost… has its share of lapsed tributes to its God(s): grammatical errors/excesses to spare; banality of smoking as slow suicide; a vapid brush with the muse’s TEAT. (Muse – sanitary napkin of a word – who is this Bic-tease and why can’t she speak for herself?) Gaulke also lists his beloved Beats/their predecessors by name – even as he wisely avoids their collective logorrhea. Surely jack bill michael gary allen william jorge jean-michele and balthus (always roughly the same list,) are grateful for the… promotion? invocation? union dues? But kindly show us you know good work, don’t tell us. Mercifully, the ubiquitous They (and Prometheus and caliban and prospero and…) are shed soon enough. Finally, Gaulke has apparently spent time at one Henry Miller School of Gynecology –(its proud motto, in part: “…put hair on it”). Reader beware – his blunt eroticism can be off-putting. But it ultimately rings authentic. Gaulke’s (mostly) stark journalism evokes Hugh Seidman, in his decades-old (and timeless) Collecting Evidence. Both poets test the weight of emptiness, the aesthetics of despair. Both are possibly vampiric (offended and charred by sunlight, respectively) – deathly-sexy, anyway; all raunch and gore, eely couplings and corroded morality: my hands meet your sex[…] the traps I set[…] your ankles are unruly and your hands are always bound (Gaulke, Title Poem) after the glasses of brandy[…] I fuck with a woman[…] and when I sleep it is your blood in the glasses (Seidman, The Modes of Vallejo Street) Both take on a chilling anonymity. But where Seidman vivisects self (“ Mind cut from body…/ My horrid heart”); Gaulke shatters it (“my double / old cry of a boy //…dead man…/ in my own / image”). Where Seidman is fractured (“you weren’t my cunt anymore… // my hand wrapped round my cock / trying to recreate you…”); Gaulke is enmeshed (“… my name was yours / my face was yours / my cock and heart and mind /…yours / my cunt was yours hiding / deep inside my hips”). And he is without anchor. Is prone. In The Ghost of Harrison Sheets, Jeremy Gaulke casts lines like spells, catches hell; and women and sudden laughter break like waves… Doubtless some drama comes from all the damned dead fish. But I love these poems under the bridge (“…murk that we’d created”). I love this marshland – brutal earth in a boyish mouth. |
About Jen Hawkins |