Isle of Wight / Israel

Matthew Klane is a man of many hats: in conjunction with Adam Golaski, he edits Flim Forum Press; and, along with James Belflower, he runs the Yes! Reading Series in Albany, NY.

Klane, though, is more than an editor and promoter of poetry. He is also an accomplished poet who excels at writing minimalist, sound-driven verse. He authored the full-length collections B____ Meditations {1-52} (2008) and Che (2013), both of which Lori Anderson Moseman published on her Stockport Flats imprint.

In addition to his “official” book releases, Klane has self-published several chapbooks, one of which is Isle of Wight / Israel (Self-published, 2011). Originally intended as a gift for his friends when he left Iowa City to move back east to Albany in 2011, Klane produced the chapbook in a limited-run of 100 copies.

The poetry of Isle of Wight / Israel, like most of Klane’s work, is a minimalist writing highly attuned to the sonic aspects of verse and, among other thematic concerns, focuses on the nature of language and poetry. Take, for instance, the poem “The Sonnet”:

-eer

I set a pretty peal

of chimes

        T dillo dee

I’m witty and full

of Rhyme

I’m quick I’m sly I’m wry

I’ll write

my bonny-tippled

riffs ripples

sequences different

non-sequitur

ditties

minnow skittling

tinsels

of Thyme

surprise! surprise!

a dish of filberts

a mince pie

if I strive to fill it more

the Isle of Wight

will burst

“full / of Rhyme,” the poem “The Sonnet,” as with the entirety of the Isle of Wight, does “burst” with Klane’s musical “riffs” and “ripples” in “quick” minimalist verse. Indeed, as the poet writes in the “Indices into the Midst,” he composes the poem’s in this chapbook from:

Sound stringing

splendid meridian

strains

of mingled

finesse

Yes, the poems in Isle of Wight exude a “Sound” predicated upon a certain “finesse” of language that most definitely is a product of a well-tuned ear.

Of course, Klane, it would appear, has a knack for sound because he, in some respects, leaves himself open to the vibrations of the world around him: he is a receptor of sound, transmitting their energies to an audience through poetry. Or, as he writes in “Higher Power”:

I lie in bed

reading

my eyes open

ears open

mouth

O

hear me

The “Higher Power” of the poem’s title, one could argue, is poetry itself and the force of sound that enters into and emanates through/from the body (i.e. the eyes, ears, and mouth) while reading and writing it.

But this collection of poems and their corresponding sounds are not merely art for art’s sake, or sound for sound’s sake, etc. More than anything, Isle of Wight, a self-published chapbook gifted to friends, connects people to one another. No more clearly does Klane highlight the communal intention of this collection (and poetry in general) than in the concluding poem, “Absent-Mind”:

we wind our way

through this

abyss

absent-minded

on a quest

of words absurd

and fertile

strange

that we should meet?

Although the poem ends with the interrogative statement, “strange / that we should meet?” we are already well aware of the answer: no, not so strange at all. In our lives and in this world, poets and writers connect through their “words absurd” as “we wind our way / through this / abyss” in the shared “quest” for poetry.

Plus Or Minus

We’re suckers for the hearts we wish to draw

but can’t or won’t through insistence or fear,

habit or worse, and so, we draw the hearts we see

ourselves loving with. And those we crave

writes Weston Cutter in the poem “We Are The Hearts We Draw,” from his chapbook Plus Or Minus (Greying Ghost Press, 2012). The speaker’s inability to draw a certain heart addresses, to some extent, the chapbook’s central concern: lamenting our unfulfilled wish to love better or stronger those around us.

But the melancholia that imbues these poems does not only stem from the speakers’ inability to love, but also from an inability to be loved. Take, for instance, the poem “Yours, Alaska.” Toward end of this direct address to the forty-ninth state, the speaker says:

                                                     so your

salmon don’t love you enough to visit or

return your call, so the languages with

all those words for snow are dying inside

your grip

While Alaska has many “languages” and “all those words” with which to express itself, the state fails to attract the beloved, who never visits or returns calls. The terms of endearment are left “dying inside” the mouth; or, in the poet’s case, upon the page.

In some instances, the inability to love, or the beloved’s reluctance to reciprocate, appears to be a matter of inexperience. In “Exposure to Various Flow,” the collective voice says:

                   The difference was that none of us on those boats’s edges

had taken our loves up to the top floor of any of those skyscrapers

       whose reflections we floated past + boated through—

               the difference was the captains had,

            did, and while we’d talk kissing and bases the older men

would laugh at us and, arms across their chests, kindly not tell us

what we didn’t know.

The youthful speakers talk rather innocently of “kissing and bases,” missing, it would seem, a fuller expression of love in the “top floor of any of those skyscrapers” above them. The older gentlemen eavesdropping on their conversation won’t tell their junior counterparts “what [they] didn’t know” under the assumption, one would think, that they’ll learn first-hand (eventually) through experience.

During other moments in Plus Or Minus, though, lovers are kept apart for nefarious or malicious reasons. The chapbook’s opening poem, “Casabianca,” narrates one such instance:

                      Love’s a man

watching his favorite bridge

                      catch fire, gust

for gust’s sake, wind because

                      what else is there,

fire grows with elemental breath

                      and if only love’s

burning boy could look back,

                      see the man

at the burning bridge’s edge,

                      say: love is wind

feeding fire, or love’s fire, or

                      love is opening

+ closing some pain.

But “love’s / burning boy” cannot look back and “see the man / at the burning bridge’s edge” proclaiming this fire to be a metaphor for passion, of “wind / feeding fire.” No, when he looks back all he sees is “an old arsonist friend walk away” on the “bridge’s far side,” wave to him, then head “for the stranded / man’s home.” We can only presume the arsonist will either burn the man’s house down, or steal the lover within it. Either way, the stranded man will lose his love to death or someone else. The metaphor of love-as-fire transforms into a new metaphor of fire-as-impediment to the beloved.

And so, given the seemingly insurmountable odds of attaining love, Plus Or Minus concludes with the poem “Virginia is for Lovers,” in which the speaker asks of the Union’s tenth state:

                                    where’s your responsibility to us

lovers, Virginia, those of us who came to and in and on

and for you, looking for something to feast on or fill up with

or be emptied by, for, because of, etcetera

Far from an encouraging response, though, the collection’s final line answers this inquiry with the line: “just like you I’ve never let anyone leave satisfied.” So we wander through this the country searching for love, but lacking the language, knowledge, and feeling to satisfy ourselves or our lovers.

Asides

Toby Altman lives in Chicago, IL where he co-curates the Absinthe and Zygote reading series and co-runs Damask Press. He is the author of the chapbook Asides (Furniture Press Books, 2012) and his poems can or will be found in Rhino, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Gigantic Sequins, Bodega, Birdfeast, and other journals. Toby took some time last week to answers a few questions for me over email regarding his newest collection:

At a reading in Philadelphia during July 2012, I believe you mentioned that you adapted the form of Asides (i.e. a numerical list of propositions) from Wittgenstein's Tractatus. To that end, I wondered if you could address two separate but related issues. First, how do think, at least to your mind, poetry and philosophy relate or interact with one another? What are the effects of their confluence? Secondly, how does the numerical list function within you collection? Or stated differently, how did a numeric list of propositions enable you deal with the subject matter of your chapbook in a manner that other forms would not permit?

I’ll only be able to answer this question in the most gestural terms. Though, perhaps there’s an advantage in the loose pleasures of the gesture when tackling these kinds of abstractions. Perhaps we should think about philosophy as a form of pleasure—or, more precisely, as a technology for organizing pleasure. It’s in this capacity that philosophy has, historically, encountered poetry: as a disciplinary apparatus, designed to organize and moderate the body for political life.

Politics is a logistics of the body: a matter of organizing the shivers and excesses of embodiment. For philosophers in the Platonic tradition, poetry interrupts their logistics, introducing unmanageable bodily heterogeneity into the political community. If the basis of political community is the organization of embodiment, then poetry—which amplifies and unmoors the body—will not just be bad politics, but anti-political as such. The pleasures of poetry actively make war on the political order.

This is—potentially—a damning accusation. The long tradition of political poetics, which begins with Aristotle, might be seen as an attempt to rescue poetry: to justify it to the city without denying its potency over the body. If my own work tends to identify with the concerns and methods of philosophy over poetry, this is in part because I sympathize strongly with the Platonic critique of poetry. I want a poetry which amplifies and unmoors the body, a poetry which is not only useless but actively anti-political. (This position does come dangerously close to a libertarian individualism: maybe it is a form of leftist libertarianism. The challenge will be to insist on the anti-political pleasure of poetry, without negating communal bonds and obligations). 

One last word about the numbers. The chapbook is intended to be both one continuous thought and a series of discrete thought experiments. The numbers are designed to indicate the continuance of a single, unified thought through the discrete poems.

There's quite a bit of food for thought in your previous answer, but your conclude with the claim that the "numbers [within your chapbook] are designed to indicate the continuance of a single, unified thought through the discrete poems." But in Asides, you write:

(16) Imagine a world in which numbers were believe to have bodies. (It is irrelevant for your purposes whether they do have bodies.) Would mathematics be more like arranging the pieces on a chessboard or composing music?

Now imagine a world in which numbers are believed to have souls. Here, addition would certainly be a kind of celestial music.

I was hoping you could address this passage with regard to how this proposition functions, in and of itself, as well as within the context of your collection (i.e. the titled sections are number 1-6, and the individual propositions are number 1-28). What is your investment in mathematics, numerology, etc.? What is your take, generally speaking, about the manner in which poetry has engaged numbers (whether functionally or as a manner of categorization)?

I’m glad you put some pressure on this point. I confess I didn’t fully think through these issues while I was working on the chapbook (it’s old work, dating from my time in college). So the notes that follow on the relationship between numbers and bodies are not authorial; they represent an attempt to read the chapbook beyond the terms and intent of its composition. 

I’d like to start by noting a paradox in the body’s architecture. As Elaine Scarry notes, the body is “effortlessly grasped”—almost perfectly self-present to its possessor: “the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty’.” But, “the” body is also a linguistic fiction even for the person who possesses it. “The” body is constantly in the process of unmaking itself, slipping into non-being: as it ages, as it sloughs off dead skin cells and hair. As a structure of feeling, the body is perfectly self-present; as a structure of narrative, the body is persistently absent, shifting, unthinkable. This paradox should not be solved or sublimed: it should be withstood. 

Roughly the opposite is true of numbers. In poetry, the use of numbered sections binds the reader into an organized process through the poem – imposing sequentiality and narrative. The device veers, sometimes dangerously, toward certainty: a certainty that forecloses the rifts and aporias of language. But in math, numbers are formal devices, meaningless in themselves. Numbers tend toward self-presence and certainty in narrative; in math, they tend toward the absence and insignificance of pure form.

Now let’s imagine with 21 y/o Toby that the categories of body and number might become unmoored, and populate each other. First, the narrative certainty associated with numbers might leap into the body. The undecidable aporia of bodily decay would be replaced by the certainty and sequentiality of numbered sections of poetry. This would be a religious fantasy: a fantasy of impossible plentitude and presence. (And, as all the sentimental language about “souls” and “celestial addition” implies, this poetry has a more-than-casual relation to the devotional). Or—second, maybe the narrative uncertainty of the body would leap into numbers, denaturing and unsettling the steady progress they imply: an atheistic plentitude of uncertainty. Either way: here is another paradox to be withstood. 

You mention that Asides is an "old work." That being said, what do you think about the chapbook looking back on it through the perspective of today's Toby Altman? How has it held up, to your mind, over time? What about the chapbook still resonates with you? What seems more distant? Finally, when I heard you read in Chicago last autumn, you read (if my mind serves me properly) from a series of sonnets you're working on. How do those poems relate to Asides? Are there aspects of your chapbook that have filtered into your new work, or does the newer resist the poetics and issues of your older work?

The language of this chapbook is embarrassingly lush; it uses the rhetoric of religion, often uncritically; it veers into sentiment and confession, particularly toward the end; it’s restless in invention, maybe obsessively so. These are the basic characteristics of the work, and I feel intensely ambivalent about them now. (Which is to say, I feel about them).

The dissatisfaction I feel with this chapbook is habitual. I never remain invested in a body of work long. I don't think I have—or want—a single poetics: rather I try to work with (and through) a range of strategies, discarding and absorbing methods of writing as my interests change. I turned to the sonnet, in part, because I wanted a way to constrain my voice—which, left to its own devices, tends toward ecstatic hyperbole. I tried to treat the sonnet as an Oulipian constraint: a way of restraining and retraining my voice. Predictably, I’m already a little tired of the restraint. My most recent work attempts to reconcile all these warring impulses—another fantasy of impossible plentitude and presence.

American Dialectics

One corollary of conceptual writing, following Sol LeWitt, maintains that “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work” and that “the execution is a perfunctory affair.” Hence, in its purest and most rigorous application no writing results at all: the concept alone is worth contemplation and would only be determined in its execution. Another corollary maintains, to the contrary, that writing resulting from the execution of a concept or procedure should itself be at least as interesting as the concept or procedure. From this it follows that value inheres to concept or procedure chiefly insofar as it yields compelling, engaging, interesting writing. I intend my review of American Dialectics to operate somewhere between these corollaries. I want as much as possible to collapse this very distinction and make the concepts and procedures an integral part of the very material occasion of the text’s being.

Yes I am a poet, truly, and I was struck dumb, stammering, attempting to speak in the presence of your glance. Shall we talk? In faith and in hope, I am listening.

I can certainly imagine procedures to obtain the circumspection of my pleasures. The business of coiling, rattling, and spitting. This describes the situation obtaining. Somebody else did it before we did it. I am nowhere gathered together. I recognize that scene of language. Do you remember shape-shifting? It frees the air of dead influences. I am transported, beyond language, i.e., beyond the mediocre, beyond the general. I can do everything with my language, but not my body. And no silence exists. I am not interested in my mind. Music is not different only simpler. Now that things are so simple, I hear rumbling menacingly a whole other world. I engage in dialogue, to the point where I lash out furiously against the importune outsider who wakens me from my delirium. “We have three”: the close anonymous collaboration. I perform, discretely, lunatic chores. I am caught up in a double discourse, from which I cannot escape. I sustain this discourse. We will change direction constantly. Phrases begin and end. I want, I desire, quite simply, a structure. Does it matter which? 

If one hears what one writes—by which I mean not just paper poems—how can one not be seduced by the sensuality of the language? It is physical, very exciting, and when organized it can have the impact and grandeur of Wordsworth. The struggle is between this sensuousness which is elegance and the newer, easier to arrive at, excitement. On the one hand language is comprehensible in that it evokes a sentiment, though the sentiment itself may be incomprehensible and far reaching. Language is all our dreams of poetry. Non-referentiality is poetry’s dreams of us. And those moments when one loses control, and language like crystals forms its own planes, and with a thrust, there is no language, no idiom, no sentiment, nothing left but the significance of our first breath.

I love splitting and scuttling American Dialectics. You go crazy traveling through logic, blaming it all and fucking over in ya. Words, terrible scuttle. You like his alright. Move over if talk can grab ya. No trust can doubt you.

“A Conceptual Review of American Dialectics by Tom Orange” is a treatment of Tom Orange’s American Dialectics (Slack Buddha Press, 2008), conceived of on 16 February 2013, actualized on 17 February 2013, and performed on 18 February 2013. Each paragraph of this review contains language taken from a particular piece of conceptual writing found in the original text. The original text contains seven compositions, five of which Orange actualizes/performs and two of which remain conceptual.

O Holy Insurgency

Of her second full-length collection of poems, O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), Mary Biddinger writes on her blog that the book:

wrenches the love poem out of the terrain of hearts and flowers, and transplants it in a quotidian rust belt paradise, where broken glass becomes a shimmering beacon, and no river is too polluted to dazzle a pair of lovers on its banks.

To call O Holy Insurgency a collection of love poems would, indeed, be correct. For everywhere throughout its pages, an “I” and “you” travel through Biddinger’s “rust belt paradise” in an effort to join as “we” and “us.” Take, for instance, the opening lines of the poem “Treaty Lines”:

There were wonders, but we didn’t know
they were wonders, or that they belonged

to us. The watermelon we tethered in a maple
with fishing line, just to see who would look up.

A dare involving teeth. Sentences we’d write
to burn. I trade my fear of matches for a love

…

There’s a filament inside both of us, though
we never noticed. It’s imaginary most days. (17)

Tethering a watermelon to a maple tree with fishing line or proposing an unnamed dare involving teeth are just a few of the unknown “wonders” to which the book’s couple find themselves subject. These “wonders” create an “imaginary” and unacknowledged “filament inside both of” them that bonds the two in a love burning through Insurgency’s sentences; yet it leaves the imaginary filament intact.

The imaginary filament connecting these lovers is of utmost importance because the “rust belt paradise” they wander through constantly shifts, mutates, and conjoins, thus making it easy for one to get lost in it. Or, as the speaker of “A Diorama” says: “One day / we woke to an unfamiliar backdrop” that “took weeks for them to identify” (70). Yes, just as the fishing line tethers a watermelon to a maple, the filament tethers the lovers together throughout the “unfamiliar backdrop.”

As long as the imaginary filament keeps the lovers attached, the protean landscape of Biddinger’s collection does not instill anxiety or fear. Instead, both lovers and readers can delight in the collection’s fabulous permutations, such as when the speaker sees “you walking out / of the sea instead, except we only had lakes” (13); and each “lake engulfed another lake” (53) with “clouds / turning green overhead” (35). Similarly, the speaker and her beloved eventually:

       invent an ocean, then merge
the ocean with another ocean
to make it vaster. (26)

or a day when:

Autumn and spring fused to one
single season where the leaves died
and reopened, and then died again. (65)

Or how:

             Somewhere nearby, two
doves stood tail to tail, made one

four-legged blur. (68)

Whether a sea transforms into a lake, an ocean into a large ocean, or autumn and spring merge into some unknown hybrid season, the “I” and “you” do not separate. They do not lose themselves or their love.

Of course, all these alterations eventually do affect the lovers themselves, such that “Every night we remake us / as our skin transubstantiates” (60). Yet even with the external transformations the “I” and “you” undertake, the filaments inside of them keep them attached; and whatever distance does separate them, they carefully map and document so as not to lose their bearings:

                                         Detail
the inches that might exist

between us, as if anything
could. (58)

The “inches the might exist / between” are so few that the speaker’s map of O Holy Insurgency’s strange world “become[s] // the palm of your hand. No longer / hiding your body from mine” (69). As such, with these maps, the lover’s bodies remain close. They keep the lovers familiar to one another. Or as Biddinger writers toward the conclusion of the collection:

Everything with us had a certain

permanence the rest of the world
lacked. The only place for me

was poured across your body. (85)

Indeed, even when liquid and fluid, the lovers pour their bodies across one another and remain fused in their love. Their imaginary filament connects them permanently, while “the rest of the world” in the rust belt paradise shifts, changes, or disappears.