The Poetry of Russell Atkins

This article originally appeared as a post titled "Profile: Russell Atkins" at Vouched Books on 06 May 2013.

A few months ago, I spoke with the conceptual poet, poetry scholar, and experimental musician Tom Orange about poets who currently live and write in the state of Ohio. Through the course of our discussion, Orange mentioned the little known poet, dramatist, and musician Russell Atkins. Born in Cleveland in 1926, Atkins still resides in the city today.

Orange also mentioned that he recently wrote an essay for a forthcoming anthology showcasing the poetry of Atkins. The collection, titled Russell Atkins: On the Life and Work of a 20th Century American Master and edited by Michael Dumanis and Kevin Prufer, will be released later this year on Pleiades Press as part of their Unsung Masters Series. The series puts out one new collection a year that contains work by, and five-to-six essays about, a neglected American poet or fiction writer. In addition to Atkins’ own writing, the book will feature essays by Aldon Nielsen, Tom Orange, Evie Shockley, Sean Singer, and Tyrone Williams.

In an anticipation of the collection, I found a relatively inexpensive version of Atkins’ 1976 full-length Here In The (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) at an online book retailer. The author’s bio in the back of the book states that he was “one of the first concrete poets in the country and an innovator in poetic drama”; moreover, established poets such as Langston Hughes and Marianne Moore read his poems and championed his work. But more than the literary mythos surrounding the author, I found the book compelling because of the strange and beautiful voice within. Take, for instance, the second stanza of the poem “School Demolition”:

so silently
about the rooms
the autopsy
       begins—
the moon coroner
working
          late (29)

This brief and enigmatic image offers us a vision of moonlight slicing through an abandon school that’s being readied for demolition. The moon transforms into a coroner, the building a body, and the city a morgue. To this extent, Atkins addresses the decay of a once great city and foretells the Rust Belt's continual decline as a result of the difficult economic effects of moving our country's manufacturing and industrial jobs overseas.

Everywhere through Here In The, the poet surveys the city, its residents, and surroundings, noting how even traditionally beatific images, such as a sunset, can transform into something less gorgeous in the crumbling urban cityscapes. For example, section six of “Irritable Songs” reads in its entirety:

horror of sunset stealths
through the boughs of birch:
sunk in a sigh the whole nauseous red:
the sun’s hideous liquid
fills gutters        frantic
the twigs at the window—
away goes through the air,
old cans abject        by-ways whimper
          —the night sky’s
at its death-fall (27)

Of course, in these “hideous” and “abject” images, Atkins creates a singular, Cleveland-based beauty in his language and the sounds it produces. Yes, while his content focuses on the death of a city, he enlivens that very same material through his poetic technique. Through an aestheticized vision of Cleveland, then, perhaps writers and artists living here (and other cities along the Great Lakes) can find an answer to the manner in which we engage our troubled city: acknowledging its decline, but doing so in a way that honors its inherent beauty.

For more information on Russell Atkins, visit his page at Deep Cleveland or read his work at the Eclipse archive.

Adcox, Krutel, Pope, and Shaheen Read Poems

This article originally appeared as a post titled "RCNC Reading (04/23/13): Pope, Krutel, Shaheen, & Adcox" at Vouched Books on 30 April 2013.

On Tuesday, April 23 in Akron, OH, Glenn Shaheen and James Tadd Adcox rolled through town for their recent Great Lakes region book tour. The writers teamed up with the local poets and co-hosts of The Big Big Mess Reading Series, Alexis Pope and Mike Krutel. Hosted by the artists that run Rubber City Noise Cave, all four readers put on lively performances, excerpts of which can be found below.

Here is Alexis Pope reading her poem "I Think I Would Die":


Here is Mike Krutel reading his poem "Physical Cliff":



Here is Glenn Shaheen reading his poem "Predatory":



And, finally, here is James Tadd Adcox reading from his "Scientic Method" series:

Cathy Wagner Sings "A Geography Poem"

This article originally appeared as an post titled "Dossiers: Ohio & Poetry, Cathy Wagner" at VVouched Books on 29 April 2013

Recently, the Oxford, OH-based poet Cathy Wagner traveled to Cleveland, OH to perform her work for the Poets of Ohio reading series, primarily focusing on material from her latest collection Nervous Device (City Lights Books, 2012).

Anyone who has heard and seen Wagner read her work will probably agree that she is quite the performer. For example, her live renditions of poems such as “A Well is a Mine: A Good Belongs to Me,” “Capitulation to the Total Poem,” and “Note and Acknowledgments” all contain theatrical elements that call attention to the body in space as a critical (but non-verbal) aspect the poem’s delivery.

But Wagner doesn’t limit her performativity to the physical realm; no, she also calls attention to voice and its articulation through song. Whether singing portions of her poems or chanting medieval verse, the musicality of her performance adds another compelling layer to the reading. Take, for instance, the below clip wherein Wagner sings a poem she wrote on the drive from Buffalo, NY to Cleveland, OH:


About one year ago, Wagner read at the University of Denver. Afterward, I asked her via email how she conceptualized the intersection of poetry and performance. Below is an excerpt from that conversation:

[Performance] has become more and more important to me—1st long ago I wanted to work on performance because I suffered too often watching people who thought it was OK to bore people. But the more comfortable I became performing the more interested in it I got; I could watch the audience, and I am fascinated by the weird interaction that is performance and in thinking about it in relation to, and as figure for, other kinds of relationships, political sexual economic, and in thinking about the poem on the page as performance, as interactive device. [Nervous Device] comes straight out of thinking about performance, or really, the poem as interactive device…There is a poet Bob Cobbing in England, dead now, whose work/thinking influenced me. He thought anything was a performance—any aspect of the artwork's life in the world. Its making is a performance, its page version, its live version—none of these is the poem, one is not the real poem while the others interpret it, all versions are equally poem. I do think there is tension between page and live at times because sometimes I prefer one to another; I might like an ambiguity on the page that it's hard to register in performance, and of course the songs lose their tunes on the page (I am trying to figure out how best to deal with that). But generally I think that the performance on the page and performance live are related but separate beasts and I don't feel pressure to make them resolve or be more similar. I am interested in both cases in drawing a reader/listener's attention to the fact of interaction and to the particular thrust or effect (these are not the right words...) of the interaction.

The Chapbooks of Jeff Alessandrelli

This article originally appear as a post titled "The Chapbooks of Jeff Alessandrelli" at Vouched Books on 22 April 2013

I met Jeff Alessandrelli in the autumn of 2008; but it wasn’t until winter/spring of 2009, when both of us enrolled in a poetic forms course at University of Nebraska, that we became close friends. After a few conversations, I learned that we shared similar poetic interests, listened to a lot of the same music, both owned dogs, and enjoyed drinking shitty beer until the wee hours of the morning, amongst other things. When you’re stuck a cornfield for nearly five years, you’re lucky to find someone with the same malformed interests.

Now that I live in Cleveland, OH and Jeff in Portland, OR, we don’t get to see each other as often as before; but every couple of months, I’ll receive a package from him that contains a new chapbook. Yes, Alessandrelli has been a bit of a chapbook machine during the last 14 months, coming out with three terrific collections.

Poor Claudia published the first of these chapbooks and released it at the 2012 AWP in Chicago, IL. Titled Don’t Let Me Forget to Feed the Sharks (which I’ve written about before, elsewhere), the book contains one of my favorite Alessandrelli poems, “Spring in the New Year.” It reads in its entirety:

Partial inventory of all items left dripping in the kitchen: one faucet, two knives. According to the fancy new guidebook I bought, you don't go crazy all by yourself. Out of some freshly sealed envelope of darkness, every morning we have to invent the sun in order to see it, have to invent the sky's cherry-blue backdrop in order to witness the sun’s milky light. Eventually there comes a point, though, when our inventions fail us: patentless, faulty, we wake up in some vaguely familiar pitch black. Yesterday was different we think, without entirely understanding how or why. But now it is the first day of spring and—reverent—we take the time to remember. Today is the first day of spring. Half-weighted flashlights aimed and ready, we ceaselessly pray that we will never ever have less. (21)

The cherry on top of this book, so to speak, is the artifact itself. Poor Claudia has done a fine job creating some amazing books, and this collection is no exception. If you’re unfamiliar with their product, I suggest heading over to their site and purchasing something.

For this year’s AWP in Boston, the relatively new Imaginary Friend Press released Alessandrelli’s People are Places are Places are People. While the artifact is a bit more in line with a no frills D.I.Y. aesthetic (as opposed to Poor Claudia’s more artisan approach), the collection contains some of Alessandrelli’s strongest poems. Two of my favorites are the opener, “Understanding Marcel Duchamp,” which reads:

One morning—I’m not sure why, maybe some type of lack or definition of half-tawdry want—I woke up, saw my neighbor’s bike lying in his driveway and just beat the shit out of it, just pummeled and crumbled and wracked and irrevocably dismantled it until what it was couldn’t even be called “bike” anymore; it was something else entirely. Then I went to work. When I got home that night my neighbor’s driveway was empty, his garage closed. The bike was gone, all its recognizable parts absent, vanished, shaped into new and heretofore incalculable realities. (1)

And two poems later, “Understanding Mina Loy (Everything, Everything, Everything)”:

I will refrain from discussing
the role of the lover.

Always burn the sheets
after you fuck in them. (4)

In the Elisa Gabbert-penned introduction to the collection, we’re told that an Alessendrelli poem is like “a place where you can know something but not believe, and vice versa; a place where understanding is not deeper knowledge but an alternative kind of access.” Or, as Gabbert, states later, these poems do “not tell us what [the poet] know, but to find out” something about ourselves while reading them. Indeed, when reading these poems, we enter into a process of discovery with the poet.

And just this month, the newly minted Both Books released a third Alessandrelli chapbook: A Lover’s History of Nevada. In this collection, the poet (a Reno, NV native) creates a liminal space filed with poetry, fiction, and historical non-fiction collaged into an off-beat guide to the Silver State. Take, for instance, the chapbook’s first piece:

Upon birth we slap the cheeks of every infant in Nevada until they bleed. To make sure he wasn’t born a wizard. To make sure she wasn’t born a witch. The old saying Go Fuck Your Soul means little in Nevada: forks weren’t introduced to our citizens until the mid-80’s, sandals didn’t arrive until just after the new millennium. In Nevada Y2K was a water rat that gnawed out the side of its cage and died quietly. A red sports car without wheels. The Humboldt River has no actual outlet to the ocean; it simply sinks into the ground, feeding a massive underground aquifer. The largest single public works project in the history of the nation, Hoover Dam contains 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete. In Nevada. How the bike tires and automobile tires ravish and splendor the pavement, the concrete, the desert sands as they make their every way to Burning Man, the largest annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance the whole world over. We are a state of grievous angels, each of us ceaselessly attempting to burn our wings for nothing but the sheer sake of spectacle. You go first. Wait for me. (1)

The collection proceeds in similar fashion and, as Alexis Orgera writes of the book, creates an “amalgam of factoid, mythos, and rhythm” that “pays homage to [the poet’s] home state, exploring its landscape and the relationships therein through various states of being.”

Alessandrelli’s full-length collection The Last Time Will Be The First Time, will be published by Burnside Books later this year. If you live in or around Ohio, you’ll be able to catch Alessandrelli read at The Big Big Mess in Akron, OH on May 10 or in Columbus, OH on May 11 at North High Brewing.

Frank Giampietro Reads "Whitman's Brain"

This post originally appeared as an article titled "Dossiers: Poetry & Ohio, Frank Giampietro" on 09 April 2013 at Vouched Books.

Frank Giampietro moved to Ohio last summer to become the interim director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. He is the author of Begin Anywhere (Alice James Books, 2008) and co-author of Spandrel (Small Craft Advisory Press 2011) with Denise Bookwalter and Book O' Tondos (The Painters Left, 2010) with Megan Marlatt. In the below video, he reads a new poem, titled “Whitman’s Brain,” at The Big Big Mess Reading Series on 09 November 2012:



Giampietro also read recently for the Poets of Ohio reading series on 21 March 2013. For the series, participating poets were asked to write brief thoughts on the state of Ohio and/or how they conceive of the relationship between poetry and Ohio. As a relative newcomer to the state, Giampietro responded with the following list:

1. Hello, Toledo, Ohio!
That’s hilarious.

2. In Maine they say, “You must be from away.”
In Cleveland they don’t say anything.

3. Like Jesus, Cleveland, in you there is no north or south—just east, west, and Akron.

4. So there's a bar on every corner in Lakewood? Yes—No. No but yes.

5. How many lonely, dog walking, single people living on one Lake Avenue is too many lonely, dog walking, single people living on one Lake Avenue?

6. If Seattle, Washington is a big city built on tiny bones, then Cleveland is a very, very, sexy Elizabeth Bishop, especially if you consider EB’s relatively small oeuvre as congruous symbol of Cleveland’s population density.

7. Once, he saw a woman walking down Euclid Avenue loudly repeating the following question: “What is wrong with the people in Cleveland?”

8. The worst thing about being destitute in any middle American city is that no one will look you in the eyes. So I’ve heard (while looking away).

9. There were so many dead fish, various sizes of dead fish on the Lake Erie shore on March 23rd, I found some kissing.

10. Hey. Let’s dump our waste into this vast but shallow lake and then get our drinking water from it!

11. If the world comes to an end and humans are to blame, it won’t be Ohio’s fault.

12. Question: What’s America like, Ohio?

Answer: Long, semi-incredulous / slightly bored sigh.

13. Hey, I’m one of the wealthiest people in the whole wide world, but my heart has gone bad (as all hearts do). Can you help me America Can you help me Ohio? Sure. Just come on over to Cleveland.

14. Did you spill coffee on your sweatshirt or is that the outline of Ohio?

15. Burn, burning river.
Die, dead man’s curve.
Just kidding.
You’re both actually very cute.

16. Hey, Cleveland Clinic. You getting all this on camera? Where’s your remote controlled medicine cart taking those meds?

17. So where did you eventually end up happily living out the rest of your life, Francois?

18. Dear Hart Crane, Sorry your monument and park is kind of a mess.

Hearts[sic],
Cleveland.

The final readers for the Poets of Ohio reading series will be Sarah Gridley (04/18). For more information, please check out the series’ Facebook page.