We were delighted with all of the submissions to our Summer Limerick Contest, but we have a special place in our limerick-hearts for these three.

Our favorite cocktail limerick, by J. O Marsh:

Was there ever a drink we won’t drink

With a chug or a slake or a clink?

Every mouth is there first

And it teaches of thirst

So a body gets learning to think.

 

Our favorite surprise-ending limerick, by James F. Woglom:

Loved her right from the first time I’d seen her

I approached with the suave-est demeanor

Tried to speak, lost my cool—

Lord, I stuttered and drooled—

Blood had rushed from my brain to my wiener

Our favorite strange hygiene limerick, by Patrick McKeon:

A fellow was proud of his skill

For cleaning his ears with a drill

“It could hurt my brain”

He would freely explain

“But for me that’s just part of the thrill”

A Scatter of Words, a Scramble

Reading J.A. Tyler’s Comatose is like being lost inside someone else’s head. Or maybe not like being lost but like being along for the ride, inhabiting the world built between the waking and sleeping mind, being on the brink or verge of everything. It is a narrative that takes place in the (usually distorted) real and the (sometimes nightmarish) imagined worlds at once. It’s not a summertime beach read. It’s kind of trippy. It’s one of those novel-length poetic narratives that are hard to categorize. But it’s a book that is worth reading (and rereading and rereading) as soon as possible because it will make you uncomfortable and uncertain in all the right ways.

Comatose tells the story of a narrator trapped in a coma who overhears the goings-on in the hospital around him, but who also recalls his painful life before the coma, and who builds around those memories a myth-like world that is captivating and frightening, expansive and entrapping, feels at once like the past, the present, and all possible futures. Tyler’s verse starts up and falls in and comes back, submerges and emerges into and out of the waves of memory, of dream, of sensory experience, and of myth.

I can’t remember her name. The name I
had for her is long lost. Yesterday I
remembered that the trees out of this
window have spines of tiny leaves and
peeling, blistery bark. Yesterday I
remembered that a tree like this is a
locust. Tomorrow I will believe a locust is
a bug. The day after tomorrow, when I
see a woman go up the stairs, I will think
that I have seen a man go that way too.
There are questions that don’t have
answers. There are questions that make
ghosts in trees. (35)

Tyler moves between voices familiar and unfamiliar, moves from the bold to the questioning, moves in and out of childhood and consciousness, moves continually so that it’s not a direct narrative to keep tabs on, but the rocking, lilting, sweeping world that comes into being. And, because the narrator is in a comatose state, that motion takes place imaginarily, in a world of memory and myth braided together, without the narrator moving bodily more than the blink of an eye or the twitch of a toe.

Tyler’s tone here wends just as the narrative does, from world to world, from that of third-person myth-making to familiar, childhood-recollecting first-person. This chameleonic narrative voice, despite Comatose‘s taking place almost solely within the head of the narrator, keeps the narrative writhing and spitting from page to page, following “The woman in this myth, she hears/it, the guttural splatter of clouds, and she/dreams of bears in her womb, of how she/is a forest,” with a sucker-punch on the very next page like, “I am a scatter of words. I am/a scramble. Moving my toes is supposed/to have meaning, but for me today, it is/nothing, because they only smile and say/in a manner of disbelief we see that you/are still here. All of the small things I do/on these days, they are strapped to me like/a bed.” (24) Yowzah.

If dreams and myth and memory come in waves in this narrative, then those physical details of the hospital are what float on the surface of Comatose, in the foreground of the action, but are only a fraction of the depth that the narrative contains. Comatose is the story of the brain’s busy whirring, populated with the footsteps of nurses and doctors or the IV drip but also with clawing bears and pine tree forests, windows, walls, and winding paths. It is completely inside and outside of the mind at once–a fever-dream that questions how one constructs reality.

We are not living. We are dwelling in
walls we built, a path worn by myths,
conversations going nowhere, lists of what
to do to keep us going. This cabin fraught
with ideas and no execution. This useless
room that takes my voice from out of my
mouth. (79)

What kept me reading Comatose was the imagery and the changing tone, yes, but was mostly that way in which I wanted to put together an idea of reality, to piece together which world (that of myth or dream, that of memory, that of overheard sensory detail or comatose stuck-ness) was real, which layer of the palimpsest was dominant, which layer of the ice cream cake was the chocolate crunch. And in the end? I’m still unsure. But that’s what I like the most about Tyler’s Comatose, is that it wears the reader down and it hurts, that the repeated images get mangled, any discernible timeline gets tangled, and that by the end you’re generally uncertain, maybe shaking, and left with the idea that you’re (everyone is) in the same existential boat as the narrator, trapped between worlds physical and mental, between now and then, between the concrete and the imagined, all of it somehow real and unreal at once.

Laura Brun is a poet who received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She just completed her first year in the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh and she likes the way pigeons kind of waddle.

Poetry, Really

In 1990 Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End became the first (and, thus far, only) collection of prose poems to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a decision that set off a firestorm of controversy amongst genre purists. Despite the widely acknowledged, non-lineated work of such lofty predecessors as Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Gertrude Stein, the taxonomic controversy over Simic’s work continued. Residual grumblings can still be heard today: “Is it really poetry?”

Suffice to say, if you enjoy nothing more than a nice long romp in formalism, this book is not for you. But if you are able to shelve your Pulitzer issues and genre boundaries, this book may prove a welcome, challenging surprise. Don’t be deceived by the slimness of the volume or the small, untitled rectangles of text suspended on each page. This is a book which, like the nature of prose poetry itself, thrives on contradictory elements. Despite the implied intimacy of the work’s size, The World Doesn’t End is significant in scope, spanning from the old world, populated by gypsies and dancing dogs, to a modern era of all-consuming objects, cluttered with TVs and blank canvases entitled “Blank.”

Amongst the most moving pieces is the book’s opening poem, which acts as a genesis story, fusing the dark aura of a war-torn childhood (“My mother was a braid of black smoke/she bore me swaddled over burning cities) with a perverted primordial skyscape (“the high heavens were full of little shrunken dead ears instead of stars”). Imbued with a proverbial biblical quality, this piece sets the stage for a series of familiar, yet hopelessly skewed events. Make way for surrealistic appearances by Jesus and the ever-weeping Mary Magdalene. Prepare for a woman applying blood as if it were lipstick, using a severed thumb. Watch a man descend a ladder while holding his own disembodied head.

As fantastical as this opening poem is, it’s difficult not to read it as Simic’s reflection on his own youth. He was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Serbia (then Yugoslavia), where he remained throughout childhood, enduring World War II. In 1954, he immigrated to Chicago, and later spent time in New York, instances which are also chronicled in the book. These autobiographical tidbits seem to crop up exactly when we are most desperate for a moment of clarity, serving as anchors to adjacent events which are far more fantastical (“Margaret was copying a recipe for ‘saints roasted with onions’”), muddied by myth (“…Hermes showed up. He was not much to look at”) and often puzzling (“The rat kept lovebirds”). The strategic placement of such bursts of realism manages to fill the entire book with the sense that this really happened. The result is a startling, unnerving effect which both consumes readers in an alternate reality and reminds them of their own gullibility.

Many of these elements feel like the stuff of prose fiction: a temporal trajectory from childhood to adulthood, the creation of another world, the entrance and exit of characters. So what makes it poetry?  Consider Simic’s own defense: ”What makes them poems is that they are self-contained, and once you read one you have to go back and start reading it again. That’s what a poem does.”* If one agrees with this definition, then one must agree that these are indeed poems. Their folkloric, riddling quality can be as frustrating as it is addicting, a characteristic found in such other Serbian poets as the phenomenal Vasko Popa (whom Simic has translated).

If you read The World Doesn’t End (which you should) and still feel inclined to argue about the nature of Simic’s poetry, just be aware that you are going up against someone who has won the Edgar Allen Poe Award, the P.E.N. Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Scholarship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Robert Frost Medal in addition to the Pulitzer. In summary: a literary giant. This is not to say that one man can decide what poetry is and is not. But I’d still be nervous to have him at my dinner table.

*From “The Smiles and Chills in the Poetry of Charles Simic”, NY Times, May 28, 1990

Beth Steidle is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, DIAGRAM, and several anthologies.

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Poetry in Prose

There’s no getting around the fact that Ben Lerner, author of the novel Leaving the Atocha Station, is primarily a poet, having published three collections before this foray into fiction. It’s not, in itself, a criticism. Beautifully written and keenly observed, the novel is more than passable as a sustained piece of fiction, coherent and effective at characterization, and with a number of compelling scenes.  But in his narrator’s concern with issues of translation, his asides on the function of poetry and the aesthetics of verse quoted in prose, and his pointed choice of words and phrases like “insufflation,” “hemic,” “the law of excluded middle,” to carry his meaning, Lerner imports the economy of language and density of thought more commonly associated with poetry.

Leaving the Atocha Station documents the stay in Madrid of Adam Gordon, a young poet on a fellowship in early 2004, tracing his development as a poet over that period. Gordon’s project, as described to the fellowship committee, is to produce a long, research-driven poem on the lingering effects of the Spanish Civil War on present-day Spaniards. The actual project Gordon has undertaken is more nebulous—a mystery even to himself—and not explicitly concerned with poetry. He avoids the other fellows and foundation staff and spends most days alone, reading Tolstoy and visiting a local art museum. Eventually he makes friends with locals, and is drawn into Madrid’s arts culture.

The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment . . . then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When the coffee was ready I would open the skylight . . . and drink my espresso and smoke on the roof overlooking the plaza where tourists congregated with their guidebooks on the metal tables and the accordion player plied his trade. In the distance: the palace and long lines of cloud.

This early passage encapsulates Gordon’s approach to his time in Spain as well as Lerner’s direct, borderline laconic, prose style. Gordon is forever modulating his state via spliffs, tranquilizers, alcohol, and “white pills” (probably antidepressants) that he self-administers in varying doses according to whim. Lerner documents moments like these in a straightforward, clipped style, alternating them with the rambling yet incisive intellectual meditations of Gordon’s internal monologue.

Lerner’s evocation of place is one of the novel’s great strengths. His use of Madrid as a backdrop is nearly as inspired as his choice to place Gordon there in 2004. Asked by his girlfriend, Isabel, why he is studying Spain and Franco now, instead of America under George W. Bush, Gordon can only make pretentious replies even he finds unsatisfying: “‘The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,’ I said, meaninglessly.”  When Isabel further challenges him, he greets her anger, “with silence, so as to allow her to imagine an array of responses I was in fact incapable of producing,” in his rudimentary Spanish. His clumsiness with the Spanish language parallels the inherent difficulty of his relations with other people—Isabel doesn’t remain his girlfriend for long—which in turn evokes the myriad difficulties Gordon has with poetry.  Even when he stumbles into a historic moment for Spain, it serves to rouse him only briefly: as all of Madrid masses for street demonstrations, Gordon pursues Teresa, a translator whose polite disinterest in Gordon as anything more than a fellow poet and friend is maddeningly clear.

Gordon is daft, arrogant, and petulant, while also being thrillingly sharp in his internal monologue. Lerner integrates a number of engrossing mini-treatises into the text in the guise of Gordon’s stream of consciousness. Reading the work of John Ashbery on a long train ride, Gordon notes that although Ashbery’s poetry uses “language that implied narrative development—‘then,’ ‘next,’ ‘later’—such  terms were merely propulsive.”  It’s a credit to Lerner’s facility sustaining the world of Gordon’s heightened, drug-addled intellect that such an observation feels not only unforced but fresh and engaging.

That observation also suggests a way of reading Leaving the Atocha Station. Time passes, and occasionally one of Gordon’s actions leads to something, but mostly the framework suggesting narrative development is, indeed, “merely propulsive.”  The novel is full of fascinating ideas, often displaying beautifully repeating patterns and surprising connections, but it falls short when it comes to plot. Lerner derives some narrative excitement from the historic moment mentioned above, and a bit more from Gordon’s pursuit of Teresa, and a tiny bit from his dilemma over whether to remain in Spain at the end of his fellowship. But by and large the novel’s events, such as they are, feel desultory, a string of occasions about which Gordon can pontificate. Combined with Lerner’s somewhat cool tone, the result is often a sluggish read.

But it seems fair to conclude that crafting a white-knuckle thrill ride was not Ben Lerner’s intent in taking on the novel.  As much as the novel is about anything, it is about Gordon fighting his way to an uneasy peace with poetry.  Where he begins the novel somewhat cynically, assembling meaningless poems by taking random phrases and then translating and mistranslating them, by novel’s end Gordon has reached a place of greater comfort in his relationship to poetry.  He arrives there by way of an almost-mystical process of gaining experience and confidence. It’s the same slow artistic growth encountered by any artist, and here it is rendered carefully, in invisible increments, by Lerner.  Poets, poetry readers, and especially fans of Lerner’s work will likely be excited, and rightfully so, to explore the author’s fascinating meditations in this new and fertile form.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

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On the Rollercoaster

Open any of Bob Hicok’s collections, and I suspect you’ll be dazzled by poems plumbing the depths of the self as they skim the fascinating, frustrating surface of contemporary American life. Using a neo-surrealist net to capture heart, humor, and the sublime in one cast, Hicok’s best poems do not merely entertain—they teach my mind to function in patterns I can only call Hicok-esque for at least an hour or so after I’ve put them down. In an intimate, chatty tone, I find myself prone to narrating my thoughts to myself, often surprised by whip-smart connections between the observed world and my mind’s internal workings that I suspect Hicok’s poems have trained me to make. Pun, sarcasm, retort, leaps of logic that at times assume mystical proportions meet the absurdities of a morning’s passage through a subway station or a trip to the market. As the effect fades, I know I’ve experienced the full power of what Elizabeth Bishop termed the “mind in motion.” I know it’s what I expect out of poetry.

Winner of the 2008 Bobbitt Prize, This Clumsy Living (2007) stands out among Hicok’s books. Balancing craft at the level of both the individual poem and the book is a hard-won achievement for any poet, but it is particularly gratifying to see a poet of prodigious strength one-up himself. Where Hicok’s earlier books were less adept at organizing his bountiful energies into a coherent emotional arc, This Clumsy Living succeeds beautifully—perhaps, in part, by beginning with an admission of clumsiness.

A quick read down the Table of Contents shows the oscillation of Hicok’s energies: “The busy days of my nights” abuts “A poem with a poem in its belly” and “Waiting for my foot to ring” with “War story,” all in the mysteriously-titled first section “Twenty-three windows.” Real-world narrative flashes chronicle the speaker’s wrestling with political and social events in everyday life, a drive that springs from the Whitmanian well of “full report,” even as the speaker soothes himself by engineering temporary escape via surreal leaps in time and space that always manage to lead him back to the indelible fact of “this clumsy living.” “If we could solve that equation, we’d be happy,” Hicok poignantly suggests.

Yet, what are the chances of solving such an equation, Hicok’s book seems to ask. In “The New Math,” math is a rhetorical structure Hicok recognizes not only as “strange,” but imperfect. We cannot rest easy with a single solution any more than we can disown our drive to try to reduce our problems. Poetry’s algebra may be a fraught construct, the poem whispers to us, but its process just may deliver a bit of happiness along the tortuous path.

Hicok would probably be the last to say we shouldn’t have fun with either the world, our psychological attempts to diminish loss, or poetry. This Clumsy Living keeps an emotional balance by swinging between extremes of existential terror and a lively absurdist humor. “Her my body,” about the inability of poetic thought to soothe a speaker imagining cancer striking his beloved (“If you are comforted / by this thought you are welcome / to keep it”), is followed by the zany, zippy “The busy days of my nights,” where our speaker meditates on zombie films (“writers struggling with the inbred / mutant Appalachian cannibal dialogue”), and the aforementioned Elizabeth Bishop (“remembered the ladybug / walking across ‘At the Fishhouses’ open on my desk”).

The shifts in tone that occur from poem to poem are well-matched in a greater variety of forms than appear in previous books. Hicok experiments with the lengthy stanza shape typical of his earlier work, a narrative flow eschewing visual pacing (stanza breaks, etc.) in favor of compact density. While individually such an effect is excellent, in a book full of such poems I find myself experiencing the pleasant exhaustion that comes from preparing for the same rollercoaster ride over and over again. Not, per Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that—Hicok’s earlier work conveyed a sense and vision of his American moment, most notably in terms of the dissolution of the working class in his home state of Michigan and American foreign policy. (May we hope for Hicok’s response to the labor protests earlier this year?)

Hicok also avoids the over-writing afflicting his earlier books, whether as a result of an inability to kill his proverbial darlings or an understandable desire to perform for his usually-rapt audience. Most markedly, the word “which” appears much less frequently. (I say this as one also afflicted by the curse my seventh grade English teacher referred to as “whichery and thattery.”) Ultimately, how could I not be filled with admiration for a poet who manages to write a lovely lyric stanza about shit-eating dogs, thanking deer for their scat at the same time as he is able to turn a discussion of his mother’s morbid obesity into a loving paean to mothering in “Documenting a Decision”?

A fat body resembles a pregnant body, resembles hope, start. ( . . . ) This is more the way of the mother than the father. ( . . . ) This is my prayer: Lord, make me round.

Reading poetry is not only about the pleasure we take in the artifact of a finished poem—it is also about the journey of the poet. This Clumsy Living witnesses a gifted poet taking a leap. Hicok’s neo-surrealist impulse pushes his earnest lyric narrative mode just off-balance, keeping conversational tones from feeling either tired or disingenuous. The poems’ speaker is aware he navigates an imperfect world with imperfect tools, but also sees no other way to go about it—the very essence, perhaps, of Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” If reading This Clumsy Living feels at times like being on a rollercoaster—emotionally and visually, tonally and metaphorically—through Hicok’s mental countryside, we do well to remember he warned us, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

Mandy Malloy is a writer and graphic designer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program and a 2011 Norman Mailer Colony Fellow, her poems have appeared most recently in The Portland Review.

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