Commentaries - July 2014

Burger's eco-poetics-activism

toward a commons of, among others, sea lions...

Mary Burger, A Partial Handbook for Navigators (Interbirth Books, 2008), 47 pp.—Per the writings of Sigmund Freud and Maurice Blanchot, human desire and human death haunt the five prose and poetry meditations that comprise this chapbook. Burger’s various riffs on the “rift” (starting with a detail from Amy Trachtenberg’s painting, Rift Zone), which opens up the part,  the partisan (the section titled “A Series of Water Disasters” is an homage, in part, to guerilla activism) and partiality in general, shuttle back and forth between the narrator’s desire to convert the static noun (signaled here by the Golden Gate Bridge) into a verb. Burger mimics the noun, the name, by permitting almost all of her body, up to her neck, to be buried near Golden Gate Park, but this grave with a view — she observes passing “joggers, dog walkers, early strollers” — cannot replicate death (“It was nothing like being dead”) despite  her desire for connection to earth, the noun and name, to, in brief, death:  “I went looking for some recognition, on the earth’s part, or my part, that we were together.”

The musics of war ...

"got 'im..."

Phil Metres, Abu Ghraib Arias (FGP, 2011), unpaginated—On alternating verso (American soldiers) and recto (Iraqi prisoners of war) pages of this chapbook, Metres ventriloquizes the voices (though some of this work is drawn from published texts) of the culprits and victims of our most recent military adventures. Interspersed with the “confessions” and “blues” of the American soldiers (including Lyndie England) are several “Standard Operating Procedures” texts regarding the “handling” of Muslim bodies, the Koran and military documents.

Nielsen's 'Brand New Beggar'

James Brown and the JBs

A.L. Nielsen, A Brand New Beggar (Steerage Press, 2013), 99 pp—Among the academics he circulates as a peripatetic conference participant, Aldon Nielsen is probably best known for his literary criticism and cultural studies work. He is, after all, the author of one of the most significant books on African American poetry, Black Chant. However, he has been writing and publishing poetry all along, and it seems that in recent years he has ratcheted up the production. His most recent collection is his most fully realized book yet.

Peter Quartermain: 'Incompletable Text,' a view of Jerome Rothenberg's 'Eye of Witness' (Part one)

[What follows is the first part of Peter Quartermain’s response to Eye of Witness, an in-depth view that leads me into & beyond areas of my work that needed & still need (for me at least) viewing & amplification from the outside.  Quartermain’s essay is scheduled to appear early in 2015 in Louis Rowan’s Golden Handcuff’s Review (GHR 20), so this is an opportunity to put it into circulation closer to the publication late last year of Eye of Witness & to turn a