& I is a correspondent

Sensational Spectacular in Kangaroo blog

2010-02-14T17:36:00.000-08:00

http://sandylonghorn.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-im-reading-sensational-spectacular.html

25º and thick strips of clouds, sun sifting through

As some of you may remember, I won a copy of Nate Pritts' first book, Sensational Spectacular, in a Goodreads giveaway. I was unfamiliar with Pritts' work, but with the chance of a free copy, I was willing to throw my name in the hat. I must also admit that I was curious after seeing the promotions for his new book from Cooper Dillon on Facebook. So that's how marketing works! Little did I know there would be 500 or so other names in that hat and only a handful of copies to give away. Woo Hoo.

I've spent the last week or so reading this densely packed adventure. The book occurs in three parts: 1) Secret Origins, 2) Big Crisis, and 3) The Brave & The Bold. Parts 1 and 3 are composed of two short poems per page concerning the speaker and a group of friends, largely identified by a certain color (Red, Blue, Green) unique to each. Each of these small poems is titled with a colon before the first word of the title and after the last word in the title, providing a frame. In the table of contents, the individual small poems are not listed, so these titles are really intended as section breaks in a long poem called "Secret Origins" and another called "The Brave & The Bold." The poems in the middle section are titled normally and are almost entirely about the speaker, minus his friends.

I mentioned that Pritts' poems are slightly outside my comfort zone. They feel very youthful to me, and I do not mean that as a slight in any way. There is humor here, alongside longing and angst, and a definite sense of the conversational, everyday language spoken in plainspeak, but arranged with a whimsy. There is a fascination for hammers & tools, rockets & robots, and all things outer space. As I read, I felt like I was being allowed to overhear the intimate daily thoughts of a man not entirely grounded in the sludge & trudge of this workaday life. It grew on me.

Perhaps the sign of a poet's success is this struggle I feel to write about the poems. They stand for themselves. So, here is the ending of one of the short poems from "Secret Origins," ":Bowled Over:," in which the speaker explains how he and his friends "enjoy competitive games" like bowling and bird watching.

.........................................................My friend

in blue tries to see only blue birds, turning a blind eye
on birds of any other color. His bird watching totals

are staggeringly low. My friend in red counts
anything he sees in the sky as a bird: airplanes,

dandelion pollen, clouds.

And here's one of my favorites in its entirety from the middle section "Big Crisis." Notice the subtle use of sounds, although often askew from traditional placements. You have to read it out loud. (The lines are double spaced in the original.)

Requiem for the End of Time!

Assume there's someone else

pulling my strings, my mouth

opening to say the one thing

that will bring you back to me

but uttering nonsense instead.

Covered with cloud, I'm shaking

as my stupidity grows to silly

proportions. Yesterday morning

I saw the hooded man with the axe, yes,

I was led onto the stage & told to sing

my last. I inhaled & what I inhaled

turned me into a robot, my limbs

clunky & hollow, my chest filled

with gears & pistons where

breathing & love used to be.

I have a glowing faith

that eventually I will leave this all in the past.

I love the way that last line extends longer than the rest, bludgeoning us with that feeling of wanting to move past what has hurt us. I remember studying last lines in a Form & Theory class with Miller Williams and this change in length being one of the closures presented. Pritts uses it quite effectively here.

Sensational Spectacular in Bewilderment, Inc.

2010-02-14T17:34:00.000-08:00

http://sincerityinc.blogspot.com/2007/09/nate-pritts-sensational-spectacular.html

I just finished reading Nate Pritts' new book, SENSATIONAL SPECTACULAR, from BlazeVox and am thrilled to know that it's arrived, it's in print, it's a message from a very human speaker to actual human beings in the NOW of this world! Nate's poems have always wrestled with essentials--Truth, Beauty, the nature of the individual--his wishes hopes and dreams of meaning. And here they speak the essential language of essentials forever--weirdly, subjectively (how else can one speak of "essentials" these days?) with guts and aplomb, over and over in interesting, charming, and heartfelt ways. For example, "Our dreams are dreams/of velocity & truth, of lifting/out of ourselves for a better place" (from "I Wish a Rocket Would Come and Take Me Away"); or "...implication itself such a sorry contraption,/a broken down engine for communicating the structure/of this when you said that" (from "In the Hot Seat"); or how about, "Monkey, lion, fox: switch places with me. Experience what it's like/ for someone to look at you & not call you by your right name" (from "The Walls of Our Sphere").

These poems are earnest, on the sleeve, full of lightness and dark, robots, friend/ships and "all my frantic/ mammal concerns blowing off behind me//in the dangerously perfect light" (from "Sun Brain"). Yeah, that's right. If seeing is believing, then believing is reading this fine new book of poems. As Pritts writes in "Journey to the Stars," "A man tells us to keep our eyes on the skies, that we wouldn't want// to look down and see what the world around us is turning into." I couldn't agree more. And yet, these poems don't ignore what the world is turning into, but rather strive to see it differently--in light of the stars, their community and grace. "For your love," Pritts writes in "Without a Net":

I'd cross from one mountain to another,

walking slow on the long rope bridge to your heart

& I wouldn't turn back even if I saw you

trying to undo the knots that hold me up.

Sensational Spectacular in Coldfront

2010-02-14T17:31:00.000-08:00

from Coldfront :: http://reviews.coldfrontmag.com/emsensational-spectacular.html

Sensational Spectacular by Nate Pritts

BlazeVOX Books 2007

Reviewed by Ben Mirov

7_5stars

110%

Pritts_cover

There is an unabashed revelry in Nate Pritts’s Sensational Spectacular that reminds me of certain poems by Frank O'Hara. In O’Hara poems like "Having a Coke with You" or "Ode to Joy," passions take precedence over highbrow intellectualism. As a result, the objects in the poem become manifestations of the poet's more intuitive emotions. In Sensational Spectacular this tendency leads to an appealing, bombastic aesthetic. Take for example these lines from "A Day in the Life":

Any patch of land with a giant grenade buried in it

knows exactly how I feel, like I'm about to be

all up in the air (...)

More ephemeral comparisons can be made between O'Hara and Pritts. Sensational Spectacular is bookended by two sections called "Secret Origins" and "The Brave and the Bold," which catalog the exploits of a narrator and his friends: Red, Green and Blue. As in many O'Hara poems, Pritts's concern in these sections is the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Red, Blue and Green get in fights, play games, fall in love, and have adventures. The result is an intimate look into a "scene." Just as O'Hara's poems encapsulated the burgeoning yet exclusive art and poetry communities in the 50s and 60's, Pritts's poems examine the inner-workings of a small select group:

My friends and I believe in excluding newcomers

from our secrets: secret lair, secret handshake.

We collect our separate feeling of scorn

&rage& elitism the way other groups of friends

collect sea shells on the shore of the vast

ocean of Hello! (...)

The main difference here is the manner in which the people in the poems are presented to the reader. In O'Hara we get names like DeKooning, Ashbery, Freilicher and Goldberg, figures with personal and artistic histories. In Sensational Spectacular, the identities of the characters involved in the poems is masked and abstracted from the burden of history by their identification with the colors red, green, and blue. Red, Green and Blue feel like real people, but their personas and exploits develop in an imaginative otherworld, simultaneously like and unlike the world in which we live. If O'Hara had chosen a sort of dream-world constituted by his imagination rather than New York City, he might have written poems very much like Pritts.

There are many aspects of Sensational Spectacular that are unique. One of the most appealing nuances of his writing is its relentless sincerity. Nowhere in these poems does one get the feeling that the author is holding back or evading the reader for the sake of cleverness. The best poems feel unabashed and outrageous:

My life is a funhouse: giant faces taunt me

& every cornering reveals another hazard

volcano simmering in the guestroom, dinosaurs

holding bazookas. As if their teeth weren't enough.

In these lines from "Never Be the Same Again," the giant faces, the volcano in the guestroom, the bazooka wielding dinosaurs push the envelope, but what they lack in terms of subtlety, they make up for with their wholeheartedness. For all the risks Pritts takes in Sensational Spectacular, he never veers into affectation. In a time when so many poems are nothing more than impressive panoplies and poets can find a million precedents to divorce themselves from taking responsibility for their lines, Nate Pritts is a refreshing, entertaining writer. I look forward to seeing what he does next.

Sensational Spectacular in Growler

2008-08-14T19:50:00.001-07:00

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” – T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

Sometimes I hover in front of my bookshelf in search of a book that will tell me exactly what I need to hear. I never have any idea what that is exactly, but I know that as my fingers walk the spines of all these poetry books, one of them has something to say to me. Nate Pritts’s book, Sensational Spectacular, is one of those books.

In Pritts’s poems, I recognize my own ambition, love of friends, belief in our own awesomeness, and our almost-assured failure. For poems that strike such a personal chord, it’s telling of Pritt’s abilities that the majority of these poems avoid the first person entirely. In fact, Pritts has such a talent for sudden science-fiction, such quick turns of logic, that it’s hard to say for sure that these poems even take place in our world, what with their spaceships, robots, changing proportions, and occasional lack of gravity.

The book has three sections. The first, “Secret Origins,” and the last, “The Brave & the Bold,” are long sequences of poems all about ten lines long, give or take a line, concerning a speaker and his group of friends. The book begins “My friends & I, we’ve got it all / figured out.” The title poem tells you just about everything you need to know:

:Sensational Spectacular:

When my friends & I sit at the same table
we all get to thinking that our actions are the important ones,

the ones that define the times we live in & that, logically,
we are the most important people alive right now

& that our thoughts are more colorful & exotic & sweeping
than anyone else’s. Then a lightning bolt

strikes the table & cuts it jaggedly in two,
our resulting fear the most spectacular & sensational fear ever expressed.

Who hasn’t felt this way about their friends? Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that way about friends from high school, college, grad school, work, my book club, at the grocery store, at the movies...there are times—few and far between—good times, when the right song is playing, the light is catching just right, and we feel on the cusp of greatness. Most of those times only last a minute or two and then we return to something completely mediocre, but those moments of unlimited potential and belief in oneself and others are at the core of these poems.

Life isn’t all busting through walls and being incredible, though, for this cast of “we”. There are also times when Green fights with Red (the friends are all named by color), when feelings get hurt, and it all seems like it’s about to fall apart. “:Free for All:” ends:

Green secretly changes Red’s mailing address
so that Red will always walk back lonely from the mailbox.

My female friend thinks these are the end times,
that the starfish who loses a limb won’t grow it back,
but instead will devour the others
out of a misguided sense of symmetry.

These poems strike me as a treatise on the best and worst of the poetry community. At our best, we are a self-sufficient, ass-kicking, brilliant dynamo that cannot be stopped from filling the universe with the largeness of our beauty. At our worst, we can be a back-biting, self-promoting, juggernaut of jealousy, content to tear this whole thing down if it gets us our due attention.

Pritts’s poems embody this duality of community and the individual in much more nuanced terms while the absurdity of the speaker’s circumstance, as well as Pritts’s imaginative and unexpected imagery, keep us from ever truly believing or disbelieving the purported greatness or pettiness of this group of friends.

There is another section of the book, “Big Crisis,” most of which appeared as a chapbook from Forklift, Ink. In this section, the collective gives way to the individual, complete with fears and daily problems. “Any patch of land with a giant grenade buried in it / knows exactly how I feel, like I’m about to be / all up in the air,” begins “A Day in the Life.” These poems may be more introspective than those of the other two sections, but there remains Pritts’s twists of reality, as in “Requiem for the End of Time!”:

I was led onto the stage & told to sing

my last. I inhaled & what I inhaled

turned me into a robot, my limbs

clunky & hollow, my chest filled

with gears & pistons where

breathing & love used to be.

I have a glowing faith

that eventually I will leave all this in the past.

The poems in the “Big Crisis” section of the book are heartfelt and insecure, sometimes optimistic and sometimes desperate. All the machismo of the group is gone from these poems and replaced with frailty and a hope that the speaker won’t shatter.

As editor of H_NGM_N, Pritts knows all about the psychology of the poetry, but these poems are clearly more than just a profile of poetry’s insides—and just to be clear I’m not ascribing any of the above emotions to Pritts himself, in truth, it’s pretty obvious I put as much if not more of myself into my reading of these poems than Pritts did in writing them. These poems speak to the place of ambition in human life, the comfort and discomforts of being in a group, and the inspiring potential to change everything as long as we can face the futility of our attempts. Maybe Pritts ends it better himself:

My friends are scattered to the winds & my hair grows grey,
thins & falls, each strand a plea that calls out
so clear it is like the first bird sound in the quiet morning.

- Dan Brady

http://www.barrelhousemag.com/growler//Reviews/Sensational_Spectacular.htm

Sensational Spectacular in NewPages

2008-05-02T05:16:00.000-07:00

By Cyan James

Nate Pritts lives in a sealed chamber. At least, I think he does, or wishes he did. Whether the voice in his poems is his own or an invented persona is unclear, but the question is soon overwhelmed by the noisy glass cubicle of his poetic consciousness – things don’t hesitate to boom, explode, and self-destruct. The place simply simmers with internal threat. After all, volcanoes are exploding here, dinosaurs are waiting, lighting strikes, the roller coaster won’t stop, the wind won’t stop, violent floods of emotion assail him, and the light is dangerously perfect. But you only know it because he tells you so. You can’t see it. You can’t break through those glass barriers – no one can. Not the woman Pritts longs after with potent intensity, and not the nameless friends he apparently lives amongst.

Pritts’s poems are landscapes of bottled chaos: this is the eternal now he creates in his poems, where he wakes every day to a treadmill of relentless turbulence while the world continues to wend its determined way beyond his barriers, where he is not seen or thought of.

This one-way mirror effect lends both perspective and claustrophobia to Pritts’s precise, immaculately rendered work. His psyche seems to reel with exhaustion and yet with certain joy – to outward appearances, he seems a man stripped by circumstances and left bereft of anything save his frayed, twitching nerve-ends – yet Pritts’s voice is that of elation as well, of ebullience in the expressive powers of description itself:

My friends & I got ourselves trapped in individual-sized
prisons. We could no longer perform our secret handshake,
kept distant from each other by the unique quality of the bars.
The prisons themselves seemed to grow smaller as night
came on & then, with a blink, they were gone. We were ecstatic until,
in daylight, we realized the bars had formed snug to our bodies,
that we’d wear them always & unnoticeably.

A beautiful description there, one, which starts with implied threat, travels through a moment of glory, then introduces something unsettling. In fact, Pritts seems to revel in introducing an unsettling tone throughout his manuscript. He wants to impress you, to stay tough but to get through somehow, to find a space where longing and frank need appear touching and honest instead of plainly weak and naked. He can startle you with his closeness while simultaneously revealing the vague threat of danger we shelter in all our relationships, as in “Without a Net”:

all the different aspects of myself that I used to hold dear
are trapped in clear bubbles; somewhere, each one
is getting smashed open & what comes out comes out
shivering & afraid. The sunlight turns orange.
For your love, I’d cross from one mountain to another,
walking slow on the long rope bridge to your heart
& I wouldn’t turn back even if I saw you
trying to undo the knots that hold me up.

His deliberate, delicate vulnerability also reveals the way his narrator explores the fragmentation of personality. To Pritts, the self is not complete. It has all sorts of ways of expressing its varying facets, and refuses to be tamped down to just one “personality.” Pritts will acknowledge this explicitly in some places, but in others, it’s left to readers to discern what’s going on. For example, Pritts mentions a variety of “friends,” identifying them only by the name of a color, creating characters who might actually be shades of a single personality, one that is terrifyingly coalescing into a lonely whole. This interpretation perhaps assumes too much, but whether Pritts is talking about friendships with others or fragmentation within himself, he’s a master at delineating the shadow lands of despair, as in “Runaway Room”:

What I hate is when my friends & I
are all having a serious conversation
about appropriately serious subjects
when—out of nowhere—the floor of the room
rips itself out of the building & hurtles
into orbit above the Earth,
creating too vast a distance for us to bridge.

The poems in Sensational Spectacular are full of despair that whispers in one’s ear even as it prepares to launch a surprise napalm attack. It’s this finely keyed emotional intensity, sometimes soft-pedaled and sometimes surreal, that drives the lush simplicity of Pritts’s language, and makes reading this collection such a delicious experience.

http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/2008_05/may2008_book_reviews.htm#sensational_spectacular

erica kaufman. censory impulse. Big Game Books.

2008-05-02T05:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.reenhead.com/biggame/biggame.html

The self is accumulated, constructed by the thoughts & actions of our life as it is lived, & Kaufman is able to present this quotidian reality as anything but thanks to the shockingly clear & unadorned language of the poems in her book Censory Impulse. Here, the reader confronts a speaker whose consciousness evolves in a traceable way, & in a process that is deeply human:

so let’s talk. about something.
deep and wonderful.
(4.3)

You can almost hear the rush of childish enthusiasm in the first sentence, that pure drive for communication, clarified with an equally naïve suggested topic (“something”). What drives this book far into your head where it can resonate with the weight & essence of its sheer accuracy is its piercing clarity. All we need to do is talk, just talk, & it will be “deep and wonderful.”

These kinds of insights abound in Censory Impulse, which makes the book more like a reminder than news from the frontline. I’m more comfortable here than I am in most books, because there is a way in which I become the speaker. Without an overwhelming “I,” or a syntax aiming more to dazzle than delight, Kaufman is able to create a kind of participatory poetry. The insights enacted here are mine, too, since they are laid out like math problems with all but the answers chalked in.

http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/the-caedmon-room-iii/

Joseph Bradshaw. The Way Birds Become. Weather Press.

2008-04-01T10:59:00.001-07:00

http://weatherpress.blogspot.com

One of the most focused and fully realized books I’ve read in a long time, Bradshaw’s The Way Birds Become is an aesthetic project that far surpasses the constraints it sets for itself. Each poem begins with or builds from a line captured from another writer’s poem & the effect of this cacophonous chirping is surprisingly unified; even with these poems “all broken, singing / different songs” the reader gets a sense of one epic movement. The pleasure here is tied generally to two effects: 1) that of seeing theory/constraint put into practice successfully & 2) that of following the workings of one mind on a single, & constantly blooming, topic.

In practice, each of these poems are full of mysterious aphorisms, hazy folk wisdom from the back of the brain that feels right:

If you look out a window from within a bird

you’ll be frightened by the idea

that it’s an eye […]

(C—)

That’s mostly how these poems develop, direct statements with syntactic or grammatical clauses added that either clarify or change the underlying ideas. These poems are almost devoid of ego; though occasionally they seem to reference something particular – some moment recollected or some situational emotion – the stakes here are decidedly processual, in motion, each poem presented as “evidence / of a sounding.” Even without the development or intimacies of an easily locatable “I” speaker, the poems here are conversational, visionary without all the heady pronouncements & unapproachable exteriors.

Bradshaw ends the poem “E—Hitchcock, The Birds (1963)” with a kind of explanation / apologia for the collection as a whole:

[…] birds become roads after they’re

transformed into and from the weather they once forecasted.

The Way Birds Become exists in the balance of inspiration & impulse, & demonstrates that the surest way inside can be facilitated by forces from the outside.

http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/the-caedmon-room-nate-pritts-chapbook-reviews-2/

Maryrose Larkin. inverse. nine muses books.

2008-04-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

mw9muses@teleport.com

Built out of obsessive clarifications & a desperate compulsion to reference, to provide support for, inverse presents the reader with an almost completely effaced speaker whose main concern is the attempt to know & communicate. Rather than residing in the self & structuring that self around & through the perceptions of a central consciousness, the poem(s) takes as its subject the very logic of knowing. When we read the phrase “between theories waking life” we’re forced to understand that this work is asking us to integrate our capacities for “logic” & “reason” in the Romantic sense – our abilities to think & feel.

Throughout, the provisional nature of knowledge is what seems to be under the most scrutiny; if the speaker has to go to such great lengths to accurately articulate anything, then is knowledge itself flawed. Is knowing something helpful or even necessary?

The name of this intersection is frost broken up

heavy spar reign heavy phrase ravishment

strands careening

let us unfurl instead: weather

see also river

see also self and the less restricted sense

I’d have a hard time tracing what the speaker is getting at here, in the traditional sense, but if we give up on that, of ever knowing exactly what, then I think we’re closer to the point. Larkin’s project here seems to be the interrogation of knowledge, creating the sense that we can achieve a larger scale of perception both through intellect & outside of it. “Come,” the poem tells us:

[…] expound breath intelligible

come shine

come abound unfold in and about go

http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/the-caedmon-room-nate-pritts-chapbook-reviews/

Dan Machlin. Dear Body:. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007

2008-04-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

Through missives dotted with lackadaisical phrases as well as more abstract convictions, Dan Machlin has written a book where the overall integrity is nested in the form itself, an epistolary certainty that this “cluster bomb of a man” can deliver a sustained and unified self (“Letter 1”).

The epistolary form itself is an important element to the book; Machlin couches all of his lyric utterances in the context of being addressed. Beyond that, the mixing of distinct registers within these communiqués keeps the reader constantly alert. There is a linguistic fuzziness to some of the work—not that the referents are confused, but that it seems, at times, as if the consciousness of the poem is unsure of what it wants to say, is still finding its sense. Take these lines from “Letter in which it is Explained”:

We were always speaking so small it snowed
I thought or the occult of
having each of us in this place.

There is definitely a procession to the logic here, but it is frustrated by the fact that it doesn’t quite add up. These moments, though, of quiet yet dazzling mystery coupled with an oddly confident progression, are part of what helps the reader construct a unified sense of Machlin’s overall project.

Another key is in the constant questioning that serves as the ostensible base for many of the poems. “Letter 2” begins:

So far in this insignificance I can’t say how I left you. How I felt the last dance
of a pulse—a cloud and—as a cliché mid-sentence—proverbial stuttering.

Here we have the same type of diction already noted; the first sentence offers a kind of bombastic statement that ends in muted defeat and leaves us without any real intellectual grasp of its meaning. But the trajectory of this poem reveals something deeper, as we find on arriving at the last lines:

Lately I have been feeling estranged from you again. Doubtful
you ever existed.

Leaving aside the larger (and here completely unimportant) concern of whether “you” is a real person, the overall dynamic of loss and uncertainty helps further define Machlin’s purpose.

Dear Body: is a rich book. There is real pleasure in reading the poems (see the inclusive virtuosity of “Fifth Letter” and the counter-intuitive beauty of “Waste Stream”), but there is also the greater challenge inherent in ascertaining whether we are more than the sum of the parts we can easily name and tabulate. As Machlin writes in “Fifth Letter”, “No we were not just pleasant beings gazing into the sun.” This book is offered as evidence to our complexity.

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2008spring/machlin.shtml

Sensational Spectacular in Bookslut

2008-03-03T10:13:00.000-08:00

By: Olivia Cronk

I admit that I -- as, I suspect, many readers -- tend toward odd connections based on coincidence, i.e. a song is stuck in my head, and I figure out how it connects to the novel I am reading… or I catch a write-up about the possibility of a multiverse and I come to think of that lofty physics concept as my own malleable metaphor, easily and carelessly applied to John Donne or Franza Kafka. Or whatever. It’s a lazy habit, but I chalk it up to serving the larger goals of thought and expression.

This brings me to Nate Pritts and the newly-released-on-DVD film, The King of Kong. There is something about the effect of combining the two. The film is a surprisingly warm and endearing documentary (ostensibly about the battle to be title-holder for most points -- in the game of Donkey Kong -- in the realm of competitive arcade gaming, but actually about a wonderful, extraordinary ordinary-man and his extraordinary ordinary-life). And here’s Pritts: “Living my life in the distant pink/ buildings of Backgroundsville, I long/ for the full-color foreground.”

On one hand, the connection is surface-y: Pritts uses the language, tone, and awkward silliness of a 1950s sci-fi-comicbook-pow-bang-robot-techical-failure world. And, given what I saw of Donkey Kong and its arcade peers, that’s exactly the sort of aesthetic that emerged in 1980s videogame stylings. On the other hand, the film really suggests a microcosm (within this tiny world of arcade competition exists the most delightful weirdoes and personal dramas) to create a portrait of one man. And that portrait, as an act of film, is, for lack of a more interesting word, touching… And back to Pritts: Sensational Spectacular is a nicely organized collection (three parts, loose narrative arc, pleasurable images) that does two things (amongst many other poetic tasks) very, very well: 1) by recontextualizing the aforementioned notions and nodding ambivalently to the physical reality most Americans now live in, Pritts is able to banish the quotidian -- and in doing so, to make brand new the struggle of one man against the infringing coldness of modern life, and 2) Pritts manages to make this book as much about poetics and the subculture that writers share as it is about existential meaning and individual expression. So, to summarize so far: where The King of Kong uses the strange “landscape” of competitive arcade gaming to reveal an exceptionally interesting man (you’ll see when you watch the movie), Pritts uses his own writing prompt (a Kenneth Koch quote and the skeleton of a bizarre outer space B-movie set) as a way of revealing genuine emotion. And, in many ways, Pritts’s speaker is an everyman, heart wrenchingly casting his powerless fist up into the air as the flying machines and automated check-out lines further crush his soul.

When I say that Pritts banishes the quotidian, I mean: through the lens of his poetics, ordinary life is stranger and funnier than it is with clear vision. Because of this, the reader just sort of falls into someone’s narrative. It all seems reasonable enough, even as Pritts drags you right into death-ray beams and green monsters and tentacles dropping from the sky to squeeze you. There is a bit of the 1980s child here: the overly intellectualized, ironic, gallows humor-ish dread that my generation uses for banter. And it works excellently. The poems are often packed on a page, almost like an e-mail printout you save for sentimental reasons. Here’s the opening page:

:World of No Return!:

My friends & I, we’ve got it all
figured out. We play a game

where we sit facing each other, stone-
faced, unblinking &, after one wrong move,

we watch a staticy purple light engulf
that poor one who won’t come back no more.

:Those Ghost Hands Reaching:

Each of us has a job: pull, push, ram

headlong. Not one of us alone could hope to keep
the shiny gold door closed by their lonesome self!
Way up above anyone’s head we see it

swinging open, those two chalk-colored hands
reaching through. It’s easy to assume hostile intent.
What good has ever come from ghost hands

reaching through a floating gold door?

None, I think, Mr. Pritts. You are right to be scared. As Sensational Spectacular’s narrative unfolds, our funny protagonist and his “friends” deal with all of the things that people deal with (romance vs. love, jobs, feelings of alienation tempered by warm friendships, negotiations with the self in everyday life, imagined and real enemies) and then they slowly come undone. The protagonist makes no qualms about being terrorized by life, about feeling anxious and strange. In one particularly successful moment, he feels a burdensome disconnect between himself and his clothes (his uniform out in the real world); I can’t think of a friend of mine who hasn’t had to give him/herself a good talking-to in order to figure out how to maintain integrity in the space of a job and young-adult existence.

Pritts opens the book with a Kenneth Koch quote about failing to properly place his friends in his poems. Pritts’s use of “friends” is sometimes, I think, for mere story-telling, and other times, for the purpose of revealing that his intellectual peers are the people who provide models for his life. We rely on our friends to illustrate our own ideas for us, and we become versions of their ideas. It seems appropriate, also, to consider the pragmatic: as we age, our relationships with our “friends” must change. The perpetual hanging-out of twenty- and thirty-somethings does not meaning make. The self must break away. Eventually. Somehow.

As with the protagonist of The King of Kong, I find Pritts’s speaker so loveable, so very much experiencing the struggles of this place in time… that the little robotic heart in me just aches: “Lost in the woods, there are two ways to save myself/: breathe the green of the trees & become more rooted/ or scream my name & try to punch myself out./ Either way, I’m left alone/ realizing that I wasn’t what I wanted.” There are a handful of longer, meatier poems that build and build and build to lovely effect. From “In the Hot Seat”:

You end up somewhere better than you started, a buzzing hope
that the bees who make your honey will finish what they’ve begun,
that love plus love can build a lasting machine, a souped-up contraption
to get its occupants safely out of their own heads
and into some gleaming hope mobile, some holy holy structure.
When you begin to ascend those divine stairs, your head
clears, you learn to become a better pilot of the contraption you’ve got.

Pritts’s story does not end happily. The protagonist is, indeed, left alone to face the passing of time and the sheer sadness of being human.

So go rent The King of Kong as a complement to Pritts’s book. And make a pie, or watch a really cheesy sunset, or eat some nachos.

Sensational Spectacular by Nate Pritts
BlazeVox Books
ISBN: 193428906X
69 pages

Buy this book >>>

http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2008_02_012486.php

Sensational Spectacular in Publishers Weekly

2007-12-27T19:37:00.000-08:00

Nate Pritts's full-length debut, Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX [www.blazevox.org], $14 (69p) ISBN 978-1-934289-06-8), collects sequences and short poems recounting the fantastical adventures of the narrator and his “friends,” differentiated only by color, as in “Blue folds himself into a ball when he thinks the universe is holding goodies.” Science fiction and surreal imagery fold, too, into the often humorous, but no less weighty drama Pritts spins. Readers will come for the humor but stay for the genuine heartache.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6513004.html

Sensational Spectacular in Brooklyn Rail

2007-12-27T19:36:00.000-08:00

Nate Pritts, Sensational Spectacular
(Blaze VOX, 2007)
Ah, to be young and full of energy, as “feet barely touch/ the ground… running straight out.” Nate Pritts writes like a receiver barreling down the field to catch the long bomb. He’s a conquistador in a funhouse. He’s out to explore the universe and carry on. The collection begins with a quote by Kenneth Koch who “never mentioned… friends” and then presents 24 catchy poems about friends. Trips, games and conversations shift from quirky patter to philosophical dictums. Grand ideas evolve from communal pursuits.
In “Outcasts of Infinity” Pritts notes “whenever one… gets down in the dumps/ it’s up to the rest of us to come to the rescue.”

The next section, called “Big Crisis,” shows Pritts to be a metaphorical metaphysicist (think of John Donne). He starts with implausible images and turns them into elegant equations. “Each thought in my head is a missile/ … and each thought chunk is an explosion of me.” Several thoughts and “Booms” later, and Pritts has reinvented an amorous entreaty.

Prefacing the last section, “The Brave and the Bold,” Pritts cites Coleridge: “Well they are gone, and here I must remain.” Yet he returns to the shorter friend poems. The only problem with this book is the repetition. Too many friends and fast feet.

http://brooklynrail.org/2007/11/books/poetrynov07

Chapbook Round Up

2007-12-18T10:50:00.000-08:00

From H_NGM_N #4.

From H_NGM_N #5.

Cate Marvin. Fragment of the Head of a Queen. Sarabande: 2007

2007-12-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

Cate Marvin has crafted a dynamic follow-up to her first collection. The poems here are packed with sensuous language yoked to an almost compulsively competent and direct voice, convinced of itself if nothing else.

Marvin’s style seems deceptively personal, one might almost say confessional. But the truth is far tougher than that. Some of these poems seem crafted around the emotional utterance but it is Marvin’s deft handling of the personal that gives these poems texture. In “Lines for a Mentor,” the “I” pronoun exists like punctuation, all this personal talk disguising the fact that we’re not really reading into a life, or even a particular event. The poem here communicates a psyche, a consciousness, in lines like “I am lying at the bottom of a clothes hamper,” or “I never wanted to build a house without nails,/I never wanted to bend a horseshoe’s glowing iron.” The dazzle of these lines is that they are inscrutable as literal talk about life as we know it but still there is such stern emotional truth that we feel the meaning even as we register our inability to comprehend it.

Moments like this abound in the book, gutsy moments where Marvin trusts the movement of the poem enough to know that, sometimes, it doesn’t matter what’s being said so much as how. What results is an intricately unified text and a speaker who is fully developed but whose actions, reactions, whose very thoughts and thought processes, are unpredictable yet definite and certain.

This allows Marvin to write some fabulously open lines, with bare, emotional moments that might come off melodramatically were the tone of the book overall not controlled so well. The speaker of “Scenes from the Battle of Us” says:

I am like a table
that eats its own legs off
because it’s fallen
in love with the floor.

I could spend some words admiring the expert lineation here, breaks falling on grammatical pauses in such a way as to emphasize the halting nature of such an admission. But really most impressive here is the very fact that this moment is powerful. The speaker here, and throughout the book, is so consumed with and by love that the reader is genuinely moved by the pure emotion.

Truthfully, this is a complex book. For every emotional statement as that above, there are lines and lines of cool intellectualism; for every open hand reaching for connection, there is the violence of lines like “…I’ll let him keep/the scissors. He’ll find them in his back” (“Gaslight”). Complex, challenging but, ultimately, rewarding. Marvin’s real success in this book comes from writing poetry of the body but not from a particular body, brainy writing that doesn’t come from a particular person’s brain. These are poems that register a deep emotional narrative, poems where intuitive truths are shaped in formal logic and everything breaks down in the face of pure human love “as the ribs in my cage, one by one, begin to snap” (“A Fainting Couch”).

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2007winter/print.shtml

Lisa Fishman. The Happiness Experiment. Ahsahta: 2007

2007-12-18T10:41:00.000-08:00

Contemporary society—with our blurred selves subject to thousands of distractions and interruptions—would be Wordsworth’s nightmare, his heart already grieving more than 200 years ago to see “what man has made of man” (“Lines Written in Early Spring”). The poems in Lisa Fishman’s third collection are presented as one possible road to salvation. This is a collection of intense lyrics that seem intent on physicality, action, and THE SOUL, poems that work to distance our consumed/consumer selves from what this world has become and return it to a state of wonder in which true perception/connection can take place.

The Happiness Experiment opens with the long poem “Midsummer,” the apparent disjointedness of its sections putting the reader into a frenetic haze that never allows sure mental or emotional footing, barraging the reader instead with supposition, possibility and metaphysical mysteriousness:

The sunflower hung over its shadow, the sun
thinking shadow, the sun

The flowerhead was made of seeds, the seedbed
ringed with petals something fled

These lines are charged with a super-sensuous attention that pays off with the language and feel of insight, though without any real clarification. The implication here is that attentiveness paves the way for perception; through the tumbling syntax, we can see that this process is not controlled or controllable. That simple observation can lead to complex perception is a widely liberating thought, and it leads to shocking revelation in a sequence that is initiated outside the self.

It’s this quality that is most striking throughout the book, and again and again, it comes from quiet attention to the things of this world. The poem “Argument” ends asserting “The leaves raked sure/into grass against we lay there, ungloved hands/of trees in the argument part earth part sky” frustrating the reader’s desire for grammatical closure but leaving us instead with the transcendent vision of the trees reaching. There is a piercing confidence in the language as it shapes these intuitive truths. When the poem “The Fall” begins “The raspberries are very sad,” we believe it and take it at face value. This kind of emotional impressionism, wherein unexplained moments generate huge dividends in the reader’s feeling apparatus, is another signature of this collection.

Fishman’s work is distinctive and important not only because of her technique but because of what she is saying. It seems the purpose here isn’t so much to present answers, or to wring hands (as Wordsworth might have done) over our current mess, but to encourage readers, those who are baffled or intrigued or somewhere else entirely, to think intuitively and emotionally. Through poems that consistently utilize physical and natural objects as the center for slippery and hazily defined abstractions, Fishman’s experiment provides some interesting and happy results.

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2007summer/print.shtml

The Armory Show at DUSIE #4

2007-12-18T10:34:00.000-08:00

When I clicked the link to DUSIE #4, an online journal originating from Switzerland, there was an audible thump. Just like that, I had 42 chapbooks sitting on my screen.

For the purposes of this review, the term “chapbook” is meant to refer only to an aesthetically or arbitrarily selected poem or group of poems. Though some (but not all) of the “book art” aspects of a chapbook are lost in the online format, & though these aspects can certainly compound, supplement, contradict or supersede the aesthetics of the poems themselves, we’ll leave those discussions aside.

Also, for the purposes of this review, the term “thump” is meant to signify the intellectual, creative & physical heft of these many works metaphorically landing on my desktop.

What DUSIE has done is not entirely new. There are several e-chaps out there (duration press has some nice ones & even my own THE HAPPY SEASONS is an online chap). But by producing an “issue” of all e-chaps, by producing a staggering 42 e-chaps at one time (!), DUSIE has done what all literary magazines, online or in print, hope to do. They’ve created & defined an aesthetic moment making this a kind of Armory Show for the chapbook in 2006.

You see, chapbooks are hot right now. They’re in.

I’d like to propose, first off, that all of the chapbooks in DUSIE #4 are worth reading. I’d like to follow that up by saying that all chapbooks are worth reading. I’m not saying that they’ll all be worthwhile, that they’ll all teach us something about our craft or ourselves or our world, but I do think the form itself, these compressed bursts, deserve our attention because they are, in action, a form of thought, scattered or unified, lax or rigorous; chapbooks are about as close as we can come to inhabiting a boiled down consciousness different from our own.

*

Take Chris Rizzo’s e-chap, In the Quells. Rizzo is no stranger to the chapbook form; he runs Anchorite Press, producing many fine print chapbooks, & has several chapbooks to his credit as a writer as well (see a review of the most recent of these, ZING from CARVE Editions, in H_NGM_N #5). In the Quells is a unified utterance, a burst of consciousness. It is a “project,” with big ambition and broad scope, using the “saleable titles” from Gregory Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death as springboard.

These prose poems are best read as a kind of applied linguistic physics. Rizzo accelerates the words like atoms, at lightning speed, & then spins them around a few times before concussively smashing them together in an attempt to generate some wholly new particle.
But before you think the work here is all head, Rizzo has inserted “the Kid” as his likeable Everyman, the controlling consciousness of these poems. Every bit as scattered & discombobulated as Berryman’s Henry, the Kid has developed a way of thinking that suits him in these times:

Go broke solo, rack up bullshit repetitions, and spit at your
god of choice. Managing messes in America incorporated
powers of buck stop nowhere. And in the breaks he can’t
catch one. But he can’t keep going, but off course he goes […]

(“Pipe Butter”)

This chapbook fully explores how our lives lived in “this kingdom of is-ing won’t leave us / at be.” Rizzo’s syntax is always so rich & generative that it’s hard to tell what comes first, the thought or the word, but the “riff punk” language of these poems lands us somewhere fully human, “locked in this droning, this story, this string we / call breathing.”

*

Heart on a Tripod, the e-chap from Kaia Sand, involves the reader immediately in the physical particulars of identity. Using a muscular line as guide, this poem courses over & through different territories of body & spirit, of public & private space.

The truths related in this work are the simple ones, but are dignified & complicated the lens of representation. How do we say what we need to say? The speaker here resorts to recitation, a tone equal parts elegy & hope:

& her legs become her legs

become a heap of bodies &

hopeless. bodies hit bodies

& they fall that way

It is almost impossible to locate or name a speaker in this poem, to give a face to this body, though the poem itself is sustained by questions of identity, the human form, & sheer wonderment at “every living thing, impossibly so.”

*

Sarah Mangold’s Picture of the Basket consists of two weeks worth of daily (or near daily) meditations / reveries / happenings. This creates an instant sense of progression for the reader – the relentlessly forward motion of time – but Mangold chooses to exploit this is some very interesting ways. As Day 1 suggests, our lives are full of “tasks and arrivals” in pursuit of “a definitive the,” some solid ground to stand on. Still, “it is possible to disappear.”

Even though the reader expects to know everything, diaristically, to follow a narrative, things are left out, as they must inevitably be. There are constant elisions, shuffle steps, flat out gaps. Riffing on Olson’s “triple theories” found in his essays “Proprioception,” “Projective Verse” & “Human Universe,” Mangold is more concerned with what poetry can’t do – “we couldn’t conjure / pumpkin festival at the oval” – the misses & the lack.

In poetry that stunningly trusts the reader to be fully awake & engaged, Mangold creates the kind of field from which all things should be possible but, facturously, aren’t.

*

It should be noted that each of these chapbooks was produced in a print edition of 50 copies; each author was responsible for his/her own book & mailed a copy of his/her chapbook to everyone else in the “kollektiv.” Imagine this as the new model for poetry “production & distribution.” A giant happening such as this one – the online thump of this – & the scene that is created, the group. Poets writing poems. Poets publishing/disseminating poems. Poets reading poems. This is a good way to start, a big shock that lasts &, hopefully, has repercussive effects.

http://thediagram.com/6_4/rev_chapbooks.html

Ian Randall Wilson. Theme of the Parabola. Hollyridge Press: 2005

2007-12-18T10:33:00.000-08:00

Ian Randall Wilson. Theme of the Parabola. (2005)

Hollyridge Press http://members.aol.com/hollyridgepress/
P. O. Box 2872
Venice, CA 90294
38 pp. $10.

We have to take Ian Randall Wilson at his word when he says things like “I’m here to document the normal” as he does in the poem “I Gloss the History of the Human Tongue” though these poems all seem to organize themselves in a technicolor war against the quotidian. And I think we can believe Wilson when he says, very delicately, “Let us listen to the voice of the instant” as he does in “Learning from Lumpiness” though the voice in these poems is a wildly ranging voice, reaching its big hairy human arms far back into the past and pushing their way into the future.
I think we take Ian Randall Wilson at his word because there is such confidence and fluency in his voice, in the active consciousness that springs to life in each of these poems. His word, finally, is all we really have; it is also all that is necessary. Look at these lines from “Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Slip Covers” for example:

I imagine a weight hanging from a string.
I image the weight grows with time.
Poor string.
Only three equations are necessary for chaos
but at least four occasions are required.
This is one of them […]

Here is a controlling consciousness, a speaker, I don’t mind being controlled by. I’m glad to go where he takes me, amazed at the linguistic virtuosity that takes the verb “imagine” and translates it into a new verb “image.” I’m bursting with sympathy for a string (!) and I’m overjoyed at the transmutation from “equations” to “occasions” and the deadpan finale that serves as a springboard into the deep water. I can almost imagine that Wilson, too, was overjoyed. See, I feel an inventively provisional undercurrent to these poems. These are not poems with outlines or preconceived grand themes. These are poems that speak in “the voice of an instant,” but it is a timeless instant; these are poems of documentation, but it is proof of the human potential for constant ingenuity.
Of course, the now is a lovely and varied place, but why sing? Well, “In an absence of because\the head just path sometimes.” I think that’s the only smug answer we need. Why not sing? Why not skitter and scat our way towards some kind of understanding:

That line was what makes the next line possible
that and a vocabulary to describe
the underlying patter of life— […]
(“An Illustrated Text Aimed At Engineers”)

Whatever the understanding is, whatever the meaning behind the patter, these poems are confident that it can be talked out, that we’ll only get there by trying. The poems are fueled by the self, are indeed self-fueling, and they’re guzzling it all down quick, burning themselves up before they burn out.

http://www.typomag.com/burningchair/2007/04/ian-randall-wilson-theme-of-parabola.html

Michael Sikkema. CODE OVER CODE. Lame House Press: 2006

2007-12-18T10:32:00.000-08:00

“One Truly Human Act” —Sikkema & Simple Wants

Despite a surface flash, a linguistic rupture that permeates some of the poems (or poetic utterances) that make up CODE OVER CODE, Sikkema work is a profoundly human one, a searching utterance.
The book begins simply enough, with the controlling consciousness, the center of the vortex, proclaiming, “I wanted everything with you to be nicely round in a square of berry patch,/dirt and sky.” So much of what this book, finally, generates for the reader is initiated here, a revving that spans the length of the collection. Here is urge towards coupled with wariness of; there is a cynicism here that wants the “round” to exist in the “square,” that wants the impossibility non-conformity within conformity & is still naïve enough to think that, if it can be achieved, there will be a nicety to it all. The book, then, the rest of the poems, are notes from the war, the speaker’s realization that this cannot be—implied syntactically already: I wanted…
If the world view of CODE OVER CODE is “romantic,” if it can be said to aspire to “organic unity,” the project of CODE OVER CODE, what the poems accomplish, can be said to reveal to us an interrogation of that Romantic sensibility & the fact that we live in a world that is openly antagonistic to it. Such simple & lovely & intimate whispers such as “Here is where I am looking at you/in me” have no place in the new mechanisms of poetic language, which use the gears of irony & fear & distrust to spin our selves further & further from real human connections.
Sikkema’s speaker asks “Is there one truly human act left?” The direct answer seems to be no, or at least that it is decidedly the kind of act we want to be remembered for. Pure animal functioning does not make a human & I stand with Sikkema, chagrined & angry, baffled that we live in an age where poetry that enacts the purer functions of emotion (including, yes, love) is viewed with suspicion.

http://www.typomag.com/burningchair/2006/09/michael-sikkema-code-over-code-lame.html

Matt Rasmussen. FINGERGUN. Kitchen Press: 2006

2007-12-18T10:29:00.000-08:00

“Suddenly and Suddenly”: All Those Important Moments—

The delicate compression of Rasmussen’s narrative & clear-headed voice in FINGERGUN carefully & discretely amp up the emotional power of these lyrics. Here there are moments considered, juxtaposed, and then held up “against a future/that never arrives.” Rasmussen locates the power of his work

In the moment between
what happens
and what doesn’t […]

(“Suddenly, the Poem Is”)

Figuring out how this poetry works is the key to its heart, really, which is deep & complex. The work throughout this sharply designed book demonstrates a range of earnest sentiment presented as a plea. These things happened & are crucial but they just as easily could not have happened & what would have happened in place of that happening would be just as crucial. Each poem is, then, a kind of question: does what I’m feeling make sense to you? Is it ok to feel this way? Is there something else I’m missing?
“Please read this and tell me/how much it moved you” (“Titled”) is both a central question for the speaker & an ultimately unimportant one. It’s as if the sensibility here needs support & an acknowledgement of human-ness. But it is that moment of bare & open address that resonates, that purely hopeful need for connection.
A poem like “Dream after Suicide” is a good example of the shifting registers in these poems, a kind of scenic estrangement shackled to this plain spoken emotional depth. Here, the speaker deals with the image of his brother “in the refrigerator light/drinking milk that poured/out of his head.” Such a jarring juxtaposition forces the reader to reconcile the quotidian nature of the scene with the shockingly macabre figure of the brother. Except the moment is decidedly not macabre or sensational, or even especially pitiable. It’s all presented in a matter of fact tone, a diction that is equally suited for dealing with the apparition of the brother as it is the weekend sports scores. The main concern here is connection:

I wanted to put my finger
into the hole,

feel the smooth channel
he escaped through[…]
These poems show that the future never arrives because it is always becoming the present, something we can’t consider & prepare for but must live & live through.

http://www.typomag.com/burningchair/2006/04/matt-rasmussen.html