Showing posts with label milo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label milo. Show all posts
Friday, December 11, 2015
Diversion - George Murray (ECW Press)
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Sunday, December 6, 2015
Sabotage - Priscila Uppal (Mansfield Press)
Today's book of poetry:
Sabotage. Priscila Uppal. Mansfield Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2015.
Priscila Uppal is some piece of work. Sabotage, her eleventh book of poetry, is the child with the nasty grin taking his/her finger out of the dike just to see what happens.
Like the Batman's butler said, "Some men just want to see things burn."
These poems are precision bombing, smart strikes into the daily minutia that makes up our lives. Subjects big and small are jury-rigged for destruction.
The Police Came for a Visit
just as grandma used to drop by before
her nervous breakdown & the stroke.
I laid out two pots of loose-leaf tea
& a selection of wheat-free, dairy-free cookies.
They removed their boots & caps
but looped their guns around their fingers
& joined me on the carpet where I taught them 2
expert knitting stitches while they explained
clause 3.21 of the Search & Seizures Regulations.
My bladder was full so they insisted on escorting
me & standing guard as I washed my hands
with cranberry soap. We traded photographs.
Yes, yes, that's my uncle, I assured the tall one,
no, no, he's not a doctor, he's a nurse.
The short one placed uncle in a special envelope.
I put on a video while they napped &
napped & napped--why wouldn't they wake up?
Just like grandma, I thought, to visit & leave
you to lift crumbs off your floor. I was looking
forward to testing out the sirens & earning
a new badge, kissing their smooth cheeks & waving
like a widow from the driveway.
The walkie-talkie won't stop bleating. In a few
moments, after I finish combing their hair
I'll sing Happy Birthday to You to the dispatcher
just like Marilyn Monroe.
...
If it can go wrong you'll find it in here. Priscilla Uppal is your tongue prodding your sorest tooth. Poke. Poke. Poke. Uppal is all about pushing over the apple cart, because that's what humans do. These poems dive in and out of our continuous fall from grace as though Uppal got the directions for conduct right out of our collective unconscious.
She is on top of every devious moment since the beginning of time and she knows who to blame.
Survivor
A millionaire is shot. And his wife. And their unborn child.
Revenge selects an arsenal of weapons.
Armies drawn by lots construct arguments.
Leaders rise like tanks and airplanes.
Gardens plant anxious roots.
Gossip punished by banishment.
Goodbye beautiful youth.
Perhaps you would like to marry a sweet blond or bouncy brunette
before the bullet rounds.
Perhaps you would like to use a lifeline to mail a letter
to your attorney, or ask your dear
old mother for advice.
Each week, ten thousand foot soldiers are served
faulty gas masks, ten thousand more must give up
their limbs for tent pegs.
The challenges get crueler. The prizes stranger.
The confessions more predictable.
Nations text their ballots into the trenches,
go back to genetically modified dinners
and genetically modified cares.
As soon as a commercial break calls truce,
the fan website nearly crashes from all the orders
for bright red poppies and T-shirts that read Never Forget.
...
If it weren't for my trusted Pharoah Sanders playing "Body and Soul" in our office right now -- I think we might have a mutiny. Sabotage is entirely that. At our morning read Sabotage stirred things up. The more we read, the more you could see it, our gentle Milo was ready to kick the chair out from under the first person he could just to see the look on their face. These poems are the just-lit match heading for the fuse. They rile readers into various degrees shitstorm.
Frankly Today's book of poetry thinks more poetry should be this incendiary.
Sabotage had a whole bunch of poems we wanted to share just to rattle the cage, but we stuck with our three strike rule. We even overlooked a fine list poem of sorts -"In The Psych Ward". Uppal speaks with such natural authority it never occurs to you not to listen with care.
There Are No Timeouts in History
At best there are pauses between rounds
to stitch skin, wipe blood, spit into the bin,
& except for a few predictable platitudes,
collect bets & wave to what's left of the crowd.
...
Poem after perfect poem in this dart shooting contest just nails the bulls-eye with a laser taut moment. Uppal really does have her finger on the pulse and the jugular.
Today's book of poetry gives out big props for Sabotage. Sustained smarts like this are what make that poetry train hum down those tracks.
Priscilla Uppal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Priscila Uppal is a Toronto poet, fiction writer and York University Professor. Among her publications are ten collections of poetry, most recently, Ontological Necessities (2006; shortlisted for the Griffin PoetryPrize), Traumatology (2010), Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, U.K.), and Winter Sport: Poems and Summer Sport: Poems; the critically-acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation(2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009); the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (2009), and the memoir Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother (2013; shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and the Governor General’s Award). Her work has been published internationally and translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Korean and Latvian. She was the first-ever poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Vancouver and 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic games as well as the Roger’s Cup Tennis Tournament in 2011. Six Essential Questions, her first play, had its world premiere as part of the Factory Theatre 2013-2014 season, and will be published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015. Time Out London recently dubbed her “Canada’s coolest poet.”
Priscila Uppal
reads "Obsessive Compulsive Cycling Disorder"
Video: PBS NewsHour
415
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.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Music from Small Towns - Al Maginnes (Jacar Press)
Today's book of poetry:
Music from Small Towns. Al Maginnes. Jacar Press. Durham, North Carolina. 2014.
Almost every poem in Al Maginnes' fine Music from Small Towns has previously been published in a magazine or journal that you and I would be tickled pink to appear in. That is an enormous accomplishment, colour me green.
These poems are tremendous machines of muscle galloping across the page like a red-haired Secretariat.
Mingus and Stars
I am writing this on my 56th birthday.
On my father's 56th birthday, he died,
leaving little to measure my steps against
from this day forward. This day when I'm afraid
to close my eyes. The day Charles Mingus died
fifty six sperm whales died on the beaches in Baja.
And Mingus was 56. He left behind
a garden as sweet and thorny as the fields
father and sons have warred in since the first
measure of time, since stick or rock
first pounded imitation of the human heart.
Tonight, presents and phone calls, the prizes
for completing a year, done, the little cake I can
be allowed, gone, I should listen to music
instead of watching a movie whose outcome
I know, turning pages in books I read last year.
I'm old enough now for real listening, to close
my eyes and let music have its way with me.
"I want to be a star," said Mingus after he knew
he was dying, meaning not the faces on magazines
or the metal shapes in Hollywood sidewalks,
but the burning orbs or rock and gas we see
only at a distance, whose light continues long after
they go out, the way music continues after
the hand that wrote it is done. When I close my eyes,
fields of stars unfurl there. Those are the stars, bright,
unreachable, each singular as bass notes, stars
I want to shine among, but not today.
...
These poems say too much, go on too long, have streamers in their tails -- but they do sing.
Milo, our office crank and technical wizard, always claims to hate jazz but unabashedly loves poems that he calls "Charlie Rich voice ditties", that Milo is a romantic at heart. And so is Al Maginnes.
Maginnes calls on various Gods both large and small to pepper these poems with notes hard as hammers, soft as your heart.
Something Words Will Not Say
For Don Adock, 1926-2011
How long will it be before I buy
some jazz or see an announcement
for a show without thinking I need
to burn it for you or call to see
if you want to go. Last night, I listened
to different piano players until
I told myself I could hear the difference
in the pressure of fingers, could tell
their signature licks, small decorations
of melody, apart. Perhaps I can,
but it's knowledge that only lasts
until the next disc comes on.
One night you came in the bookstore
where I worked between semesters, pointed
to the speaker and said "That's Cedar Walton,"
and when, a few nights later, it was
Red Garland, you knew it too.
One evening while we watched a quartet
work through "Body and Soul,"
the piano player stumbled on his solo.
"He doesn't know what to do with it."
You elbowed me as the hapless pianist
nodded it to the sax player,
whose playing all night had surged
with invention. "He knows what to do
with it," you chuckled and leaned back.
Watching you was a lesson
in how to listen. There are chords
underneath the chords being played.
There are leaves blowing down sidewalks,
alleys filled with wind, the sound
of a name broken into three long notes.
I have always believed music was
trying to tell me something
words will not say. When I drive
at night, I sometimes listen to CDs
you copied for me--there are enough
to fill a shoebox--and those hours
are empty enough for the searching horns,
the splash of drums, the piano waiting
to drive, empty enough for me
to listen until I think I hear you say,
"He knows what to do with it."
...
Al Maginnes gets it. Marcus Aurielius might be walking around in these suckers along with Charles Mingus, Billie Holiday, the Prez, John Keats, Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm too. Thomas Edison and Peter Coyote drop in. You just cannot predict who is going to sit in on something to make it just right, but everyone plays nice. The quartets and quintets Maginnes finesses out of his noggin astound just a little.
You get the drift though, these poems are full of hard-edged knowing and charm.
Passage Through the Body of Fire
Impossible to fathom lightning without
dark and silence. One of our commandments
is contrast. There is silence so deep
words, even thunder, will not find
the end of it. The house burning down
on the news might be the church
of your childhood, dissolving in fire
while half the town watches.
Can't faith crumble the same way?
The nameless man pulled from the lake
offers the same excuse to break
our soft code of silence as rain
or any weather we can name but can
do nothing to change. Give us anything,
and we learn to make language,
the way prisoners invent code to send
shorthand messages tapping through stones
or flashing in bolts of light from mirrors.
His eyes were still open, said a woman
at the bank; his body showed
he was not in the water long.
The finger of lightning that touched
the church into flame, the ragged scars
across the drowned man's chest
hold us in a place language will not
free us from. Words will never be
all we have of language, as flame
cannot be the whole of fire. The stare
of the drowned man, the architectures
of burning wood might be signals from
the unspeaking world, like sullen braids
of smoke rising from the ruin
of the church the night after the fire
did its work, shards of metal, glass,
even wood still undigested after
their passage through the body of fire,
the ghost of what had been there
more real than when the door could be
opened, the body entered. Some prayers
outlast every vow to forget them.
What you have of the fire-eaten church
is smoke so thick it was language
all its own, body that might insist
on seeking its own path,
as you resisted the hand that seized you,
shoved you into the soundlessness
of water, making an unreachable heaven of
the surface you suddenly prayed for.
...
We here at Today's book of poetry are especially fond of narrative poetry. We love poems that tell a good story. Al Maginnes is a master storyteller and they are rarer then hen's teeth.
Maginnes has a voice we want to listen to.
— Lola Haskins, The Grace to Leave, Still the Mountain, Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems
Music from Small Towns. Al Maginnes. Jacar Press. Durham, North Carolina. 2014.
Almost every poem in Al Maginnes' fine Music from Small Towns has previously been published in a magazine or journal that you and I would be tickled pink to appear in. That is an enormous accomplishment, colour me green.
These poems are tremendous machines of muscle galloping across the page like a red-haired Secretariat.
Mingus and Stars
I am writing this on my 56th birthday.
On my father's 56th birthday, he died,
leaving little to measure my steps against
from this day forward. This day when I'm afraid
to close my eyes. The day Charles Mingus died
fifty six sperm whales died on the beaches in Baja.
And Mingus was 56. He left behind
a garden as sweet and thorny as the fields
father and sons have warred in since the first
measure of time, since stick or rock
first pounded imitation of the human heart.
Tonight, presents and phone calls, the prizes
for completing a year, done, the little cake I can
be allowed, gone, I should listen to music
instead of watching a movie whose outcome
I know, turning pages in books I read last year.
I'm old enough now for real listening, to close
my eyes and let music have its way with me.
"I want to be a star," said Mingus after he knew
he was dying, meaning not the faces on magazines
or the metal shapes in Hollywood sidewalks,
but the burning orbs or rock and gas we see
only at a distance, whose light continues long after
they go out, the way music continues after
the hand that wrote it is done. When I close my eyes,
fields of stars unfurl there. Those are the stars, bright,
unreachable, each singular as bass notes, stars
I want to shine among, but not today.
...
These poems say too much, go on too long, have streamers in their tails -- but they do sing.
Milo, our office crank and technical wizard, always claims to hate jazz but unabashedly loves poems that he calls "Charlie Rich voice ditties", that Milo is a romantic at heart. And so is Al Maginnes.
Maginnes calls on various Gods both large and small to pepper these poems with notes hard as hammers, soft as your heart.
Something Words Will Not Say
For Don Adock, 1926-2011
How long will it be before I buy
some jazz or see an announcement
for a show without thinking I need
to burn it for you or call to see
if you want to go. Last night, I listened
to different piano players until
I told myself I could hear the difference
in the pressure of fingers, could tell
their signature licks, small decorations
of melody, apart. Perhaps I can,
but it's knowledge that only lasts
until the next disc comes on.
One night you came in the bookstore
where I worked between semesters, pointed
to the speaker and said "That's Cedar Walton,"
and when, a few nights later, it was
Red Garland, you knew it too.
One evening while we watched a quartet
work through "Body and Soul,"
the piano player stumbled on his solo.
"He doesn't know what to do with it."
You elbowed me as the hapless pianist
nodded it to the sax player,
whose playing all night had surged
with invention. "He knows what to do
with it," you chuckled and leaned back.
Watching you was a lesson
in how to listen. There are chords
underneath the chords being played.
There are leaves blowing down sidewalks,
alleys filled with wind, the sound
of a name broken into three long notes.
I have always believed music was
trying to tell me something
words will not say. When I drive
at night, I sometimes listen to CDs
you copied for me--there are enough
to fill a shoebox--and those hours
are empty enough for the searching horns,
the splash of drums, the piano waiting
to drive, empty enough for me
to listen until I think I hear you say,
"He knows what to do with it."
...
Al Maginnes gets it. Marcus Aurielius might be walking around in these suckers along with Charles Mingus, Billie Holiday, the Prez, John Keats, Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm too. Thomas Edison and Peter Coyote drop in. You just cannot predict who is going to sit in on something to make it just right, but everyone plays nice. The quartets and quintets Maginnes finesses out of his noggin astound just a little.
You get the drift though, these poems are full of hard-edged knowing and charm.
Passage Through the Body of Fire
Impossible to fathom lightning without
dark and silence. One of our commandments
is contrast. There is silence so deep
words, even thunder, will not find
the end of it. The house burning down
on the news might be the church
of your childhood, dissolving in fire
while half the town watches.
Can't faith crumble the same way?
The nameless man pulled from the lake
offers the same excuse to break
our soft code of silence as rain
or any weather we can name but can
do nothing to change. Give us anything,
and we learn to make language,
the way prisoners invent code to send
shorthand messages tapping through stones
or flashing in bolts of light from mirrors.
His eyes were still open, said a woman
at the bank; his body showed
he was not in the water long.
The finger of lightning that touched
the church into flame, the ragged scars
across the drowned man's chest
hold us in a place language will not
free us from. Words will never be
all we have of language, as flame
cannot be the whole of fire. The stare
of the drowned man, the architectures
of burning wood might be signals from
the unspeaking world, like sullen braids
of smoke rising from the ruin
of the church the night after the fire
did its work, shards of metal, glass,
even wood still undigested after
their passage through the body of fire,
the ghost of what had been there
more real than when the door could be
opened, the body entered. Some prayers
outlast every vow to forget them.
What you have of the fire-eaten church
is smoke so thick it was language
all its own, body that might insist
on seeking its own path,
as you resisted the hand that seized you,
shoved you into the soundlessness
of water, making an unreachable heaven of
the surface you suddenly prayed for.
...
We here at Today's book of poetry are especially fond of narrative poetry. We love poems that tell a good story. Al Maginnes is a master storyteller and they are rarer then hen's teeth.
Maginnes has a voice we want to listen to.
Al Maginnes
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Al Maginnes was born in Quincy, Massachusetts and teaches at Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, NC. His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Poetry, The New England Review, The Georgia Review, The Antioch Review, Shenandoah and Quarterly West. He has been the recipient of a Writer’s Fellowship from the NC Arts Council and is the author of two collections: Taking Up Our Daily Tools (St. Andrews Press, 1997) and The Light in Our Houses (Pleiades Press, 2000), which won Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize.
BLURB
“What I love about these poems is how they manage to be so eloquent without being pretentious. I’m also drawn to the way Maginnes juxtaposes fire and its quick losses with fire’s complement, slow vanishing. Not all the poems in this collection directly address either of those ideas — Maginnes is too smart for that — but I finished these pages thinking it was change that infuses the finest of them and that Maginnes, like so many of us, has striven to accept what is, even when it’s transition, and through that acceptance find peace. I admire that, and this book.”— Lola Haskins, The Grace to Leave, Still the Mountain, Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems
Al Maginnes
Reading at Poetry Hickory
12-24-2010
Video: T. Peeler
376
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.
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