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 

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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.

       

Transaction Histories - Donna Stonecipher (University of Iowa Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Transaction Histories.  Donna Stonecipher.  Kuhl House Poets.  University of Iowa Press.  Iowa City, Iowa.  2018.

Today's book of poetry read Donna Stonecipher with our usual hopes; Today's book of poetry always wants to like the books we receive.  Stonecipher gave us no choice.  Transaction Histories is made up of several long poems, each of them made up of numerous numbered prose passages of similar length.  It's a tidy package and solid as a brick.  Stonecipher takes these microcosms and uses them to decipher the world; Willy the Shake, Normandy, history books, Greek temples, oceans of plastic, architecture, psychology.  Donna Stonecipher takes it all on and this was just a tiny, quick disassembly of the first few pages.

Today's book of  poetry has recently started taking on Michel de Montaigne's Essays.  Maybe everything will feel this way but Stonecipher's Transaction Histories is similar in its accessibility, the author's limitless and generous curiosity, and perhaps even a touch of the Socratic method.

Transaction History 5

2.

      The photograph of grains of sand magnified 200 times revealed microscopic works of art

— gold, rose, opalescent scrolls, gaskets, sugars — where we had expected only a consoling

beige monotony, the consoling beige monotony we always counted on when we came to the sea

with our troubles to be consoled. Our troubles, too, were like artworks: constructed with love over

time.

💫💫💫

The grains of sand image was a brain tease and particularly apt because Today's book of poetry recently saw an enlarged photo of sand on the internet and was astonished.

Take a look as see if you can believe such beauty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_JQTe09_YY

Such unimaginable beauty hiding in plain sight.  Perhaps Today's book of poetry feels the same about Transaction Histories.  This is one contemplative read.  Transaction Histories was set down several times, not out of boredom, on the contrary, to better contemplate what Stonecipher is burning.

Stonecipher's foot never comes off of the gas, the deeper you go into Transaction Histories the more intimately things are revealed.  At times it feels as though the brilliant Stonecipher is trying to emotionally engineer some sort of new and beautiful language, a whole new template.

Found to be Borrowed From

Some Material Appearance 4

2.

     That night we saw her again: the blonde girl who shuffled through the subway cars crying

and begging, her scruffy dog clutched in a hug. Was she an actress, or truly a fellow damsel in

distress?  We were like vending machines that couldn't tell the difference between coins and

slugs. Grief is only too real to the Madonna Lachrymae weeping in paintings and statues all over

several continents, for those who know what real grief is.

💫💫💫

Our morning read was hothouse sweaty as our offices have NO air conditioning and with the humidex it was 40 C or 110 F in the Nation's Capital when we ran this puppy into the ground.  Even in those torpid moments Transaction Histories regaled us with German translations about luck and happiness and mechanical Japanese cats.  

An intellectual roller-coaster that Stonecipher seats you in when you open the cover.  This cat can burn, Transaction Histories is a totally refreshing encounter.  These poems illuminate, shine light and new thought where previously there was just the dark.

Snow Series 2

     There once was a polar bear who didn't know that he was polar bear, because he'd been

raised in a zoo by people. What would a polar bear have to know, to know that he was a polar

bear? That's what the people would never know. All that winter, as we roamed around the 

gingerbread town, we kept noticing how the snowmen's bodies were segmented like insects', and

how the new snows kept resembling other, older snows.

*

       The beautiful young woman slowly realized that her beauty was a currency, but did not

know how best to spend it. "It is difficult to be beautiful for long," wrote Max Jacob. The young

woman read this and promptly forgot it. The Swiss chalets dotting the hillside did resemble other

Swiss chalets. The polar bear who didn't know that he was a polar bear had snowy fur reflecting

those regions where only our supercooled minds can go.

*

     You were the one who wanted to ride the telepherique all day long that winter, to float up

over the Alps and then back down into the valley in an endless paternoster loop that would keep

cycling us in and out of the sweetest ether. If "architecture is frozen music," then "music" must

be "liquid architecture." the architecture itself was frozen: there were chalets trapped in aspics of

ice. There were insects trapped in aspics of icicles.

*

     In another city, people flocked to the zoo to imagine owning a baby polar bear named

Flocke, whom they'd relinquish to her fate once she grew out of the phase in which they wished

to crush her snowy fur with bear hugs. "Flocke" means "snowflake." No two snowflakes are

alike. The wonder of uniqueness. The wonder of ownership. We opened our mouths to let unique

snowflakes explode all over our wondering tongues.

*

     Wonder upon wonder, tongue upon tongue, Alp upon Alp upon Alp. One Alp resembled

another Alp. Gliding higher and higher on the telpherique, we felt we were at last one with the

Alps: encased in a glass eye floating up over the snow, all eye ourselves, our intertwining bodies

architectonically segmented into distance, ownership, and desire. The glacier below us was beautiful, beautifully, violently expiring.

*

     But later, as we moved deeper into winter, I couldn't help noticing how your body was

starting to resemble a snowman's — it kept melting to nothing when I tried to hold it close. The 

old man wondered aloud why some valleys fill with water and become lakes, and others remain

simply valleys. Eventually the young woman would know that beauty's currency was like any

other: useless if hoarded, gone when spent.

💫💫💫

Today's book of poetry loved Donna Stonecipher's Transaction Histories and want you to love it too.  Why wouldn't we?  Emotionally engaging and accessible from the first page.  

The reader feels smarter with every page they read.  That's about the best trick in poetry.

Today's book of poetry will now have Milo, our head tech and book hunter, on the job.  There are several earlier Stonecipher poetry collections out there and Today's book of poetry needs to read them.  I suspect you do as well.

The game is on.

Donna Stonecipher

ABOUT THE POET

Donna Stonecipher is the author of The Reservoir, Souvenir de Constantinople, The Cosmopolitan, Model City, and Prose Poetry and the City. She lives in Berlin, Germany. 

BLURBS

“[A] highly affecting work of imagination and sensibility . . . one often feels afloat in a world concocted and dreamy, there and not there.”

     —Martha Ronk, The Constant Critic

“In the same way that architecture must abide by certain rules and regulations but can still create a thing of beauty, Stonecipher, by constraining herself to engineer within her own parameters, forms beautiful language and ideas.”

     —Hamzah M. Hussain, DURA

“How many poets are there in the world that you go looking for online, checking regularly, even impatiently, to see whether and when their new books will be out? Not many. Among the poets whose work I anxiously await, Donna Stonecipher has long been near the top of the list."

     —Michael Thurston, Massachusetts Review

www.uipress.uiowa.edu 

771

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.