ISSUES | winter 2009

Reviews of: The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, Paisley Rekdal. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007, 88 pp., $14.00 (paper) Universal Monsters, Bryan Dietrich. Word Press, 2007, 156 pp., $18.00 (paper) Ka-Ching!,Denise…    read more

Many of Bellows’s friends described him as a man in a hurry. His artistic career bloomed early: at age twenty-six, five years after attending art school under the mentorship of Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design. At thirty he displayed his paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was elevated by the Academy to full Academician the next year and was considered the country’s most accomplished lithographer-a meteoric rise by most artistic standards.

Art is a game of light and shadows, and the studio was a place of such chiaroscuro. The shadows were filled with an assortment of objects: a Rembrandt pastel set, a thousand little colorful chips of crayons and chalk in a wooden box, or a Maxwell House coffee jar stuffed with brushes. Bacon often didn’t bother to clean the brushes after he used them, rendering them useless thereafter. Next to these discarded brushes, cardboard boxes lay in heaps, often thrown into the studio after the contents, bottles of champagne—Francis’s drug of choice—had been consumed elsewhere in the house. The champagne boxes were then used to store photographs. The boxes, brimful of photographs of friends and lovers, became painted over and waterlogged.

In those early days we watched Get Smart, WKRP in Cincinnati, The Joker’s Wild (“Joker, joker, joker!”), The Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Welcome Back, Kotter. A captive audience, we watched greedily, singing along with every theme song, falling over ourselves at every punch line, following every story line as though they were our story lines instead of some schmuck’s on the television. When Dr. Johnny Fever was forced to wear a disco suit to host a dance show, we shook with the outrage; when Mr. Kotter’s wife walked out on him because of the Sweathogs, our hearts shattered; and when Bobby Brady got to play catch with “Broadway” Joe Namath, we fell silent with awe.

I’ve spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem-could become a poem. What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared now to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition. If I’m excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That’s the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.

Featuring the poems: What the Dead Know Easy Money Stranger Recent Cosmological Observations (featured as Poem of the Week, Jan. 26, 2010) Baffled   Recent Cosmological Observations One of the…    read more

Featuring the poems: Pardon and Amnesty Provinces (featured as Poem of the Week, Feb. 9, 2010) The Hills, Beautiful Hills   Provinces Moonglow projections on a screen reveal A drunken…    read more

Featuring the poems: Dream Poems for Lisa, in Distance: Dream Poem 1 Dream Poem 3 Dream Poem 4 Dream Poem 6 Dream Poem 7 Dream Poem 10 (featured as Poem…    read more

According to subject number 6, in the winter of 1984 inside Nongpo provincial detention center a man known only as i, or Tooth, saved her life and those of countless others solely through clever use of ventriloquism, a skill he used to spook the gulag warders into thinking every life they stole would return as an invisible phantom. Eight years later the same man emerged in Yodok re-education center, this time as a contortionist who, according to subject number 32, was so flexible he could calligraph with his toes, pirouette on one palm and squeeze himself through a car tire—altogether confounding the injurious teachers and making them forget to administer the daily self-criticism exercises. By the time subject number 97 and Tooth crossed paths, the Great Leader’s heart had failed, the great famine had come and gone and the millennium had been celebrated, but Tooth, apparently ageless and vital, was still rescuing North Koreans, now as Yongdam’s resident shaman, a political prisoner who convinced the warders he was capable of killing a man with an angry wink or whistle.

Luis shared an apartment with his brother Hector and three other men, all of whom happened to be named Juan. Everywhere he turned there was a Juan: a Juan in the shower, a Juan in the kitchen eating pineapple rings out of a can, a Juan asleep on the couch. They were quiet and harmless but undeniably present and numerous, like the silverfish that were also always in the shower and the kitchen and among the couch cushions.

All that summer in New York she had a special glow. People said things like “Motherhood really suits you!” Or “The baby’s done wonders for you!” But her friend Marta didn’t buy it. Marta already had four children and was planning one or two more.

The day Ms. Moreau would cry in front of her freshman honors English class was the stuff of Lawrence High School legend. It happened every year, could happen at any time. Some innocuous eighth period as the school buses sat chugging by the curb and the minute hand stuttered toward 2:39, Ms. Moreau would announce she was going to read her favorite poem, then read, cry and dismiss the class with a wave of her thick-ringed hand.

In the company of old friends, what surprises me is not forgetting shared experiences or remembering them slightly differently but the fact that we have anything like the same memories. Perhaps that is a simple confession of aging. Yet psychologists have grown increasingly skeptical about the human ability to remember and accurately recount the distant past, just as historiographers are dubious about our understanding of history. This declining faith in our grasp of “what really happened” has taken a particularly dramatic dive over the past century.