BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

THE OUTER GATE: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF
NORA MAY FRENCH (SAN FRANCISCO)

The Outer Gate: The Collected Poems of Nora May French by Nora May French, edited by Donald Sidney-Fryer and Alan Gullette. (Hippocampus Press, New York: 2009), 254 pages, 88 poems, 15 notices and reviews, 18 tribute poems by various writers, “Nora May French: One Still, Small Voice out of Time and Space” a historical essay by Donald Sidney-Fryer; “Helen (Augusta) French Hunt (1883-1973):  A little memoir (a friendship, 1968-1973)” by Donald Sidney-Fryer. $15.00, www.hippocampuspress.com. Book cover design is by Barbara Briggs Silbert using photograph taken by Arnold Genthe.
 

It is with passionate delight that I discuss this important volume. Like Donald Sidney-Fryer, I, too, was privileged to know Helen French Hunt in her final years, 1968-1973 when she visited San Francisco frequently and to understand Helen’s lifelong dismay that her poet sister, Nora May French, embraced suicide in 1907 at the age of 26. Her beloved sister was gone and the promise of a superb mature poet had vanished.
 
In 1926 George Sterling, the unofficial poet laureate of the West Coast, looked back to that exciting earlier time with this tribute to the poet:

And first in memory of those days that already begin to take on the royal purple of distance comes the magical one of the beautiful Nora May French. She was born in western New York, but came to Los Angeles when still a child. Not long after our great fire she came to San Francisco, and was the most charming personage of the group of Bohemians that foregathered at Coppa’s restaurant, then in San Francisco’s most romantic building, the Montgomery Block. She died in the following year (November 13, 1907), leaving behind her poems of singularly limpid beauty (published later by her fiancé, Henry Anderson Lafler). She had been influenced mainly by Tennyson and Housman: hence the blending in her poetry of a fine simplicity, sincere emotion, and crystalline workmanship.

 And first in memory of those days that already begin to take on the royal purple of distance comes the magical one of the beautiful Nora May French. She was born in western New York, but came to Los Angeles when still a child. Not long after our great fire she came to San Francisco, and was the most charming personage of the group of Bohemians that foregathered at Coppa’s restaurant, then in San Francisco’s most romantic building, the Montgomery Block. She died in the following year (November 13, 1907), leaving behind her poems of singularly limpid beauty (published later by her fiancé, Henry Anderson Lafler). She had been influenced mainly by Tennyson and Housman: hence the blending in her poetry of a fine simplicity, sincere emotion, and crystalline workmanship.

Donald Sidney-Fryer’s extensive essay “Nora May French: One Still, Small Voice Out of Time and Space” from which the above tribute is taken offers an amazingly perceptive compilation of the diverse forces that forged Nora May French as a poet and a personality. In my experience poetic intensity is a rare, wonderful, and extraordinarily difficult gift for an individual to graciously accept. Nora May French seemed far too big for life: passionate in her love affairs, passionate in her love of Nature.
 
Sidney-Fryer quotes from Inventing the Dream by Kevin Starr who sketches Nora May French as honestly as can be:

A spirited horsewoman and lover of the sea, Nora May French wrote poems bristling with realized Southern California imagery—the sundown Pacific, the Arroyo itself, a mission garden, sage brush,  desert flowers—all of it put in service to a pervasive plaintiveness, a sadness she felt at the heart of things, as if she foresaw her own fate….In any event, she of the curly hair and the soft eyes was dead from cyanide of potassium in the early hours of 14 November 1907 on George  Sterling’s porch in Carmel: done in by her vulnerability to Eros (a succession of affairs, a number of abortions), sick with confusion over having loved unwisely and not well. At the funeral services on Point Lobos a quarrel broke out among a number of men as to who would have the right to cast her ashes into the sea.
 

Readers today are ill-equipped to deal with rhyme in verse so I suggest you read aloud the brief portions of poetry I will share with you: I promise you will cherish the experience.
 
Three vibrant strains that infuse Nora May French’s humble opus of less than 100 poems, are the melan-choly of romantic love, the toss between nature and civilization, and a fascination with mortality.
 
The melancholy of romantic love finds a resplendent presentation in “Between Two Rains” here quoted in its plein-air entirety:
 
It is a silver space between two rains,
          The lulling storm has given to the day
          An hour of windless air and riven grey;
The world is drained of color; light remains.
Beyond the curving shore a gull complains;
          Unceasing, on the bastions of the bay,
          With gleam of shields and veer of vaporing spray
The long seas fall, the grey tide wars and wanes.
 
It is a silver space between two rains:
          A mood too sweet for tears, for joy too pale—
          What stress has swept or nears us, thou and I?
This hour a mist of light is on the plains,
          And seaward fares again with litten sail
          Our laden ship of dreams adown the sky.
 
This poem lives and breathes within its own image.  The rhyme scheme the poet chooses is a masterpiece of inversion and reflection: abbccbba abcabc.
 
“When Plaintively and Near the Cricket Sings” brings a piercing chill of a lover’s sorrow and loss in this second and final stanza:
 
The sighing garden calls me from the door;
          Above the hills a little crescent swings—
Above the path where you will come no more
          When beetles hurry by on vibrant wings
          And plaintively and near the cricket sings.
 
The toss between nature and civilization was felt strongly by Nora May French who throughout her brief life spent as much time in Nature as she could: on horseback or hiking with her sister, Helen French Hunt. Here in “Down the Trail” the reader faces the fearsome contrast between Nature and the compacted world of the multitudes. Don’t miss the exquisite image of a quail family in stanza two.

Break camp, the dawn is here!
A sea has swept beneath us in the night—
Poured outward in a wrinkled floor of white,
And left our eyrie clear.
There in the deeps the little trail is curled—
We plunge like divers to the under-world.
 
The Manzanita stirs!
Look, in that little thicket just ahead!
Down, down, the covey whirrs,
Mocking us, careful, led,
Slow-slipping beads along a slender thread.
 
Here the stream flows;
Here we tread yellow leaves.
(Sun in the sycamores,
Sun on the granite walls.)
All is so still,
Never wind blows,
Only the singing stream
Shouts little waterfalls.
 
We round the mighty shoulder of a hill—
Oh, sweet airs damp with ferns!
The day is old, the lengthening shadows chill—
The wanderer returns.
 
Traffic, and wakeful eyes of little lights;
The black crowd passing near; and far way
A fading rose of sunset hanging low
Above the roofs of indigo and grey.
 
“Along the Track” is perhaps the most poignant statement in the poet’s work: Nature and Civilization have forged an extremely uneasy, often brutal truce.
 
The track has led me out beyond the town
          To follow day across the waning fields,
The crisping weeds and wastes of tender brown.
 
On either side the feathered tops are high,
          A tracery of broken arabesques
Upon the sullen crimson of the sky.
 
Into the west the narrowing rails are sped,
          They cut the crayon softness of the dusk
With thin converging gleams of bloody red.
 
A fascination with mortality is a frequent theme throughout the poet’s expression: a dark strain, but also a fiercely honest contemplation of life’s opposite, patient death. The collection begins with “The Outer Gate” balancing existence and non-existence:
 
Life said: “My house is thine with all its store;
          Behold, I open shining ways to thee—
          Of every inner portal make thee free:
O child, I may not bar the outer door.
Go from me if thou wilt, to come on more;
          But all thy pain is mine, the flesh or me;
          And must I hear thee, faint and woefully,
Call on me from the darkness and implore?”
 

Nay, mother, for I follow at thy will.
          But oftentimes thy voice is sharp to hear,
          Thy trailing fragrance heavy on the breath;
Always the outer hall is very still,
      And on my face a pleasant wind and clear
           Blows straitly from the narrow gate of Death.
 
“The Mission Graves” quietly reveals the poet’s in-trinsic understanding of the Cosmos Absolute. The wooden slabs with names are long gone, but the Padre sets out candles with a prayer on Saint’s Day. The poem concludes:

Whose  nameless dust did each faint glimmer mark—
Skull, crumbling bone?
 
Ah, the Dead knew!
The grateful Dead, far-called from voids of space,
Each by the tiny spark that gave him grace,
Watched, the night through.
 
The Nora May French consummate gallery of thought-portraits resolves “At the End” with this absolute picture:

Trembling and spent I ran and fell,
And ran again, a sorrow made me fleet.
For very fear its shape I could not tell—
          The briars tore my feet.
 
In broken flight across the cruel land,
So weary was I that I only smiled
When, swift and strong, a tender, mighty hand
          Upraised me like a child.
 
“It was not you I feared,” rejoiced, I cried,
(His touch had healed my hurts, no more they bled,)
“Life radiant, God has sent you to my side!”
    “Nay, I am Death!” he said.
 
With truly Herculean effort Donald Sidney-Fryer and Alan Gullette have assembled an astounding compilation of diverse materials: a true poetic history, a true poetic realization. The eighteen noble tributes by concerned poets serve as a unique gathering of understanding and luminescence. The Outer Gate: The Collected Poems of Nora May French is of intense interest and value to any passionate poet.   
                                                                                                                --Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra

From the back cover of The Outer Gate: “Nora May French published no books in her lifetime, but her Poems were assembled in 1910 by George Sterling and others. That volume, however, was incomplete, and many fugitive poems have been added by Donald Sidney-Fryer and Alan Gullette, two of the leading authorities on California poetry and the poetry of fantasy and terror.”

VOYAGES TO ANCESTRAL ISLANDS
DAVE HOLT (CONCORD)
 
Voyages to Ancestral Islands by Dave Holt. (Bohemian High-way Music & Books: 2009), 100 pages, 43 poems, $11.95, www.chappellroseholt.com.
 
In ancestral days the Ojibway could travel only by birch-bark canoe: there were few connecting roads. Voyages the reader takes to ancestral islands are difficult and demanding journeys: they are written, often with pain, in the bones of the poet, Dave Holt. The rich and complex format of the book is a collage. We’ll look at four components of this exciting collage.
 
First, the reader finds a series of enlightened fictional interludes throughout the book that deal with the poet’s creative evolution. The poet quotes Robertson Davies to explain the process: “To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobio-graphical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread.” The first five interludes concern a childhood pal, Dougie Hetherington, who urged the young 12-year-old poet to tell him stories and listened eagerly. The most important part of the poet’s life is the listener. Someone who does not share his creation is not an artist.
 
Later interludes deal with moments in the poet’s adult life that bring resolution and understanding. “Made up Stories that Make Sense” reveals the poet visiting the town where he and Dougie grew up: the poet as an adult wants to talk with his friend.
 
I want to tell him we didn’t know what was really going on. Would he agree? That is why we had to create the stories. To capture the vanishing truth, so elusive, right at our fingertips, but somehow out of reach. We studied body language to discern the real knowledge layered and knotted into the very tissues. . . . Something emerged out of shadows and subterfuge, and the show of gracious amiability, the false layer of civilization.

Second, and perhaps the most important element in the collage, are poems that explore the poet’s conflicted identity. Alas, if there are no problems, no poet or artist!  To the emerging crisis of every artistic identity is added--in Dale Holt’s case--an ancestry that is Irish, English, and Ojibway/Chippewa. On one level such a  poet must spend his life floating between two cultures. “Christmas Orange” forces a little boy to realize he must be somehow different from those around him when his gift exchange orange is rejected by another child. The poet is speaking to Christ on his birthday. Here from the middle of the poem:
 
Our boots crunched bone-cold snow to the car.
I gulped wind, frost-nipped, in needle-sharp blasts.
While my father drove us home, I peeled the fruit,
and quietly ate each orange section.
 
Crescent moons traveled a deep sky inside,
each mandarin moonset glowing as it descended.
I couldn’t name what burned, what buried,
until years later, when I called on you, Master.
 
You returned to me with the gift I rejected,
still holding out the unconditional offer of your love. . .
 
The fear and the pain continue to thrive. Here are the first two stanzas of “nightmare” recording the cries of a life in peril:

thrown overboard in a storm
on the lake   returns
to haunt my dreaming sleep
 
my grownup self underwent analysis
I was tempted
to come up with glib judgments
something to satisfy the doctor
“haunted by a fear of abandonment”
said uncertainly   knowing other gulfs
struggles to cross unruly chaos
a Greek world   Charybdis and Scylla
whirlpool  clashing rocks
I swim to safe islands in the rain
 
The two final stanzas complete the archetypal trial of fire and water:

I imagined leaves to incinerate
edges curling  blackening
becoming smoke
that rose into the clouds
 
I was afraid
I had to remove myself
I was a flying spark

The facing poem, “BUDDHA DWELT,” is an understated and unflinching reflection of “nightmare” and an astonishing revelation:

Buddha dwelt
in the blazing heart
of God
and was not incinerated.
 
I, so concentrated
on my own pain,
my soul
got burned to a cinder.
 
“Taking Down a Wall, Building a Bridge” attempts to resolve the eternal conflict between father and son at the scene of the father’s final hospitalization. In his thoughts the son speaks to the father:
 
“Won’t get to heaven,” you always told us --
Happy Hunting Grounds, that’s where you’re going.
 
I’m really not sure of my prayers,
longings to believe --
how can I be?
You and I face emptiness
and platitudes together
from opposite sides of a wall,
my religious beliefs, part of the wall
I built to oppose you.
 
Discovering
it’s impossible
to oppose you.
 
I must have grounds for faith
under my feet, not faith
as winged flight,
rebellion against gravity.
 
The third category of poems dazzle with their simplicity. As many poets before, this poet finds antidotes to the poison of a conflicted life in the calm wholeness of identification with Nature. “Living on the Spiritual Plain” urges the reader to follow Nature’s dynamic patterns in the first stanza:
 
Be like the fish that throws itself upstream,
Like trout seek their source against a current.
Be like the salmon climbing up a rock ladder,
So too does Spirit fight for you from within.
 
If one is part of Nature, one must be part of Creation and the Creator. So concludes “Even Reeds Will Sing” with understanding and respect for oneself.

I am just a reed,
nothing to you.
Not even one transformed
by human hands
into a flute, making music.
But when a marine wind
sweeps across the frost-bitten hill,
blowing between the long stems,
even reeds will sing.
 
It is then we praise
Creator and creation.
We seem of small consequence,
yet we have life.
It is precious.
We give praise.
 
Fourth, and most archeological of the poet’s self scrutiny, is the “Poem for My Grandmothers” series where the reader is treated to an elegant patchwork quilt of details about the ancestors lives and origins. As the poet, the grandmothers had little choice but to shift back and forth from one culture to another. In “Poem for my Grandmothers: Corbiere, Debassige, and Hare--(Part I) Cassie Hare” several contradictions carry on into the poet’s life. Here are stanzas 1, 3 and 6:
 
Grandma Hare, I discovered the first big lie in our family,
your untold story, like a brick at my door.
You followed repudiation of the past with flight
From West Bay, Ojibway, First Nation blues.
 
Before long, married to a Scotch-Irish son
of a father who owned a big, red brick house, you defied
village women and bobbed your hair (none of them dared).
You were seen going to Methodist Church in a motorcar.
 
In her garden, densely hedged with trees, Grandma Hare
chatters and giggles with the youngsters who play
while she weeds her tomatoes. Our game is being Indians,
camped out in “wigwams” made of tree branches.
 
In the last segment “(Part IV) The Grandson of the Debassiges,” the poet defines his own unresolved position, “Nor do I find the Spirit Ally I seek.  Perhaps too late for that.”
 
Voyages to Ancestral Lands is an extremely complex and profound assemblage: pristine elements of the poet’s identity. For best results the reader should consider the book as a symbolic autobiography and read it: beginning to end. The inner strength that allows Dave Holt to create, to share, and to carry on is quite astounding.               

                                                              --Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra

THE SISTER FROM BELOW:

WHEN THE MUSE GETS HER WAY
NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY (PLEASANT HILL)

The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky. (Fisher King Press, Carmel, CA: 2009), 211 pages, 23 poems set in an autobiographical self-portrait and cosmic-portrait, $25, info@fisherkingpress.com.

This is truly a most personal and most valuable book. What courage it took to write it and bring it out calmly into the daylight! If you are not a person nurtured by self-honesty and self-exploration, this is not a book for you.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky makes the understatement of the ages when she gives the reader this lucid paragraph:

I write of nine manifestations in which the muse has visited me, stirred up creative ferment, found me my voice as a poet, filled me with stories of ghosts, mysteries, erotic teachings, the old religion. In my experience the muse can be an inner figure, a fleeting memory from early childhood, an ancestor, a figure from myth or from a dream, an image of a culture, a dead poet, or a ghost from one’s personal past.

Any poet knows, at the best moments, the Muse takes over and the creation of a poem is almost like automatic writing. The poet rushes to get the words down and is then amazed by the result. Lowinsky has lived a complex and richly rewarding life and yet is centered enough to realize she is most complete when she lets the Muse take over in her poetry and in her work as a Jungian Analyst. “[The Muse] wanted time for Her own poetry. But I didn’t have that kind of time: when I put time in Her hands She takes forever, dreaming, dawdling, working hours on a single line.” How we all know that situation! Lowinsky’s Muse continued to push, push, push until “I struck a deal with Her. I made a time and place to listen to her everyday. And every week I gave Her a full day or two for poetry.”

This is an essential feminist book, but more important it is a book for every creative person who struggles to find time for play dates with the Muse in a daily jammed and conflicted life. The poem, “Hera Reflects on the Anniversary of a Long Ago Dissolved First Marriage,” chronicles Lowinsky’s early demand for her self-existence. Here are three stanzas from the middle:

Zeus came
on the groom’s side
he sees it as his job
to kiss the bride
and organize her mind
into a small
neat package

lavender sachet
to fit inside a drawer
on the right side
of her husband’s
busy brain

I won’t allow it
I took the form of
snakes
I mixed the blood
And the milk
I waited for you
in the apple tree--

If an individual has the courage to listen, the Muse has so much to say, so much to offer. If this reviewer likes, in this case loves a book, he wants to quote it in its entirety. That not being possible . . . here is the Muse:

You had not yet learned to sort out the voices within you. You did not know how to distinguish the voice of the poem, my voice, from the critic who says “this is no good, this is going nowhere” or from the voice that says “make a name for yourself” or “where are you going to publish this?” You confused external acclaim with my blessing. You couldn’t tolerate rejections. You were a frenzy of unfulfilled emotional needs which you poured into me. I can’t give you human love or recognition. You needed to go out and find those in other realms. And you needed to learn that destruction and chaos are natural phenomena, not just the product of human evil.

This book is filled with insight from both the author and the ubiquitous Muse. This comment from the author about poetry today is of utmost value to all of us:

In a culture that seems fixated on money and celebrity there is a lively other realm in which thousands of poets compete fiercely for publication in small literary magazines for no money and little glory. Why do they do this? Because it is the work of their souls.

Throughout The Sister from Below transitions between the poet’s inner and outer world move so skillfully they take the reader’s breath away. Lowinsky has not spent much of her life in Jungian Understanding for nothing. Consequently,  this book is really an Encyclopedia of Core Discernment. The book is really thousands of pages long and perhaps even infinite.

It would be inappropriate to review this book as a mere text so as you have guessed, I am presenting some of my reflections on it. I choose to focus on the chapter “Old Mother India” because it is an area close to my inner world and because it is the locale where the Muse began to assert herself in Lowinsky’s life. The poet then thought she would become a novelist and only through Destiny’s clairvoyance did she find herself in India as the young wife of a doctor in the Peace Corps. The poet stepped into an open world where the splits that undermined and still undermine Western thought did not exist. “In Hinduism, I learned there is no beginning and no end.” Most crucial, “the split between monotheism and polytheism does not exist in Hinduism. There are many gods in human forms, in animal forms, we see them wherever we look . . . .” Yet, “these gods are the manifestation of the one god, Brahman, who has no particular shape but is manifest in everything that is.” The poet Rabindranath Tagore rejoiced in this realization:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhymic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy thorugh the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flower.

In a dream, the Muse speaks to the poet when she returns to India years later with her grown daughter, Shanti, whom the poet had adopted during her first time in India:

In the West you think the unconscious is inside you. In the East we know it is all around us. We are in it. The divine is everywhere. That is what wrapped you up and carried you along in India. This is what came to you in the poem you wrote before you returned to India. The elephant appeared in the poem. The elephant appeared again in front of your hotel in Bangkok, on the way to India. There was a shrine, crowded with all sorts of little elephants, brass, wood, incense, flowers. Shanti complained she had nothing to wear to enter India. You bought her a sarong, with elephants marching all around it.

The poem “elephant blessing” originally from Lowinsky’s Red Clay is Talking is radiant with power. It begins:

And the elephant looked at the small human face
and saw where the feared lived
hanging from the rafters of that high pitched
                    human mind
it worried and wailed
about death
and not enough
money
love
work
fame
time
dreams

a hindu will tell you
an elephant’s heart is bigger
than a human brain
that the touch of an elephant
is as close as we get
to a god

and the elephant put her sensitive trunk
down firmly
where the soft spot had long ago
been open
to the gods . . . .

The power of this book glows in the fact that the text is both intensely personal and directly connected to the Universe as a Sacred Whole. A chapter called “The Book of Ruth: Naomi’s Version” contrasts her Muse Ur Naomi, a feminine Identity of the Centuries, with the articulate poet of the 21st century. Ur Naomi reminds her that “You’re no scholar of any sort!” and assures her “Your job is a poet’s job.” Throughout this odyssey the Muse, in whatever form, defines and humbles the poet into action.

The final chapter “Beloved of the Beloved” listens to the Male Muse who can be both helpful and severely restricting. The father tucks the child into bed, then carefully places the child’s hands outside the covers. The father means well, but “the message is clear: thou shalt not play with thyself!” It took years to under-stand, in a bodily sense, that there is no creativity that is not playing with oneself.”

The poet’s friend John died very young; he appears as a Potent Muse and speaks to Naomi.

“You don’t want to commit the sin of seeing all men as alike, as many men have done to women all these years. Surely you can discriminate between the voice that interferes with your creative flow, and the voice that encourages it.”

After a multitude of journeys the poet concludes, or rather opens her experience, to this rich understanding:

So John, I have mad a journey back to the time before the sky father took over. Guided by you, the shaman of the stones and my own Dan, I have met men in the outer world, . . . who have helped me experience a female sense of self, and the power of the erotic imagination to bring male and female, father sun and mother earth together.

This reflection in The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way only hints at the insight and delight that reading this book will bring to an evolving individual: female or male. The fortunate reader becomes part of a successful attempt to pay respect to the many manifestations of the Muse. Just reading this book melts away a false self and clears the spirit.                                                                                                                             --Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra

THE ANCIENT BOOK OF HIP

D.W. LICHTENBERG
(SAN FRANCISCO)

The Ancient Book of Hip by D.W. Lichtenberg (Fourteen Hills Press, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA: 2009), 96 pages, 41 poems, $12, www.14hill.net; cover art by David Gerbstadt, book layout by Julia Zangwill.

D.W. Lichtenberg’s fresh body of poems was selected by the Ploughshares poetry editor, John Skoyles, as winner of San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing Department’s 2009 Michael Rubin Chapbook Award.

Lichtenberg reports that he grew up “on the Main Line of Philadelphia & went to school at NYU in New York City. “He also says he hopes to meet J.D. Salinger one day, now only a goal for the dream-life since Salinger‘s recent departure from this earthly plane. But this particular ambition--to meet the iconic author of Catcher in the Rye--is perfectly understandable in light of Lichtenberg’s work in The Ancient Book of Hip; to some extent, Lichtenberg‘s persona is a righteous inheritor to Holden Caulfield.

Witty, yearning, self-deprecating, observant, sometimes breathless, sometimes pensive, The Ancient Book of Hip is surprisingly guileless in spite of my associations with the word “Hip“: poseur, cool, ‘in-the-know,’ and standing at a judgmental, contemptuous odd angle to socially sanctioned roles and ‘normal’ behaviors. Lichtenberg’s voice is not so much that of the critical cultural outsider as that of someone looking to sincerely connect and build rapport with authentic others (oh, where oh, where, might they be?). The tone does have its provocative edge but it is  more approachable than classically “hip.“ Such discrepancy and ambiguousness seed the momentum and interest of the book.

The poems are set in the narrator’s ethnographic context:

At the turn of the 21st century, hordes of people migrated into urban centers, most notably New York City & other American cities in the Northeast and Northwest. For the first time in modern recorded history, more people lived in urban places than suburban or rural ones. Many of these pioneers were young twenty-somethings supported financially by their parents. At the time, I was living in New York City, in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. I took an interest in observing this phenomenon, which I will refer to as the phenomenon of hip.

The certainty of the outside observer, the roving anthro-pologist is about as far from the tone of the rest of the book as one could get as we descend into doubt, self-questioning, self-deprecating humor, and exchanges with others that cast the narrator (and us) into confusion about how he/we stand socially speaking. The joke is on those who think they know how they stand, who believe they are masters in any social intercourse, ‘in-the-know’ and hip, when often these very individuals are often themselves coming from carefully constructed masks designed to ward off sincere interaction. Our narrator quickly abandons any mask of confidence--occasionally to his detriment as he lays bare both innocence and vulnerability:

The man on the subway sits across from me
and tears a scratch & win in half.
Then to pieces. Then the pieces to pieces.

He didn’t win, I say to myself.
You didn’t win, I say to him.
Don’t laugh at something
that’s not funny, he says to me.
He doesn’t look up.

He tears the pieces of pieces to pieces.
    (from “Scratch & Win”)

That line, “don’t laugh at something that’s not funny,” appears in a later poem; it’s a refrain that Lichtenberg/The Narrator can’t take completely seriously, because these encounters, quasi-threatening as they are, are funny. And, humor is a defense mechanism and measure of our discomfort in certain social situations. (The scientists think that monkeys smile when they are trying to win favor and avoid conflict.)

Many poems in The Ancient Book of Hip are about friendship and love affairs, but just as many are about close encounters with strangers, almost in a Jim Jarmusch-y “Night on Earth” way, where one random interaction can take on life-changing resonance. These often occur when one is traveling, or after moving to a new town or new part of town, and many of these poems are set in situations of dislocation or during transit/ transition.

Although the pace and rhythm of Lichtenberg’s writing has an untempered stream-of- consciousness quality, there’s actually more construction going on; it is clear the author is capable of working in form as well as in free form repetition and negation. In “Just Another Sequel to the Bible,” repeated lines weave down the page offering a strange anchor of sound in an otherwise elusive world:

You’ve been waiting all this time
to be something you can’t define
Surround yourself with people
Reaffirm your rich white kid complex

To be something you can’t define
Don’t fall in love with the autograph
Reaffirm your rich white kid complex
Don’t be a slave to three acts

Don’t fall in love with the autograph
I know you think you’re better than me
Don’t be a slave to three acts
Think about that, man

Lichtenberg alerts us to a kind of psychic disintegration, or to spin it more positively, a continuous reassembling of disparate parts as identity gets shaped and reshaped. Holden Caulfield’s struggle to pin something down, to get a fix on what people are all about as well as himself, is doomed because Self is not a butterfly on a science project display board. Lichtenberg gets this in spades--and gets the danger of it as we participate in self-invention--then delivers it to us with playful and quick non sequiturs and ba-da-bo--ba-da-bing rhythms:

Right field he thought
was the bottom of the barrel.
He knew he was good.
He knew he ought to be center field.
He knew it as he prowled the field
in search of a hawk. A hawk
in search of a field mouse.
A hawk and a field mouse
and a wide gap between right and center field.
And a leopard. A leopard
and just as the hawk swooped down
the leopard pounced.
    (from “Right Field in the Little League All Star Game”)

With an inventive bag of tricks, Lichtenberg has created a good first book of poems in The Ancient Book of Hip;  it will be fun to see what he gets up to next.

TRANSLATIONS FROM SILENCE
CLIFTON ROSS (RICHMOND)

Translations from Silence: New and Selected Poems by Clifton Ross, introduc-tion by Jack Hirschman. (Freedom Voices, San Francisco: 2009), 100 pages, 70 poems, $15.95; book design by B. Jesse Clarke, cover illustration by Diego Marcial Rios, www.freedomvoices.org.

Richmond poet Clifton Ross, who teaches creative writing at Berkeley City College, placed the poems in his new book, Translations from Silence, in reverse chronology, the better to present what he considers his stronger and more recently written pieces first, and earlier poems in the latter half where they can be contextualized as the work of a younger man. The wisdom of this choice shines in the first poem, “The Proud Sinner’s Prayer” :

O God forgive me for having loved you more
than life itself and correct me in my ways;
make my way crooked
so I might delight in the curves of the road.
Give me more tasks and less success
that I may always be occupied with work
but never with fame.

These are words gained through the experience of recog-nizing that self-righteousness and ambition-- whether bent on religious ideology or ideological materialism--are just as much a false path as any of the traditional Seven Deadly Sins. But the arrangement of the poems also lowers one’s expectations toward the latter pieces; instead of encountering weaker poems, I was pleasantly surprised and deeply moved by many of these ‘younger man’s poems.

In so many words, Ross tells us he is one who has struggled with his faith. . . a revelation that infuses his work with greater complexity. In the background of many of Ross’s poems that are otherwise characterized by a lyric and reportorial tone, there is a spiritual sensibility--an existential agon--wrangling intently away.

Ross has spent much of his adulthood observing the cultures of North and South American, traveling extensively in the Spanish-speaking south and involving himself in political struggles. There is a stark, unblinking, and unsentimental tone in poems that are refreshingly non-polemical and non-proselytizing; instead, we witness the clamor and  waste alongside poverty and pain:

I muse on the dying light as I walk
the sidewalks of Caracas, crowded with vendors
and throngs of threadbare shoppers,
voyeurs ogling over the plastic glitter
and imported fantasies destined to be tomorrow’s                             trash.
The light turns golden as it dies
and night opens over the mountains.
. . .
I turn unsteadily like a tightrope walker
or a fool dancing over the abyss
and make my way through a frenzied chaos
of hope in motion and chants to old gods,
laughter spit through gaps of missing teeth . . .
        (from “Requiem-Lullaby”)

Death is a character in this book, unnecessary Death as in the hundreds of thousands of “disappeared” lost in post- colonial battles for power won mostly by generals and commandantes:

Thirty thousand emptinesses continue their final trip
in the back seats or trunks of green Ford Falcons
barrelling down the dark streets of Buenos Aires,
Cordoba or Resistencia:
They continue to free fall out of helicopters
into the glimmering ocean below;
they continue to scream in the torture cells
of the factories of death and the Military mechanic’s                                   School;
they continue to dig their own graves in secret                                   locations;
they continue to refuse to confess or, again,
they break down and turn their mothers in;
they continue to feel their bones rattle and teeth
chatter with fear;

they continue to be followed into blind alleys or
up the doors of homes they’ll never reenter.
        (from “The Disappeared of Argentina”)

As Jack Hirschman writes in the forward to Ross’s book, “The Disappeared of Argentina” may be the penultimate poem in English on the subject,  a powerful piece. Fortunately for the reader, this brooding on overwhelming political realities is balanced with lyric poems about life and the living. One of my favorites is about cats:

Our angels have grown wings
sprung invisibly from their kitten coats
and now they sail from the fence post
blurs of fur, fangs and claws
that land daintily and unruffled
on the concrete patio.
    (from “A Poem for Ricky and Emma”)

In spite of the author’s placement of older poems in the back of the book, some of these were the best and seemed more eagerly engaged with their subjects. Perhaps what was gained by aging--that all-too valued distance and perspective --is reflected in a cooler tone. There’s a freer emotional range in the poems written at an earlier time in the poet’s life. But, perhaps it is a characteristic of this poet’s work to play off a distant, more philosophical voice with a meatier, grittier, body-framed imagery. “The Turn” is so good it outdoes Coleman Barks' translations of Rumi:

And when you suddenly turn
down a one-way street,
finding yourself wholly alone
where before you couldn’t find yourself
for your friends,
the first thing you’ll hear,
rising up from darkness,
will be your heartbeat, a rhythm
slower than the movement of your feet.
If you move to this speed
and follow the music
into your soul
you’ll never be lost again.
You’ll find that treasure
you’d sell a world for
at a turn in the spiral path
of the darkness that is all light:
the clear red star of your heart.

Many poems reference the Cold War before the fall of the Berlin Wall and during Ronald Reagan’s presidency when America’s manipulation of anti-communist sentiment led to meddling in Latin American politics and class war. As many in the Bay Area did, Ross lived this era as an activist, going to and from the scenes, trying to help. In his “Salvadoran Cycle” and “Nicaraguan Cycle,” he captures some of this time:

At breakfast I sip coffee.
its bitter taste bites my throat.
Here a cup with sugar costs a quarter.
A meal costs roughly a dollar twenty-five.
You can buy a beer for fifteen cents a bottle
and I hear a woman costs a few bucks.
Everything’s cheap.
(1987, San Salvador)
(from “Salvadoran Cycle”)

While some of the tone is relentlessly despairing, there is also the anger of the activist:

Watching Robert Dole on Television
(written during the Senator’s visit to Nicaragua)
The worms are beginning to crawl just under his eyes,
beneath the skin, moving like the dot pattern
of the television screen.
You wonder how such soft creatures
are able to eat pure stone.
(from “Nicaraguan Cycle”)

Finally, there is great compassion --for the downtrodden, the hard-worker, the homeless, the friend who has passed away. My favorite poem in the book comes out of Ross’s Christian background; it comprehends the biting truth of the Christ’s Passion in “How Jesus Earned His Name”:

The crucifixion was really the least of it:
worse still were the days they worked
the life out of him in the woodshop
where he joined sweat with blood
and tears to make a river that sang his name
and babbled his complaint to heaven.
It was there and not heaven
where he learned love for the slave
and hate for the master,
where his hammer forged
his passion for revolution.
It was there, too,
in the misery of toil
and subjugation to empire
that he sealed his fate,
earned his name
and learned his first beatitude,
the one they never wrote down:
Blessed are those who work
for they will be crucified.

Translations from Silence is an important book by yet another of our relatively unsung Bay Area poets of passion and witness.       

Reviewed by Jannie Dresser