Counterpath Press

The Desires of Letters

priyanka — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In 1994, poet Bernadette Mayer published The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, a collection of loosely structured and un-posted letters written over a nine-month period while she was a new mother in New York in 1979.

Now Laynie Browne, in The Desires of Letters, takes Mayer’s flowing style as muse and resonates profoundly with her own ruminations on motherhood and daily life. Author of nine collections of poetry, she uses her talents to describe the experience of motherhood and desire, which I find is often like trying to nail water to a brick. But she turns the brick to water.

When does it get easier (you ask). The answer is yes and not when. Since time has nothing to do with us now. We live in a timeless realm where the effect of difficulty is cumulative, like labor, not each event taken on its own. There is no tense one could call ‘later.’ Each tantrum or disaster formally speaking is returning home to feel an outing has been successful, no matter how humble, to buy milk for instance, if everyone is still alive.

As a writer and a mother with young children, I often find it difficult to connect to voices so far removed from the disjointed and often surreal world my children and I inhabit. But in The Desires of Letters I felt at home. Taking the writing, the experience of being a writer, then wrapping it around the children and their needs, and the day to day that translates in such a different way than it did as a singular person who was not so bundled in with other human voices.

Naomi Stadlen, in her 2004 work titled What Mothers Do Especially When It Looks Like Nothing said that, “Mother’s live in a universe that has not been accurately described. The right words have not been coined. Using habitual vocabulary sends us straight down the same… footpaths. …There are whole stretches of motherhood that no one has explored.”

Laynie Browne has offered a beautiful new step toward this exploration.

Written by: Jen Wilson Lloyd, October 4th 2010

Incivilities

admin — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:02:00 +0000

By Barbara Claire Freeman

Counterpath Press

With her first collection of poetry, Incivilities, literature and theory professor-turned-poet Barbara Claire Freeman excavates the vagaries of an American narrative—“how it became, what it began,” as one of her poems says. Like men counting bodies on a battlefield, exploding the absurd order of the data they have collected, Freeman’s poems rebel against the aftermath of the atrocities (the title puts it mildly) they insist on recognizing. It’s that rebellion that makes them so compelling. It is also the playful way in which they confuse the manufactured order of a manufactured history.

“One Down, Seven to Go,” for instance, hints at the emptiness of narrated traditions, from the fanfare of presidential elections to the sanitized nursery school tale of the first Thanksgiving: we shrink from responsibility for both yet beam proudly at their trappings. (Meanwhile, in the poem, a still-lit supermarket has already cleared of shoppers, and an onlooker imagines charming scenes inside.) The poem observes:

...We forgot

the narrative was supposed to make us whole. The main thing was to tell the story.

Freeman’s reassembled American history is one of stock trading, gold mining, Louisiana Purchases, slaves, the revolutionaries who kept them slaves, shoddy intelligence and the ways in which we seek to forget. It is told through fragments of George Washington’s speeches and descriptions of newspaper photographs of staged townscapes.

These poems’ heterogeneous forms suggest that poems, too, are artifacts to be referenced in other pages. The denser, longer ones move in cadences and sentence fragments that recall Lyn Hejinian; the sudden spaces and surprising inversions of the narrower ones gasp elegiacally around the textbook-ready rhetorical platitudes they try to dismantle. All of them shudder at the brutality of infrastructure (“Most of the ideas we’re talking about are bridges and roads”), the permanence of debt (“America will not let/her children deleverage”), the complicity of the poet and the caprice of communication:

_...   if now you cannot hear me_

it is because the sound of this night no one will remember no one else.

Written by: Samantha Schulz, February 20th 2010

Shot

admin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:59:00 +0000

By Christine Hume

Counterpath Press

It seems like it has become very fashionable for poetry collections to have short and ambiguous titles. We are long past the era where poems’ titles were incredibly detailed, as in “To my Lover, Upon Discovering that I Forgot to Do the Dishes and Churn the Butter. Autumn 1864.” I was drawn to Christine Hume’s Shot because it sounded promising, between the edgy title and the vague descriptions I could find through online previews. Her work lives up to my expectations.

When read aloud, Hume’s poetry has a certain melodic quality, by turns both jarring and soothing. This skillful placement of words goes hand in hand with an ability to create rhythm that evokes action, as in this phrase that is reminiscent of a failed attempt to start a car: ”My pulse stuck to the signal: turnoverturnoverturn.” An engine can almost be heard turning over–and even if that’s not the image Hume was shooting for, that’s just an example of the way this work is open to interpretation.

The recurring symbols in this collection of poetry are very decidedly feminine: night, moon, and darkness are all portrayed with feminine characteristics, such as wearing makeup or having skirts or female genitalia. Most pronouns are female, particularly when describing a character that seems integral to the poem in a positive manner. A rebellious edge sneaks into some of the poetry too, without being too specific as to its target. The poem “Um, Um...” starts out: “You may pound this night as much as you please/ You will never pound into me what you think.”

The only weakness is that the abstract personification of both objects and concepts occasionally borders on the obscure. Nontraditional uses of parts of speech make for interesting reading, but at a certain point it becomes almost distracting. Beautiful imagery sometimes results from this seemingly random pairing of words seventy percent of the time, however.

Some feminists in unquestioning support of women’s reproductive rights might find the detailed and rather opinionated narrative of the first section slightly unnerving: it’s a dialogue between a pregnant woman and her fetus. That can be considered under the catch-all of poetry’s ability to be random, to say one thing and mean another. Sometimes metaphor makes for objectivity. All things considered, this collection of poetry was mind-bending and a celebration of the feminine, both dark and light aspects.

Written by: Sam Williams, February 6th 2010