Apogee Press

Also Known As

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Being a writer is often a difficult endeavor. It’s not the desire nor the passion that is constraining but more often the discipline, the dedication. Sometimes what writers struggle most with is the publicity of the written word. Once something is printed, with your name next to it–there is no going back. It may be one of the reasons so many authors choose to publish under a pseudonym, a fictional name created to hide the identity of the author in order to create a truly private space where creativity can thrive.

Elizabeth Robinson has taken this practice one step further. In her latest book of poetry, Also Known As, Robinson “interacts” with the work of Portuguese poet Fernando Passoa in an effort to “explore the opportunities and limitations of persona(e).” What is interesting and challenging about this task is that Passoa wrote most if his work under “heteronyms,” alter-egos with distinct personalities and unique poetic voices. As introduction, Robinson opens with a poem by Richard Reis, one of Passoa’s most well known and prolific identities.

Robinson doesn’t merely rely on the inspiration of Passoa’s work, but rather invokes an exploration of identity that is both darkly ambiguous and yet deeply personal. By refraining from use of gender based descriptors and pronouns, Robinson relies on the collective consciousness of anyone who seeks to be identified. Her work is simultaneously brave yet cowers to self-consciousness – I, who loved to fondle the antonyms, was caught red-handed. – “Intermediary”

Poetry is a form of literature that many people shy away from, out of fear of not understanding or lack of connection to the material, often because of the way it’s presented. Robinson balances gracefully on this tightrope, and offers a collection of work that is both intellectual and accessible. On the power of poetry, I must agree with Travis MacDonald who suggests “The cumulative result is a seamless (if eerily disjointed) whole in which the individual edges of authorial identity become indistinguishable from the tangible act of each poem’s performance on the page.”

Written by: Alicia Sowisdral, August 24th 2010

Table Alphabetical of Hard Words

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Pattie McCarthy

Apogee Press

Recently, as I was pushing my daughter in her stroller up a hill, a guy in a pickup truck whistled. Pattie McCarthy’s poem “spaltklang: is good broken music” reminded me of this moment. McCarthy describes a new mother who finds her body meaning has been overwritten with a new set of signs:

it’s the stroller, she said, it renders one
invisible, no one will ever look
at me like that again, she said, not
_even him. _

Table Alphabetical of Hard Words tells the story of how we want to believe in the simplicity of signs, even as these signs slip away from us and are ultimately irreducible to their dictionary definitions. Her poems show that “the stroller” does not make “one/invisible,” just as diacritical marks do not always tell us precisely what part of a word matters most.

While reading Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, I found myself drawn by two incongruous impulses: to join McCarthy in an archive outside of our time and to relish in the shape, the feel, the complexity of early modern language and to try to piece together the fragments she had drawn together. The first of these impulses fits neatly with the material project of the collection.

The cover of Table Alphabetical of Hard Words is a repeating yet off-center set of identically bound archival documents, their contents listed but hard to read on the bindings. McCarthy makes her reader enter the archive with her, where she provides etymologies and connections between words while also sending readers outside the text with annotations like “(see usage notes)”. She identifies twenty-first century language as something difficult and tricky, in a different way than the “Hard Words” comprising early word lists and dictionaries: "I don’t understand your euphemistic emoticons, please stop saying important things in code.” We do not have a word list, a key for our own linguistic shortcuts, she suggests in frustration, yet Table Alphabetical of Hard Words also tells the story of what is not said, and McCarthy unpacks only some of her shorthand in her list of sources. Her readers must think outside this text, following traces of allusions and shades of influence.

McCarthy’s language echoes modernists including Virginia Woolf, H. D., Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and especially Gertrude Stein. She draws on Henry Reed’s “Naming of Parts,” and she jarringly blends Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, and Jenn McCreary’s poems with Old English sources, contemporary references to television shows like NYPD Blue, trial records, and other fragments of language that she pieces together with sometimes playful and always visceral effects. For instance, she notes that Webster’s original dictionary used the long s for bloodsucker, making the word look like bloodfucker. Her first poem, “askew: latelye done to deathe” echoes Howe’s The Europe of Trusts, in which Jonathan Swift’s Stella (Esther Johnson) blends with Shakespeare’s Cordelia: she is given a voice, but still obliterated by her lover.

McCarthy forces her reader to question this search for allusions and origins. If our own markings are so illegible, so meaningless, and misleading to us, how can we read break down words we have lost? If a mother’s body may or may not be read differently because of the diacritical mark of a stroller, how do we know what and how to read on and about the bodies that surround us? Table Alphabetical of Hard Words explodes the one-to-one relationship between words and meanings that are so basic to daily life while demonstrating that bodies and words are both hard to interpret, meaningful in their matter, but tricky, mutable, and often unintelligible.

Written by: Emily Bowles, July 25th 2010

Edge and Fold

admin — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 03:02:00 +0000

By Paul Hoover

Apogee Press

Paul Hoover, author of Edge and Fold, amazes his readers with postmodern poetry. His newest work is a compilation is separated into two poems: "Edge and Fold" and "The Reading." Hoover carefully crafts couplets which express time, distance, vision, pop culture, and daily life.

His ideas expand and evolve with the turning of each page. However, in postmodern terms, anything goes. This is the beauty of his work such as in his lines “Miles Davis unfulfilled/his notes heartbreakingly/always on the edge/of breaking down completely/all true things are song/a weave unweaving.” His lyrical words run parallel to Davis’s notes as they echo into time. The quick, clean, constructions maneuver readers quickly to relish vivid lines as “Within the linear forest, /at the edge of all scatter, /beyond recognition/but coming into focus, /where color folds and/dust resists the garden, /a fruit tree stands--/dots and dashes.” Again, the poet illustrates a change from a wider perspective to a more refined one. The notion of a rising aerial view summons a clearer and definite picture.

His couplets are precise, magical, and alluring to the eye, intellect, and ear. Through pith, Hoover asks questions, sometimes describes circumstances, but never closes ideas for the readers.

Written by: Mona Lisa Safai, February 18th 2007

Apostrophe

admin — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 20:15:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Robinson

Apogee Press

Elizabeth Robinson’s new book of poetry, Apostrophe, is startling in a number of respects: more white space than word, more whisper than yawp, poems with one-word titles like “Wind” and “Lost”—and, in fact, titles like “Anemone” repeated twice, as if the author were revising herself or perhaps offering variations on a theme. The language first encountered seems startlingly abstract and enigmatic, although moments of sensational contact invoke Whitman’s advice: “missing me one place, search another,” at the end of “Song of Myself.”

In two epigraphs, the poet signals that the book is, in part, a narrative about grace, coming unpredictably like an a gift of words. Often, here, because of the sparseness of the lines, the silence in the interstices, the words seem more sacrifice than gift, offered almost reluctantly and with great caution. In her revisions, her repeated titles, her quiet musings, she experiments with forms of grace as made manifest in the wind, in the passage of time, in the unfolding of petals.

Perhaps the most extraordinary effect of the work, finally, is a product of the author’s singular talent as a sculptor of bodies: mouths and spines and armpits vivid, bare, resplendent: “My back pressed up against your back, and times’s tensile in between”—time and flesh, object and abstraction nestled up against each other.

Robinson’s title alludes to a poetic convention: the direct address, in this case I think to the reader, rather than to the wind or perhaps some supernatural being as others have done. An apostrophe is also, of course, a punctuation mark of elision or ownership. Read the white space; find what’s omitted, she asks, and there you will find a poet of remarkable control and evocative power.

Written by: Rick Taylor, January 6th 2007