Photo of the Sonora Desert Museum in Tuscon, AZ, by Michelle Maria, via Wikimedia Commons.
I thought of these mythic depictions of the American West as I read Brandon Shimoda’s The Desert, not because Shimoda repeats their clichés but rather because his book so powerfully unearths the violence and oppression they obscure. Shimoda reveals another American desert, one that has, of course, been there all along (or at least since Europeans arrived on the scene). It is the shadow side of the myths of freedom, emptiness, and speed.
We don’t often think of deserts as confining. In the Western imaginary, at least, the mystique of the desert is that of unboundedness, escape, freedom, and authenticity. The American desert — in this sense more a generic placeholder than a specific geography — has served as a backdrop for the continual staging of these cultural myths.
Broad-leaved (left) and curled (right) dock. Photos by R. A. Nonenmacher.
In many ways, the structure of this poetry is parabolic. Points of reference are plotted along a curve that eventually returns to the same site of origin — the dockfield — before continuing onward.
Carol Watts’s Dockfield opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson — “Like Rain it sounded till it curved.” This attention to sound and structure also informs the opening lines of the first poem:
On one level at least, Inciting Poetics would seem to be in dialogue with Donald Allen’s 1960 iconoclastic anthology The New American Poetry. With the majority of this volume’s contributors having come of age in the 1960s and 1970s and now in their sixties and seventies, the essays collected here tell a particular narrative, one that seems acutely linked to the political upheavals and cultural shifts of those formative decades.
When I first learned that the University of New Mexico Press was publishing Inciting Poetics, a collection of essays edited by Jeanne Heuving and Tyrone Williams, I was excited for a number of reasons.
Syd Staiti’s novel The Undying Present opens with a somewhat startling brief scene wherein the narrator smashes their watch on their desk, ripping off its hands, before entering out into the world and its “present and continuous catastrophe” (11). What — outside of crisis — thrusts us into the pure present other than an escape from — or rebellion against — (modern, capitalist) time?
Time is the cousin of punishment — Syd Staiti, The Undying Present[1]
Photo of Harry Gilonis courtesy of Carcanet Press.
Reading Rough Breathing, one is quickly struck by the extent to which Harry Gilonis’s poetic praxis is imbricated with antecedent poets and forms. Titles such as “Some Horatian Ingredients,” “Reading Hölderlin on Orkney,” and “Georg Trakl fails to write a Christmas poem” locate the poetry’s provenance in the praxis of reading (or experiencing by different means) the work of others. Gilonis also frequently favors already existing forms — sonnet, haiku, renga, ghazal, acrostic, to name just a handful.
