Attributed to the Harrow Painter - Nick Twemlow (University of Iowa Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Attributed to the Harrow Painter.  Nick Twemlow.  Kuhl House Poets.  University of Iowa Press.  Iowa City, Iowa.  2017.

      "I must've eaten

       Ten clocks

       Waiting for you"

                               from - "Responding to my father's question"

Nick Twemlow has a section of poems near the end of Attributed to the Harrow Painter, ten of them, all titled "Responding to my father's question."  These poems seem to be a confessional primal scream of beautiful tone and duration.  Underlining every poem is long love letter to Twemlow's son Sacha.

Twemlow nails that lava hot emotional battlefield where families crash and burn or the relationships grow white/blue like tempered steel.

There are nine poems, groups of poems, making up Attributed to the Harrow Painter and they all have the same feel, a machine gun pace and the best bolognese temperament, proper burn.  Twemlow

is one of those whip-quick-smart poets.  His ideas come so quickly you can't figure them all out in one read.  These cats are dense, but man oh man, Twemlow can throw a line.

Mothland

All along you were Right, they were flanking our

house They Documented you taking off your clothes

every morning I requested these Documents & they

sent someone's Illicit hard drive I fucked with the

commandant Nothing that mattered Continued to

happen into the Nothing that made us laugh like Gas

does Most of us went WYSIWYG Which meant sand

kicked In our face &/or our Life was a fracking disgrace

I know you lived mostly Desirous of desolation A

kind of Interior branding a Lesbos of the Soul Let me

introduce you To my friends Who fry bacon & Spumoni

de Kooning cooling limbic An astral fryer. Thomas

Mann Spelling things out I exhausted I falling down

On my face the divorce Anything but legal Just shame

& egrets Shitting the windows I realm I record Life

begins to get in The way the life Of a novelist Which

I assume is not Only more comfortable The advance

is ridiculous But strident The perqs develop Their

own antiquities I always go back to my Preference

for medications that act swiftly I don't do time-lapse

So well I get hell I focus my gaze On Takashi Ito's

Structured vision Of the not this world But space is the

place Where we can mace the strangers walking into

our loathsome Into oblivion The usual I refuse My son

Wallows the smooth Tallows of the luxurious paradise

of Time to spinneret to Pearl the moustache I get that

You falsify Perfectly you stream experience Like a coin

you toss Into whatever Fountain I still Believe the

poem Delivers a brutal shrill lust for streaming Cusps

your romance With ecriture If my mother were To read

this How much shame Would envelope Her I'm sure

you assure us Reassured all of us Which might mean

Write out & out & out else Make this a god Or homeless

People to shine a light On a poem amending The title

Intended to circumscribe My mother's loneliness I am

thinking of My mother a lot These days which Pass 

in spasms In theory If we are anything If we have

nothing else uncommon My mother Finds comfort

in Planting bulbs each fall She left me a voicemail

Message for my birthday Several days late to which I

never responded I didn't Listen to it for months I can't

remember if I did listen to it. Fred told me he couldn't

Get over a line from the Poem I read in Chicago This

summer from a poem that shows up later in this book

"Look, I've loved my mother Most of my life."

Its permission to admit why the anxiety Over mother

love Why depict spiders skittering All over our dreams

I didn't mean I didn't always Love my mother her Name

is Robyn same As my wife When Oedipus says I get the

feeling his dumb Luck is his fortune Is his is Oedipus

Reminds us to behave Better in the future Which his

motherwife Reminds us is unknowable Every memory

I have Or choose to have Of my mother saturated In

the blues of a Dusky sky I should Cry I should inhabit

The cliches entrusted to me To exhibit A lonely boy

ill Treated defeated before Birth exiled from Chance

When I Remember my mother Crying I don't remember

Her ever crying She loved me I'm certain As she loved

her Spring tulips not unconditionally But with proper

proportion Unhappy that I cannot heave My heart into

my mouth I Love your majesty According to my Bond

no more nor less the man standing Next to me inside of

me in Permanent ecstasy the cyphers Scuttling under

passing cars Unable to find A shadow to Dissolve Into

The barrel Of a gun twists Back at me I lard The scene

with A company of C's I see the scene in every Register

but time-lapse returns No favor The mother coma The

mother coma The various strobing Or phasing The 

clock dial is a riot Planning itself Years in advance Go

quietly address The vending machine Snip wires Stare

at Pictures of you Jolted twenty feet back onto The hood

Of a viper Flicking its Capital relentlessly At the brine

of these new centuries Erupting like nothing You or I

know I pick at a scab I develop A hankering for Insta for

gratification A door that slides Shut just As invasion

of talk Of jetties & molly & away to Somalia As if

you could evade The glistening Of your Fund which

powers up In a shadow Enciphered this cruel media

this papering Over & proxy servers & Anonymous

nerve Tapping to allocate resource Assuaging Assange

Buffering Beyonce Journos Copping a feel in Ferguson

ecstasy of Entering the Gilgamesh Dying 'neath the

heath Hammered to a tinsel thin Instance of justice

You don't belong To tribe always acting as Leering

at The contents of the mirror Mirroring the Warhol

Insistence on or the Basquiat Keith Haring! Nauman

walks in a square that Occludes race & class Privilege

preening or Peacocking Queer Theory rasterized

Resisting salve of Semiotics Your brother arches His

eyebrow Thought This true & u spend so much of

yourself Spending credit scores & fantasy The vale

we Vulture in our waking dread Waxing what You

examine with your niggling X-ray You my standing

Camino All the world's nostrils flare & Zenith & zeroes

shiver Me back into my car & I Drive home totally

💫💫💫

Today's book of poetry would like to apologize to both Nick Twemlow and to the University of Iowa Press.  In its original form, in the book, this poem is justified on both sides, hence it appears as a monolith.  Idiots that we are here we haven't figured out how to do it.  Imagine.  Of course we are still posting these blogs/reviews with a Commodore 16, steam and coal powered.

Today's book of poetry had David Bowie's "Young Americans" on the box this morning.  Today's book of poetry finds "Young Americans" always takes us back to our cab-driving days, 6 pm - 6 am.  Mr. Bowie helped us get through more than once long night.  Today if feels a right companion to Attributed to the Harrow Painter.  Controlled mayhem meeting precision, Twemlow and Bowie are similar smart cats.  These poems go to your brain before they force their way to your heart.

Today's book of poetry would want to suggest Nick Twemlow plays with his readers, but he is a poet at play.

Responding to my father's question

I square dark spaces

In the places where

I'm an addict. I rinse &

Delete on repeat.

The addict

In me charms the

Awful offal, where

The memories (of you) collide

In stride, the memories

Of you glitch through.

Like tiny flashbacks

Flashing back your priors.

Now you tell me.

You think you're going

To hell. I look forward

To your review of the place.

The mild discomfort you'll

Feel is my two year old

Self wondering why

Mum looks so

Peaked & wearing

Hospital gown. She could

Barely look at me the one

Visit I remember taking.

There was an inner

Courtyard teeming with

Plants. She seemed to prefer

Being in there than being

Anywhere else. If you feel

Anything for her. If you

Can't stand all the

Involuntary

Redress. You've spent

Most of your life

Listening to the berserk

Among us spit our

Holiness at you. That'd

Kill most of you, which

It did. I can't come this

Weekend. I'm grilling

For three these days.

As my friend said when

She was pregnant with

Her only child, at brunch,

"Bacon wants sausage."

💫💫💫

Attributed to the Harrow Painter leaves marks.  By the time you've hammered your way through to the end you'll have notes all over the place, painters to look up, other new poems/poets to read.  Twemlow provides us with new areas of study.  He also heats the place up.

Our morning read was held in some summer sauna hot offices.  We have a couple of old aircraft sized propellers hooked up to two large fans.  They create enough to wind to lift my desk off of the floor so no loose paper in the office today.  You have to lean into the fans to get to the bathroom.  Unfortunately they're only pushing hot air around.  How ironic is that for us here at Today's book of poetry?

Champagne Dawn

Cassandra wrote

To tell me

That my 

"Problem

With chicks

Is over,"

& I jumped out of

My chair

& ran

To the picture

Window

In the living

Room,

Threw open

The curtains,

& saw

My neighbor

Hacking

His rake

At the still-

Fluttering

Body

Of a 

Barred

Owl.

💫💫💫

Reading Nick Twemlow was a new thrill for Today's book of poetry - so of course we sent Milo, our head tech, a note asking him to add Nick Twemlow to our list of "must find poets."  Attributed to the Harrow Painter has weight when you read it and a splendid aftertaste when you're done.

Today's book of poetry gets such pleasure out of introducing you to books like Attributed to the Harrow Painter, we can confidently promise "no regret" reading.

Nick Twemlow

ABOUT THE POET

Nick Twemlow’s work includes Palm Trees, and his poems have appeared in Court Green, jubilat, Lana Turner, and the Paris Review. He coedits Canarium Books, and is a senior editor at the Iowa Review. He teaches at Coe College and lives in Iowa City, Iowa. 

BLURB

“Meandering around the edges of the beginning of someone’s mid-life, Attributed to the Harrow Painter dips back to lost teenage friends, traumas, accommodations, pleasures and losses and forward as the father of a young child, to the inevitable future. There’s the New York diaspora, and there are the blue jays 
and backyards of skull-fuck cold Kansas. Where are you most alive? Like Dana Ward and Ariana Reines, Nick Twemlow writes brainy poetry that’s as dispersed as real life without losing heart. I found the book very moving, and will read it again.”

     —Chris Kraus, author, I Love Dick and Summer of Hate 

Power in Poetry - Nick Twemlow Interview

Video:  Skylor Andrews

uipress.uiowa.edu 

773

DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

       

Changelings - Cassy Welburn (Frontenac House Poetry)

Today's book of poetry:
Changelings.  Cassy Welburn.  Frontenac House Poetry.  Calgary, Alberta.  2015

Cassy Welburn's Changelings reads like a book of incantations.  Welburn has an other-worldly noggin' and is translating these missives from languages we are yet to know.

These are deeply personal narrative poems that are attempting to make us see new worlds, better understand our own.

The Solitary Cyclist

My thirteen year-old self comes unbidden
out of the sky,
always on the same strip of road
on the outskirts of memory,
coming right at me
cycling home from school
in the wide green spring,
birds chattering through the pedals
to the click and whir of wheels,
leaning over the handlebars,
her eye on me,
she startles with familiarity,
beckons me slowly
from my life of glass--
this state of emergency.

Nothing should be lost,
she says,
and I'm caught
on this path, this hill,
while my body
whatever age it has become
or injury sustained,
remembers
her centre of gravity,
the spokes beneath me
turning.

...

"in the wide green spring."  This is such a simple perfection, Welburn laces these poems with gems like this as though she were tightening her skates and about to do double-axles, score on a breakaway.

Todays' book of poetry was utterly enchanted by Welburn's poetry.  Although there are many voices at hand the reader always feels secure because Welburn's steady countenance cornerstone's every poem.

Welburn counts on a little help from friends like William Butler Yeats, a quick kick in the pants from Walt Whitman.  David Bowie, Francis Child and Mary Oliver make guest appearances.  Gerard Manley Hopkins rears his old head and the nicest man on the planet, President Jimmy Carter, kicks in his two lovely cents.

Welburn understands the universe and our small part in it.  These poems feel wise but hard won.

At a Morning Truck Stop

The waitress calls out orders
over the sound of retarder brakes
and exhaust,
will that be to stay or to go?

Men climb down from their
diesel bodies, pull off caps,
as heat goes picking its way
across the parking lot
looking for plunder--
the swollen bag the busboy leaves in the bin,
a squirrel's bid for freedom
before the lid clangs shut--
a young woman leaning against the tire
of her car to smoke, a map of her whole life
spread out on the pavement--
Will that be to go or to stay?

Her young daughter's small
round head peeks
up through the sun roof,
eyes blue and cloudless,
cheeks catching the air,
right here,
one small glimpse
of paradise.

...

These poems are aching to connect.  The characters Welburn inhabits and conjures flay themselves open to make that human connection, that moment where understanding reveals the hearts' intent.

Today's book of poetry was consistently surprised reading Changelings.  Reading Welburn is a bit like watching the high jump competition at the Olympics, the bar just keeps getting raised by one gloriously beautiful leap after another.  We forget that this flight is human effort as we learn to enjoy to the soar.

Wade in the Water

The drowning man
still has a hospital bracelet around his wrist
though the name is washed out.
I've changed my mind, he says
almost cheerfully
allowing us to pull him from the river.
A light jacket and pajama pants
cling in sodden embrace,
outline his lean bones.
Memory fading, he's aging
before our eyes, forgetting already,
why we are there.
They're taking my wife away,
he says, teeth beginning to chatter.
We have a blanket around him,
carry him from the cold current of his mind
into the lap of the present,
jolt him with questions, pull down his patience
take him back where he does not belong.
There's a river flowing, he says, I saw
it from the window. Reminds me of the
sound of my own blood.
I wanted to go down there,
you know how they dunk you,
let the river wash over you, give you a new name?

...

It's a dark and rainy morning here at Today's book of poetry, Pharoah Sanders is wailing away on the box, "Save Our Children", live, it's booming and I'm blog-happy.  Day after day I get these marvelous books of poetry in the mail and Cassy Welburn's Changelings makes for an ear-mark day.  Good poetry is something magical because it changes your view of the world.  Welburn casts a spell that is both desolately honest and human about our grim world and yet she manages to find hope.

President Carter is quoted in the last poem of this collection, the last two lines in fact.  I think it sums up Welburn's poetry and frame of mind:

"We are attempting to survive our time
      so we may live in yours."    - President Jimmy Carter

Cassy Welburn

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CASSY WELBURN is a poet and storyteller whose work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies and on CBC radio. She has travelled across Canada sharing her work at festivals, and for audiences of all ages. She works part time as a teacher to new Canadians and as Artist in Residence at many schools. She lives in Calgary, Alberta.

BLURB

“Cassy Welburn writes with insight and revelation, as she examines the nuances of personal story, transformation and healing. Her poetic narratives integrate strong images with lamenting vignettes. Welburn presents her reader with rich portraits of people and landscape, through a tight lens and then again through the optic of a hermetic breath.”

      – Sheri-D Wilson

frontenachouse.com

392

 DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Designation Youth - David Bateman (Frontenac House Poetry)

Today's book of poetry:
Designation Youth.  David Bateman.  Frontenac House Poetry.  Calgary, Alberta.  2014.

I wasn't sure if I was looking at David Bowie's cool Duke or Marlene Deitrich in repose when I first saw the cover of David Bateman's Designation Youth.

Bateman gives it all away with the title of his poem "Boston, 1989: only parts of this are true, but all these are real."  That's how Designated Youth rolls, this book is primarily made up of a series of rambling autobiographical prose style poems.  It might not all be true but it certainly is real.

Bateman toys with the idea of youth and beauty, mantras of truth and beauty.  But mostly he riffs on his gay life, the confusing issues of first awareness and the endless issue of his Herculean sexual ambition, friends and lovers facing mortality with AIDS and all of us facing morality in the face of Queer love.

Designation Youth

when he was young again
in middle age
before that final infancy
he turned to older men
babied them in cubist cradles
splintered by surreal movements into youth
unprepared for that mature impressionistic route designed by fate
post expressions refracting joy and wisdom and trust
moving swiftly out of teen inspired jeans

                          draped like fallen fauvist petals upon such lacy frames

into trousers, cuffs and pleats, stopping long enough
considering cravats, but saying no
Prufrock had it right, no frill across
those firmaments of graying lust
just simple line and shadow
gracing shallow pools of once taut crops

fashion not as folly but the well hung framing
of all those years that pass as light
having known in his first blush of truth
much older men who grazed along
the edges of his snowy thighs
on feathered follicles when summer sun
transformed them into gold

so now he ambles back in middle age
to same sex sites of longing
for the brevity of lust with older men


becoming hope and love and care
parenting lovers in ways in which
his own familial unit failed to dare

so there he goes - bob bob bobbing on the edges of their thighs

he has become too glib for their desire to hold

                             a careful glamour that conceals the syntax of the soul

but somehow he has found a way to set that snare
to beat that drum, to fumble in and out and back
to where his first-last stab began.

...

David Bateman's Designation Youth does not waste an iota's time on pretense or pacification.  In these trauma's the only innocents are those that don't know yet.

These very humorous and human lyrics are brave.  Why?  Because it still requires bravery to sing that Queer song so loud.  John Barton does it, and very well.  There are a few other voices, but there are still few books of poetry by gay men.  We all need to hear our brother's stories.  Mainstream poetry doesn't give much room for those voices.

Alan
(our bumper sticker lives)

am I ready to write about you, two decades later
carrying your little frame in that outlandish snowsuit to the car
that final ride in a blizzard to a hospice named after another lost child

your burning trousers, cannabis smouldering in your flaming crotch
your escapes from the playpen into lavish unaffordable toy stores
my desperate mid-day searches for you in breakfast cafes
my hostility toward prim, crass restaurateurs suggesting
my ragged tank top was inappropriate garb while frantically looking
for you in the hollow well of your early dementia

you selling your drugs at a student pub
in exchange for recreational comfort
fleeing from the terrible pain of not being a child any longer
just an adult trying to survive
the terminal phobia induced boyishness
of being caught with his pants down in the schoolyard

just one last blast from the iconoclast you were you were running, madcap and
infantile, through the streets in search of things, ideas, life

how you loved eggcups and soft-boiled greasy breakfasts alone
waking early to escape from hearth and home

how you returned to the house in a taxi
with a trunk full of computer equipment
pale water colours from a local gallery
we had to return it all
we had to go back to something we could justify in order to see you
crumble in a world of denial and taboo

how I didn't know I was lying when asked what you were dying of
numb and over functional until that sudden moment of recognition
when you just looked at me and said,

when someone's lifespan is suddenly shortened

and then I knew
I simply had to be told by you
I could never just say on telephones, in conversation

Yes, he's dying of it, AIDS. It has him in its grip, tra la.

how I remember your short stocky body
fit and trembling under my touch
how I spread oil on your hairy full and gorgeous tiny torso
and we had sex in my childhood bedroom with my widowed mother
out on the town
with so much lust that love would never speak its name
I miss the past we never had

I miss you
I miss your volatile irrational whimsy
I miss jumping over hedges in Aegean island cafes to escape from the
latest fight you have embarked upon with the waiter, calling him a
motherfucker in your broken Greek
just because the kitchen is closed at midnight

I miss your pseudo experimental theatrics, Beckett in a blender
how you directed Hellenistic classics
with an eye for Fred Astaire induced debacles
filled with maenads matriarchs
tall fey gods hell bent on wining dining
through the haze of quaint Wagnerian tributes to your navel

missing your inane argument with a taxi driver
on our way to the ambulance depot
when I was beaten up in Athens
you found me bent and bloodied in the street

and yes, I mostly miss the sad and sorry self-indulgent tale of me
being told on more than one occasion
by old-school aficionados in a cafe with you
on a Greek island that my left handed ways were wrong
and a sad and sorry testament
to a total lack of self-restraint on the part of my parents,
they should have changed me

and finally, kneeling in the driveway by a car
borrowed from a friend's insane lover
scraping away at a bumper sticker with a box cutter knife in my left
hand in heavy snowfall trying to remove the words from the back of
your final chariot

THIS CAR IS PROTECTED BY A
    PIT BULL WITH AIDS!!!

my fingers bleeding lightly in the tainted white ground covering
asphalt stained with impure blankets blood and snow
the knife slipping on the chrome as it glides through these
apocalyptic hate mongering cliches piercing my mittens dismantling
my denial these callous one-liners only moments before your
withered middle aged carcass becomes my infant cargo as I cross the
threshold and into the driveway to the car with what is left of you
in my scarred arms

the follies and the madnesses that made your life
and the lives of others so exciting
so excruciating

has it been twenty years
it seems like today

you and so many like you always dying inside of me as I wait my turn
patiently, in earnest, for the day, filled with laughter, disabuse,
the familiar rule of male hysteria when snowsuits, burning oversized
khaki shorts seared by clumsy hashish ashes in your lap

eggcups and outrageous expenditures
that moment of promiscuous angelic indiscretion
you told your lover that that had things been different
it might have been me

and now he has gone the way so many of us have been sent

but I'm the one left here with memory in my arms
bare, unabashed remembering you and yours
when all these material trappings
these brash and strident strings of incident and plot
come tumbling down front steps in some unwedded march
into driveways along thoroughfares ending in the same
great sadness singed with ample mirth
invigorating brutal bawdy messages of bumper stickers
caught in wordstorms fraught with love

...

Today's book of poetry wanted you all to see the poem "Allen" in full.  It is rife with the heart-stopping moments in this book that will resonate in every heart.  Those difficult moments where the crystal of truth is also a moment of condemnation, ugly shit madness.  We learn, early on, with Bateman that it is all tolerable as long as it is real.

David Bateman and I grew up in the same small town, we are the same age, and although we were never close our circles did intersect, we knew many of the same people.  Seeing this brave, bawdy body of work makes me wish I'd known him better.

Dressing Down

after being that beautiful man stepping out of a gown

trading in his tulle for turtlenecks and scarves
of the voluminous kind
fooled by the wooly tales he never chose to pull over empty eyes
the goddesses of daily rhythms made him do it

when the taut teenaged skin and fluttering hairline
fit for one thousand fragile angels abandoned him
at 24

when the cowl necks he admired as a child
sputtered into in his early teens, became his skin
at 39

when his belly fat became that babied hump
he held his breath to hide
at 43

when the body fails to come and go with the curves of Michelangelo
deferring to the fulsome swerve of Rubens and Botero

to have faded out of beauty
into this dismissive survey
of corporeal bliss
come and gone

and then
at 58

there are things far worse than swaddled goosey necks and the
memories of how the flesh will fail us in the mutant glow of
immortal myths we try so hard to tell

...

True, honest, real.  These are big words in poetry.  David Bateman's Designation Youth is all these things.

Plus he quotes Truman Capote and the Slovenian Milan Jazbec to introduce the same poem.

Today's book of poetry will be looking forward to more from David Bateman.

David Bateman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Bateman is an actor, playwright, visual artist, and performance poet currently based in Toronto.  His spoken word monologues and solo plays have been presented both nationally and internationally over the past twenty years.  He has a PhD from the University of Calgary (English Literature; specialization Creative Writing) and has taught at a variety of Canadian post-secondary institutions including Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver), Thompson Rivers University (Kamloops), and Trent University (Peterborough).  His arts and entertainment reviews have appeared in XTRA, In Toronto, and at batemanreviews.blogspot.com/

BLURBS

designation youth performs precision in its exacting signatures of voice and rhythm. These poems are “speaking poems” that use the “spoken poem” as a prop. David Batemen recuperates the honesty of a personal lyric by a subtle and intelligent attention to the particular way of telling something. And the pleasure in these little fictions is that he so skillfully uses the poem to play them out. 

– Fred Wah

Bateman’s latest continues his questing trialogue via many forms, lengths, and shapes in verse but always with the surefooted emotion, devastating honesty, and poetic pyrotechnics we’ve come to expect. Among his many accomplishments in designation youth is his regeneration of the long poem so loved by the Victorians. They’d be astonished to read what he has done with the form.

– Felice Picano

David Bateman

"Why did you have to go through a car wash on the way to our mother's funeral"

A video by Centre Arts

for

Capturing Fire - Queer Spoken Work

Summit & Slam

frontenachousepoetry.ca

302

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.