Approaching Ice - Elizabeth Bradfield. Persea Books, 2010.
d n love the poems, right off, words I wld not prefer, but some I like. and do like the book as whole, libr card cataloging infrm subject not just as 'poems' but: exploration, Arctic & Antarctic. informed, researched, arranged. sequences amid other poems: re individual explorers chronologically ordered ~1820 to last poem woman explorer in 2002. and notes on ice, alphabetical definitions. attracted to the title, and the cover. ice.
previous (first) collection: Interpreted work.
www.ebradfield.com - founder & editor of www.broadsidedpress.org

Lost Alphabet - Lisa Olstein. Copper Canyon Press, June 1, 2009. ~ seen & shelved once before, last consbo, & d n like title? & d n m like cover: book design & some of the back copy from Copper Canyon. but so far I like v m everything Olstein writes. and the cover photo is moths and moth-eaten music, that's_ impressive. again, I like that this is a book whole, card catalog subject 'etymology'. this is a narrative, one sequence:
'An unnamed lepidopterist a lepidopterist! studies moths? —living in a hut on the edge of an unnamed village— is drawn ever deeper into the engrossing world of moths, light, and seeing. Structured as a naturalist’s notebook, suggestive of an ars poetica, four-part sequence of prose poems re the consequences of intensive study, the trials of being an outsider, and the process of metamorphosis ok actually, in detail: moths.
"I have learned to peer at specimens through a small crack at the center of my fist. It’s a habit herders use for distance: vision is concentrated, the crude tunnel brings into focus whatever small expanse lies on the other side, something in the narrowing magnifies what remains. At the table, my hand tires of clenching, my left eye of closing, my right of its squint, but the effect: a blurred carpet of wing becomes a careful weave of eyelashes colored, curved, exquisitely laid . . ."
previous (first) collection: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone.
in wh: 'Insert bird for sorrow.'
In the Meantime by Lisa Olstein [The Poetry Foundation]:
What seemed a mystery was / in fact a choice. Insert bird for sorrow.
What seemed a memory was in fact / a dividing line. Insert bird for wind.
Insert wind for departure when everyone is / standing still. Insert three mountains ...


hmm. birds for sorrow. birds, sorrow. I find I like picture of birds, I go towards books with birds on the cover. perused also another poetry volume from Persea (distr. Norton) that has bird on cover 'Anatomy of a Dead Bird II' by Joel Sager. Used by permission of the artist and the Perlow-Stevens Gallery.

Mistaken for Song - Tara Bray. Persea, 2009.
this one I do not like enough. and since will not keep, am noting here. do like how back cover looks like ahsata press galley ~ brown text on white ~ brown~sepia photogr of author looking down, I like the photo, how she looks. poems about mother dying when she was young, about self 'I want, I want' (like my appley girl 'and I want my skin to peel in one smooth curl' hmm? no it was better how did I), and recurring about birds I do like about birds.
but what the poems say, and the cadence, too obvious ~ for me ~ expected, easy, not what I find real, thought ~ or trust as.

How My Mother Died: My father shook the gun to get the bullet out. / He was a careless man, but only once. / I shouldn't linger on this, the road rising out of itself, / my father out on Pine Street in the dark, / down on all fours, trying to open up his face / with gravel, trying to get down to the tar mm / of what went wrong by making blood again.
that is sad. and the road rising, father trying to open his face, gravel, tar, down to the tar

Rain: Like a dark miracle, they sleep, 2am / at a truckstop outside Indianapolis: / my husband of three cities, three years-- / flycatcher, scrub jay, kingfisher; / our baby daughter, little chickadee, / pale wrinkle, my inkling. mm. / A motherless girl who now mothers, / I am loved twice, two orchids, two glimpses / of the afterlife, two clearwing butterflies, / two fox sightings—twice scraped, twice owned.

and a heron. you have me at 'heron', or 'river'. also 'green.'

Once: I climbed the bale of hay to watch the heron / in the pond. He waded a few steps out, / then back, thrusting his beak under water,/ ...
How is it for him, day after day, brittle legs rising / from warm green scum, his graceful neck curled, / damp in the bright heat? It's a dull world.
brittle legs rising his legs are brittle. sticks in water. a heron's walk very pick up sticks ~ knee bend knee bend (I think -?) it's amazing that it's happening in front of me, him walking like that.
... The heron stood / stone still on the bale when I returned. / And then, his wings burst open, lifting / the steel blue rhythm of his body into flight. / I touched the warm hay, hoping for a trace / of his wild smell, then cupped my hands over / my face—nothing but heat of fields and skin. his swamp smell.

starlings, meadowlark. wading boots. lake bird refuge. belted kingfisher. larkspur.

"wren, deer tick, creek noise."

Pelicans everywhere, like answers
to failed questions.

oh and she has a poem titled 'The birds are making me' and I like that, I like that a lot, but I am thinking "making me" like the undercover cop says about the guy he's watching who's figured him out. who knows who he is. 'He made me.' The birds made me.
her poem though:
The birds are making me: day by day, building me / with twigs and flecked notes / mistaken for song.

Lyn Hejinian's My Life in the Nineties, by Thomas Fink


"It is the task of art to preserve disappearance" (80), not the things that, otherwise, disappear.


yes. yes I think that's ..
the keeping. keep sonnet. have by heart, all the arrangements. when the poet left out in to it.
you know: all the thinking is about loss.

Jacket 36 - Late 2008 - William Watkin: on Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben
“Though we keep company with cats and dogs”: Onomatopoeia, Glossolalia, and Happiness in the work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben


a roe deer which, upon sensing my presence, lifted its head and gave a full throated cry, hoah, hoah
One cannot write the voice of the animal.
the voice can suffer no separation from the animal, which language demands, and remain its voice.
this bark of pure being. one wants to write it, because it is a rare example of the presence of a being’s truth to itself ~hmm~ not ~ well for one not rare ~ every animal every us even also when maybe not looking which our civilisation has been chasing for twenty five hundred years and more.


Hejinian, like Pascoli, takes dictation, but the voice she hears, which is her own as other, is made up of bits which only later find their own coherence.

take dictation. mm: My uncle is a lawyer's clerk. He calls me once a year. The __ takes dictation. naval boy down the chute.
(gosh that poem I think is so good - So good.)

ends, I believe, with the victory of language over the voice as Hejinian indulges again in pure sound: “more more than nine”. Is the nine really nine, numbers are mentioned more than once in the poem, or is it a suggestion of mine, the mouth wants to say this after the repetitious m’s, and the mind wants to say this because it makes more “sense” and because mine featured in the line above? Glossolalia stops the sign “mine” from coinciding with the referent mine such as one finds more openly in her My Life so that one could argue again that the two works are twinned, My Life being the autobiography of the voice, and Writing is an Aid to Memory that of language.

The last sentence of the “Preface” states: “Though we keep company with cats and dogs, all thoughtful people are impatient, with a restlessness made inevitable by language.”[15 Writing is an Aid to Memory] While we like to bark we prefer to write as we would rather make mistakes about who we are, what we did, what we remember, because we like to remember more than we like to have ontological, linguistic plenitude, which takes us on to what Hejinian’s poetry is all about: happiness. However, before we get to happiness and also the reasons for contemporary poetry to still exist in the world wow ok let's meet back here for that
~not trusting style here much, not thoroughly trusting the thinking ~ but helpful with noticing some things happening in Hejinian's text? and return to read, how Hejinian's poetry is all about happiness, and about happiness, and about why poetry
and about lang poetry too okay
as well as -dlcs pgmark notes- continental philos Heidegger int in ontological uses & implicatns of poetry - to do work of philos when philos not up to it at moment in history.
landed on this Jacket essay by way of looking for Hejinian re Heidegger (ggl).

az- The Fatalist - by Lyn Hejinian| Omnidawn Publishing 2003:
From Publishers Weekly:
Readers have perhaps grown used to American poets writing ongoing, complex, symbol&reference-laden poems as if talking to themselves, making the reader a witness to the activity of a dynamic thinker's mind. Pound and Stevens, in their very different ways, are immediate forebears of this style, but Emily Dickinson before them and John Ashbery since are other obvious markers: poets who find as much poetic force in a symbol revealed hmm? as in an opaque reference to a current, but hidden, stream of thought. y. good. hidden bcs thought is hidden. not bcs poet is hiding it, no, I won't like that. phantom like in melville, not ghostly because seen thr a placed glass darkly but bcs what is seen ~ or, the seeing ~ is dark, is ghostly.
as also I want that we are really dealing with thought, that you are telling me (and~or telling yourself), there is a telling (where trying to tell = telling). what is meant by honest poetry. I think (roughly speaking) I'd rather you did not set out to write syntactically complex hypotactic poems (Moxley), I'd rather complex syntax & experiments & innovations be an expression, what you are trying to tell. (if what you are trying to tell is about syntax, 'possibilities of language', I don't know, maybe that doesn't do it for me.)
Hejinian's stature in this tradition increases with the publication of this book. Even more than her long poem A Border Comedy and the shorter pieces that have appeared since (Happily; Slowly and The Beginner), The Fatalist takes advantage of the tropes of fiction while admonishing narrative for not being able to contain the will of the poet.

2 cust rvws:
-The Fatalist is a terrific instance of Hejinian's work in recent years: a lush re-purposing of sinuous, elegant syntactic constructions to hoover up just about anything that happens in the mind in time. Because her lines push clauses through time with the variety and complexity usually attributed to "fine" writing, the poems slip easily past the centurions of craft--there's no doubt among the doubting that this counts as poetry.
-I can't say that I enjoyed reading this. only mildly witty. pseudo-intellectual. The language is too vague and the diction is anything but evocative. this rvw is ok too dismissively negative to be thtful, likely. thing is, I react against words she uses ~ too vague ~ 'immutable' 'fleeting', that kind of thing. to me feels like grandiose abstraction.
and maybe - only maybe I do not know yet - maybe I will not come to trust her ~intellectualism.

L Gluck : Wild Iris . The Village Life .

her choices ~ 2004,5 ~ Yale Younger Poets series

J Hopkins : Green Squall . 'frustrated angel: I can see why your friends get tired of you'

R Siken : Crush .

The Unit. swedish author. Other press. into scandinavian writing lately? knausgaard norway. whatshisname iceland who I've tht for some time shld try Halldor Laxness that blue bk whatitstitle, that I like. now I have archipelago cloth edtn of his first novel.
The Unit appeals because about closed space, finite life.

like Saramago, The Cave. which I am trying to remember. the clay figurines they take to sell. and they move there, why do they have to move there? a closed inside world. entertainment. amenities. then what happens?
az- The Cave - by Jose Saramago (2002)
-az rvw: The Cave follows the fortunes of an aging potter, Cipriano Algor, beginning with his weekly delivery of plates to the Center, a high-walled, windowless shopping complex, residential community, and nerve center that dominates the region.
What sells at the Center will sell everywhere else, and what the Center rejects can barely be given away in the surrounding towns and villages. The news for Cipriano that morning isn't good. Half of his regular pottery shipment is rejected, and he is told that the consumers now prefer plastic tableware. Over the next week, he and his grown daughter Marta grieve for their lost craft, but they gradually open their eyes to the strange bounty of their new condition: a stray dog adopts them, and a lovely widow enters Cipriano's life. ...
-pubwkly: Widowed Cipriano Algor is a 64-year-old Portuguese potter who finds his business collapsing when the demand dries up for his elegant, handcrafted wares. His potential fate seems worse than poverty-to move with his daughter, Marta, and his son-in-law, Mar‡al Gacho, into a huge, arid complex known as "The Center," where Gacho works as a security guard. But Algor gets an order from the Center for hundreds of small ceramic figurines, a task that has Marta and Algor hustling to meet the delivery date. [-Cipriano sells his earthenware pots and jugs there until he is told that they are "worthless." People prefer plastic. Cipriano decides to make ceramic dolls instead.] ..a stunning ending after the doll project crashes, when Algor becomes a resident of the Center and finds a shocking surprise in a cave unearthed beneath it. remembering .. was it like Plato's cave? men in chains, watching shadows? (but why? do we learn why & by whom set up, or are we left there ~ parable)
Saramago deserves special kudos for his one-dog canine chorus, a stray mutt named Found that Algor adopts. oh yeah I liked that dog. I think I liked this book.

-The close to nature life of the village and the globalized Centre are in total contrast and the drive from the village to the Centre is unforgettable, first passing the so-called green belt where nothing is green (and the insides of the strawberries grown there are white), then through the industrial belt, then the shanty town where the poor live, then through the city itself to the impenetrable fortress called the Centre. Consumers are barraged with advertising slogans and expect to find everything (or a copy of everything) that can be bought from anywhere in the world as well as every imaginable form of entertainment including a casino, a racing track for cars, a beach with waves -- even sensations, like being in a tornado, or a blizzard can be experienced inside the Centre. right these are the 'amenities' I was thinking of. the artificial landscapes, weather. Most of the apartments in the Centre do not even have windows that look out, many of the residents prefer a view of the inside of the Centre itself, and half the dwellings have no windows at all.
-The Center, an imposing complex of arcades, shops, staircases, escalators, cafes, terraces, movie theaters, discotheques, big-screen tvs, electronic games, billboards, mannequins, a church, a casino, a gymnasium, a roller coaster, and a zoo (p. 241).

-The meaning of the discovery at The Center that inspires them to run away is a bit of a mystery to me. ok so yes maybe its meaning is left ambiguous
-In his novel, Saramago's frequent allusions to Plato's cave transition from metaphorical to literal. During excavation, Plato's cave is literally unearthed beneath The Center, containing six bodies imprisoned there with ropes, and "as if a metal spike had been put through their skulls to keep them fixed to the stone" (p. 292). ok there go then. that's wh seemed to remember. When Plato's cave becomes a tourist attraction, Cipriano and his family leave The Center to "start a new life a long way from here" (p. 305).


+ Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go. "final donation." same phrase right?
no actually d n say that phrase; says 'fourth donation.' they die in making this fourth donation, if not at the first second or third. oh ok also they speak not of dying but 'completing.'

az- Never Let Me Go - customer reviews srch: 'donation'

-"You were brought into this world for a purpose." Never Let Me go opens with the young narrator Kathy H. telling us that she has been a "carer" now for eleven years, and that the authorities - whomever they are - have been generally pleased with her work. Then she talks about her "doners" and their "impressive recovery time," even before the "fourth donation."

-I do find myself wondering how it can be economical to raise clones for the donation of 2, 3 or at the most 4 organs, although it is implied that the donation process continues after "completion" or death - that what remains of the clone is preserved and more organs are harvested. A grim, very disturbing idea, and the calm acceptance of it makes the novel so tragic.

-Ishiguro creates a convincing vocabulary, milieu, and mythology for this setting: guardians, carers, donors, completing, Exchanges, Sales, the Gallery, Norfolk, and an eerie sense of the students having "been told and not told."

-seemingly benign misconception that Norfolk is where lost articles are found and reclaimed. Articles like her beloved tape and Tommy's football shirt.

and what was the Gallery? that Madame came to the school & took paintings for? why was art emphasized in their teaching?
-In the Hailsham academy, children must produce large quantities of art, which is then sold in exchanges and rewarded generously based on the levels of talent and creativity it produces. Kathy H. recalls that an exceptionally good work of art would mysteriously disappear, and it was rumored that a gallery existed to showcase all of the outstanding work. The older graduates speak of the gallery, and how the mysterious woman in charge, "Madame," will use the works as an indicator of whether the two deserve this privilege. ah. whether they seem to have souls. but, it turns out there is no gallery? what was the art for?

-At one level this is a deeply moving and extremely sad love story told by a young woman, the sole survivor of a love triangle. At another level it is a nightmarish horror tale whose protagonists have all come to life through cloning, and from day one were then raised at Hailsham, a special "boarding school" where, in total isolation, they were being prepared for an early death by organ donation to terminally ill but maculately conceived "normal" humans. .. Hailsham graduates can expect to "complete" (their euphemism for the verb die) before they even reach the age of thirty. One lives one's life according to the time at one's disposal. It is remarkable how the basic human emotions and interactions get deformed to accommodate the much-shortened lifetime of these characters. At some point all humans become aware of their mortality, but this point obviously gets much moved up when early "completion" becomes a near certainty. This novel explores in some depth the extent to which mortality-awareness affects human feelings and actions.

-The book doesn't emphasize at all on the technical details of what really goes on behind the scenes when a "donation" is given ("what body part did they take away now from this poor child now?") or what the actual scientific purpose is. I found a strong feeling of gloom and sadness as I lived through the emotions of the characters and constantly hoped for their escape, which of course never came. This sadness surprisingly stayed with me for quite a while.

-Girl loves longstanding male bestfriend, but subsumes her love when it becomes clear that her female best friend is also interested in the same boy. Kathy's narrative is clean and matter of fact, full of the detail of day to day school day memories. The story of love lost and regained which drives the narrative forward is one which has been played out in love songs (like the fictional "Never Let Me Go" song which Kathy takes to) for as long as love songs have been written. But this is no ordinary coming of age story. Nor is it really about a love story, although the whole concept of love, and artistic power is one which sets off the sinister underlying elements of the story. .. What the reader finally becomes aware of, more or less concurrent with the narrator, is that the characters are clones, `created' rather than born, solely for the sake of providing replacement parts for `humans,' a `species' to which these people clearly do not belong.
Somehow, and somewhere, one imagines a kind of parental set - the persons, scientists or whatever who have created them, and who has the responsibility for their existence. These missing characters form part of the novel's setting: the backstory and backdrop which is never revealed. The gods which created Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are missing from the novel, along with any kind of reference for morality. Not quite missing however are those people after whom the clones are created--the "possibles" -- and there is a kind of touching nostalgia of the sort that an adopted person might feel for his real but utterly inaccessible parents among the characters for their possible.
[...'possibles'? are the models for the clones? voluntary? (why 'possible'?) how did that work? maybe Ishiguro did not say much about it
-Ishiguro tells a heartbreaking story of human resignation, but he falls short in the science fiction elements of his book. The gaps in the picture Ishiguro paints of a world where a special race of human exists are never quite filled-even with Madame and Miss Emily's confessions. The book seems unfinished to me, because the full scope and rules of Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy's special world is not revealed. The question of the possibles is never resolved, though it seems something that Tommy and Kathy would have asked about. The fact that the way these people come into Hailsham still remains hazy is bothersome]
..the ethics of this world, or the terrible use of what are clearly people in this way is hardly raised, with the very brief exception of a last ditch visit made by Kathy and Tommy, in an attempt to get `out of' the donor program - based on a rumour circulated among the donors that anyone who demonstrated `true love' might get let off. The lovers made their pilgrimage, and instead found some semblance of the horrible truth about their existence.
The morality in this novel is pretty clear, but there are also hints that the book may be showing us more the similarities rather than the differences in the lives of these characters and those of the readers. After all, we are all going to die after a relatively short life of utilitarian work on behalf of someone else but? not *all* work on behalf of someone else?, and while we may have the consolations of family which the characters in Never Let Me Go don't, the novel makes our own exertions on the hamster wheel seem almost as futile as Kathy's. It's a chilling notion that makes you want to go berserk just like Tommy.

-To me, it's not just about the cloned kids. By midnight shadow
This book is very disturbing. At first, I was very sad about the fate of the three main characters and my attention dwelt on questioning the morality of cloning. But when I reached the part when Tommy said "...It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever." In this sense, what is the difference between them and us? The "students" worked hard on their art, on poetry, on creativity but in the end, all are futile. All of them are doomed to die upon the 4th donation at the latest. How about us? We work hard through school and work. In the end, what does all that matter? No matter how much two people love each other, one thing is certain and that is "we can't stay together forever." For Kath and Tommy, it might be 3 months. To us, it might be 30 years but in the end, our end is the same. No escape.