CHAPBOOKS by KENNY TANEMURA, MATTHEW THORBURN, MELISSA ELEFTHERION and MARGARET BASHAAR

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

MAO'S PEARS by Kenny Tanemura
(Tinfish, Hawai'i, 2011)

A Green River in Spring: Poems by Matthew Thorburn

(Autumn House Press/Coal Hill Review, 2015)

PIGTAIL DUTY by Melissa Eleftherion

(Dancing Girl Press & Studio, 2015)

LETTERS FROM ROOM 27 OF THE GRAND MIDWAY HOTEL by Margaret Bashaar
(Blood Pudding Press, 2011)

Chapbooks, Mini-Reviewed

Kenny Tanemura's single-poem chap, MAO'S PEARS, came out in 2011.  I read it then and have been unable to forget it. It is, among other things, one of the best long poems I've read and experienced.  It makes sense that its existence has haunted me over the years.  Here's how it begins, the first stanza:

"If you want to know

          the taste

of a pear, you must

     change the pear

by eating it yourself," Mao said,

So right there is the call for engagement--a lesson that continues to be timely in today's recent controversies about the OTHER, race or otherwise.  The poem continues:

meaning you must,

          by biting

into the fruit, enter the conversation

     of a pear, and convince it

to change its pear-mind,

or at least alter it in

          some way--

perhaps an inclination

     or a way of decorating

a home could be improved.

You can't really know

          a pear

or anything, for that matter--

     an eel, green peas, wafers, tomatoes

--unless you change it,

because letting these things

          stay 

what they already are,

     untainted by our knowledge,

keeps us in a state of

ignorance.

The notion, as a general concept, goes against another seemingly admirable idea of being able to see someone or something the way that someone/something is -- that they exist or have properties not dependent on you seeing them:

Of course a lot can be explained by the poem's particular context: Mao, a revolution, his times:

And Mao said, “If you

          want to know

the theory and methods

     of revolution

you must take part in the revolution.”

But taking the matter beyond Mao -- to, say, pears which is a  metaphor (perhaps) for a more general human condition and why this poem has lingered -- there are no definitive or general (even a revolution?) answers for how one may engage with the world. 

Mao trusted the coyote and wound up

on a country road. A random fiesta

with trumpets came out of the woods.

But perhaps the key is the willingness to continue, to engage?  To be (ultimately) unable to put down the brush even when, at times, the meditation exhausts one into wanting to put down the brush?

What did it mean? Some kind of redemption

or pointless excavation? They said

Mao was a penitent type, but he saw me

trying to put down my brush.

  

**

Never (or so I’m tempted to claim) has delicacy been so palpable as the poems that make up Matthew Thorburn’s chap collection, A Green River in Spring. The author says “the first spark” for many of the poems came from reading classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. Thorburn retains much of what’s wonderful about the sources—imagery, the link to nature, the meticulous placement of words, a deftness, among others.  Just witness (in addition to reading) this chap’s first poem with a finely-wrought but nonetheless killer ending:

First Light

The sun breaks like an egg over everything

east of here. Stop stop, enough, enough,

the sparrows say—or that’s what Lao Wen says

they say in Chinese. Take your tarnished

born, your wooden flute and break

this silence—alone beside the dark water, desperate

for the birds to get to work—delicate

as the last skin of ice on a winter river’s wrist.

There’s much to enjoy in this slim collection. The evocative poems resonate and linger long after they’ve been read. And, upon slipping from memory, at times, the poems return to haunt again, poems that

                        … just come back

like your gray cat—

scooching across the floor

inch by inch all afternoon

to stay inside this

yellow square of light.

**

PIGTAIL DUTY by Melissa Eleftherion provides pleasure in a different, less-direct manner, starting with its quirkily-enchanting first line (and first page):

I looked in a book for an answer but it was upside down.

From that opening, the rest of the text (narrative) sketched as fragments, as moments, on each page offers a haunting, a grasping, a stuttering here and there, a fragile (at times, fraught) domesticity—

The path to happiness is.

Paved with discarded fish a

sacral gill slitting. Plenty of

blowholes in the sea breathe

white in urchin faces as

they scurry to do dishes. Why

whiskers at a wedding is good

luck icing.

To bind is to bosom to bouquet

to bedroom. A field of red poppies

I love you is a garden if you let it

—a desire, rather, many and massive desires—

On the fires escape     I grew like a dandelion

                                              Greedy for pigeon talk and flowered

                                  Skirts

I wanted to be a garden

                           So I doused myself with hose water

Painted my arms with thorns

                                       In the wandering dusk

How to be a fortress

          Tenement of my red mouth

How to be quiet

Dig under the belly

Lift the stone slab

—but also a perseverance—

The stained  glass tree house

I want to live there

A curved path of stone circles

The ruby glass necklace I tried to preserve

The stain.

I try to keep things.

Entonces, one senses complexity, confusion, difficulty … but the speaker perseveres, certainly if only to write these poems.

And it all creates for a moving effect, such that the reader is also moved to wish this person(a) well, because it’s clear that the person(a) is engaged in a deep search from which emanates such ravished but also ravishing lines like

Almost like love fluttering.

Early dark now. I look for you in vestibules.

  

**

One of the chapbook’s possibilities that doesn’t exist with full-run, perfect bound books is how it flowers through a custom-made (often combined with DIY) sensibility. Margaret Bashaar’s LETTERS FROM ROOM 27 OF THE GRAND MIDWAY HOTEL -- designed evocatively and sensitively by poet-editor Juliet Cook -- is a grand example of such a production, from the yarn that flows from the spine

to the heart-shaped fabric that greets the reader as soon as you open the chap

to the loose photographs by Kevin Ross that, within the pages, heighten the tone and text of the poems

The above photo was inserted atop the Table of Contents—a pair of legs going up a staircase of what I assume—but in any event, can be—the referenced Grand Midway Hotel.   It’s a nice touch: at this point, we haven’t read the poems yet and the ascension up some stairs facilitates the idea of going somewhere.

The poems, themselves, are powerful, disturbing, enchanting, lyrical, punchy—AND they do imply they could have been written by a poet at a desk (or on bed, or while sitting atop a toilet) in a hotel room.  Presented below are shots of the chap’s pages bearing the loose mini or small photographs—as you see, they heighten the mood and intensify the reader’s engagement with the poems.  Beneath each shot, I’ll present some of the poem’s lines so you can see how they relate:

Imagine yourself looking at that photograph while you read the poem "The Unmaking" that begins with these lines:

She is not quite full of the night yet 

cannot remember how she got here, 

through a summer in the haunted hotel

A few pages later arises this image:

imagine yourself looking at that photograph while you read the poem "Claire Visits the Old Hotel" with this first stanza:

She let the Proprietor kiss her and his mouth was 

all dry heat and questions she could not answer, 

hyacinths tumbling from her tongue. 

She gathered them up off the floor 

in pale armfuls to pile at his feet, 

wrote a message on each blossom.

More pages later and then there's this image:

Imagine yourself looking at that photograph while you read the poem "Meditation on Ichthyosaurus at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, featuring these lines:

Where are you now? Are you there, hands reaching into the night? 

Are you there and you are at the bar and I am dancing on it 

and I am naked and you are the one whose beer I kicked over and you 

are always looking away from me and I will never stop looking toward you toward the thing I have named.

Bashaar's poems are effective and moving because they also often make the reader feel like she's in a dream.  The evocative visuals enhance the poems' resonance.  All in all, Bashaar’s poems and Black Pudding Press’ design combine to offer an intense, highly-satisfying reading and witnessing.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects because she's its editor (the exception would be books that focus on other poets as well).  She is pleased, though, to point you elsewhere to recent reviews of her work.  I FORGOT LIGHT BURNS received a review by Zvi A. Sesling at Boston Area Small Press & Poetry Scene; by Amazon Hall of Fame reviewer Grady Harp over HERE; and by Allen Bramhall in Tributary.  Her experimental biography AGAINST MISANTHROPY: A LIFE IN POETRY received a review by Tom Hibbard in The Halo-Halo Review, Allen Bramhall in Mandala Web and Chris Mansel in The Daily Art Source. SUN STIGMATA also received a review by Edric Mesmer at Yellow Field.  Recent releases are the e-chap DUENDE IN THE ALLEYS as well as INVENT(ST)ORY which is her second “Selected Poems" project; while her first Selected THE THORN ROSARY was focused on the prose poem form, INVEN(ST)ORY focuses on the list or catalog poem form.  A key poem in INVENT(ST)ORY was reviewed by John Bloomberg-Rissman in The Halo-Halo Review, and the book itself was reviewed by Chris Mansel in The Daily Art Source and Allen Bramhall in Mandala Web.  More information at http://eileenrtabios.com