A Particular Time and Place: A Review of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Third Edition, by Anthony Frame

Cover Credit: Autumn House Press

The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Third Edition, edited by Michael Simms, Giuliana Certo, and Christine Stroud
Autumn House Press (2015)

Reviewed by Anthony Frame

In his introduction to The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Michael Simms writes, “Poetry is just like people talking.” He further explains the ways it goes beyond common speech, saying poetry, “has something special or amazing about it, something that makes us think, wonder, or marvel.” It is this idea of everyday language, heightened and crafted to give the reader a sense of amazement, that defines the aesthetic choices made by editors Michael Simms, Giullana Certo, and Christine Stroud as they curated this collection of poems by 106 American poets. The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry offers a snapshot of the poetry landscape at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. These poems contain contemporary poetry’s celebration of American life and language as well as its concerns about inclusion and varied voices.

Narrative poetry dominates this anthology, which is clear from the first poem: “Collapsing Poem” by Kim Addonizio. This meta-Ars Poetica begins with a man and a woman arguing. It then discusses what it needs to do in order to give this moment meaning to the reader. Addonizio masterfully places the reader within this scene, writing, “And by now, if you’ve been moved, it’s because / you’re thinking with regret of the person / this poem set out to remind you of.” But even with audience interaction, the poem never leaves the story of the couple fighting. She ends by accepting that she cannot leave the narrative unless she is taken from it:

this poem won’t get finished unless
you drag me from it, away from that man;
for Christ’s sake, hurry, just pull up and keep
the motor running and take me wherever you’re going.

The ending of “Collapsing Poem” seems an apt metaphor for The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Although the editors, according to the introduction, value a variety of styles, they continue to return to narrative-heavy or narrative-influenced poems. Even poets whose works usually push far beyond the narrative mode are represented by their most narrative-influenced poems. Larry Levis’s lyric elegies, for example, are omitted in favor of two personal narratives, “The Poet at Seventeen” and “My Story in a Late Style of Fire.” Similarly, master of lyric meditation Li-Young Lee’s three selections are dependent on narrative techniques. For example, “The Hammock” opens:

When I lay my head in my mother’s lap
I think how day hides the stars,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside my mother’s singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and kindergarten,
once each morning and once each afternoon.

Here, Lee presents his trademark language leaps in deep imagery with the boy hiding in his mother’s singing. Interspersed through these images, though, is a structure that relies on interactions between character, place, and action. “The Hammock” needs the relationship of the boy and his mother for an image like “day hides stars” to carry weight beyond its music. Compare this to opening of “The Sleepless,” from Lee’s collection Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001):

Like any ready fruit, I woke
falling toward beginning and

welcome, all of night
the only safe place.

This poem lacks any narrative devices to pull the reader into the poem. Instead, Lee uses the language of the lines (the repeated “a” sounds) and the oddness of the imagery (such as the comparison of the speaker to a “ready fruit”) to engage his audience. The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry only represents this different style in a few lines in various poems, and it’s rarely on display in an entire poem.

The anthology does contain a few non-narrative poems. These are best represented by the multi-page works of Michael and Matthew Dickman. Matthew’s “All-American Poem,” though it does have a narrative backdrop, is structured as an address to the speaker’s lover. Its tangents and associative leaps tear the narrative into a surreal journey through the speaker’s psyche. “Let’s live downtown,” he writes, “and go clubbing. / God save hip-hop and famous mixed drinks.” This type of stream of consciousness continues for six pages. His brother, Michael, destroys traditional narrative techniques even more in his poem, “The New Green,” which includes lines like, “I left a note in my brain in red Sharpie it says Don’t forget the matches.”

Beyond the emphasis on narrative, the poets selected for this anthology represent a range of well-known, highly recognizable names in the poetic world, including Alicia Ostriker, Rita Dive, Dean Young, and Jane Kenyon. Similarly, these pages include poets who were, at the time of publication, on the precipice of fame. Ada Limón, for example, was selected prior to the publication of her celebrated fourth book, Bright Dead Things. Four poems by Ross Gay were chosen a year before he won the prestigious Kingsly Tuffs Poetry Award. The anthology also serves as a useful introduction to a number of poets who may not yet be quite as known but who certainly should be, such as Dawn Potter and Yona Harvey. “We’ve selected poems based on their importance to us,” Simms writes in his introduction, “not on the fame of their authors.” The variety of poets at varied stages of their careers represents the editors’ commitment to poetry rather than the writers, and the editors should be celebrated for that.

The anthology should also be celebrated for its commitment to equity in publishing. Of the 106 poets in the anthology, sixty are female. Compare this with the most recently released VIDA counts and Autumn House’s anthology ranks near the top in terms of gender parity. However, there is still a continued problem of racial parity in the contemporary literary world. Of the 106 poets, only 22 are poets of color and only 11 are women of color. Simms’s introduction discusses a number of aesthetic considerations the editors used while making their selections. Although he does not discuss gender or racial parity as being an active part of the selection process, this anthology can stand as a symbol for growing social progress.

Any anthology trying to cover all of contemporary American poetry will, by definition, fail. The American poetry landscape is vast and multitudinous. This is, perhaps, why so many anthologies choose to focus on a specific type of poet or subject. But The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry succeeds as well as any anthology can, limited as it is by its 384 pages and the aesthetic preferences of its three editors. “Poetry,” Michael Simms writes in his introduction, “captures the essence of what it is to be alive at a particular time and place.” If this is the goal of the poem, it is also the goal of the poetry anthology, which Autumn House Press has reached.

Remedies in Songs and Silences: A Review of Toadlily Press's Mend & Hone by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Toadlily Press

Mend & Hone by Elizabeth Howort, Dawn Gorman, Leslie LaChance, Janlori Goldman

Toadlily Press (2013)

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

I first became acquainted with Toadlily’s quartet series back in 2008, when I reviewed their third collection, Edge by Edge. Each book in the series brings together four poets in separate sections that are essentially “joined” chapbooks of 13-14 poems each that find common ground within differing styles and approaches. It’s a marvelous idea that increases by number and literary style the experiences of discovery and transition, and Mend & Hone proudly continues this tradition.

The volume begins with Elizabeth Howort’s section, “Turning the Forest Fertile.” These prose-like, untitled pieces float on the page, dream-like, referencing the silences we need to immerse ourselves in experience, to turn inward. They also beckon the reader to listen for music that rises through an unfurling leaf or the calamitous pulse in a city of pedestrians and traffic. “I looked in the shops and cafes, bars and museums, but silence was nowhere. / Who hears her breath amid sirens?” Howort asks in the third piece.

Silence and sound—the pastoral and urban—intertwine, blend, and evade. Howort presents this in a Zen-like series of statements (“What sound does a fruit make when falling? // A branch upon release?” “My breath is a foyer that moans with entrance, exit.” “When we hold silence we do not answer.”) and psalm-like passages, as we learn how elusive and profound silence is. She explains:

     

Out of silence, light:

a blessing on your eyes,          acres.

Out of the silence, space:

A place to inhabit:                   field,

                                                                        sky.

You invite me into the garden.

A third pulse.

You invite me into silence and say

We are drawn, weightless, into a world of diminishing wilderness and overgrown urban landscape, hovering and anchored by the music and libretto of our hopefulness.

Dawn Gorman’s imagistic, lyrical poems in “This Meeting of Tracks” find fascination with time, memory, and the juxtapositions that can encourage longing, regret, or denial. In “Stiletto,” a nearly surreal appearance of the shoe “on top / of the spiny winter twigs” causes no discussion in a rural place that readers are told has no secrets or unturned stones. “The rain has warped the insides, but the toe still lines up hail clouds / like a stealth bomber. // They keep their eye on it, though; / farmers, mothers, priests / all remember a shoe like that.”  In “Buried,” an act of love outdoors is roused in memory by the images of trees: “The beeches silenced us, / their sudden amphitheatre / spread brown / with last year’s empty nut shells.” The hard evidence, a condom, was buried, according to the poet “under the crushed shells / where nothing would grow. I imagine it there now, re-routing nature / still.”

There are forces to be reckoned with—nature and intimacy—that Gorman summons with drama, as in “Wave” where a storm whirls beneath the surface, prompted by “a passing thought…” Yet, she writes, it:

…builds, rises, coming unstoppably,

turns darker blue, green, triumphant turquoise

then ruffles and tumbles and wallops forwards

huge, heavy, froth leaping, flying. …

Or conjures quietly, as intense but fleeting desire in “Blue,” where a chance encounter at an airport summons longing amidst short, polite conversation (“…I have precious minutes/to watch the hands / I ache for.”).

Leslie LaChance’s poems in “How She Got That Way” endear with their wit, cleverness, and celebratory air—even as she allows poignancy to effortlessly emerge from between the lines. In “Strange Little Enthusiasms” LaChance extolls the virtues of indefinite articles, “…so small, so full / of possibility and yet complete?” She continues:

…We go

For a walk. I tell you a secret; we make a pact. See how easy it is

with just a few little words? A mouth, a breath, a long

kiss, and then another. …

In “Literary Landmark: A Valentine” a hangover after a drunken declaration of love in an Irish pub is immortalized in a photo taken the day after the carnage. Speaking directly to her beloved (“You proved your love with one hand / holding my hair back, and the other tilting the ice bucket to my chin…”) she recounts standing with him “on the Great Dead Writer’s front porch with a pair / of headaches, a camera, and go figure, a future.” “Nocturne” possesses a wistful beauty, visually and emotionally stunning, inspired by the simple act of removing one’s—and rousing the memory of removing another’s—glasses. LaChance describes:

I took my glasses off and set them

open on an open book. Later

when I came back into the room,

they looked so melancholy in the lamplight—

there on the dining room table

trying to read Tolstoy by themselves.

Janlori Goldman’s “Akhmatova’s Egg” rounds out Mend & Hone with poems that are personally inspired yet have the confident stride and linguistic grace of domestic parables. These poems deal with mortality, love, and the pain in living that fuels indignation that sometimes fuels hope. In “Yom Kippur,” the poet is in synagogue and begins:

Today everything hurts, and I’m as close to

god as I’ll ever come

or want to be. I try to forgive myself, fist knocking at the chest,

a door that forgot how to open. The prayer book’s spine

against my palms, I sing loudly to drown out the dandruff

flaked on the suit in the next row, sing as if I do believe…

Even after her mind wanders to the spiritual disappointments of the past and back, she eventually “thinks of the woman asleep in the window well on my block, blonde / wisping out of a hoodie, sneakers on the sidewalk like slippers by a bed” and wonders about her own ability to reconnect to faith.

In “At the Cubbyhole Bar” the reader is an invisible guest as the poet and her friend, a First Responder (the dedication reads “for Donna Bianco, retired NYPD sergeant”) share the small and large horrors of family dysfunction and global disaster. The discussion leads from a father dead from AIDS, to a dinner fight between mother and daughter, to the unimaginable, as Goldman writes:

That morning, after the buildings buckled,

a brown skirt of cloud billowed up.

            You saw her, a bleached blonde

in purple satin shirt, no body

            Below the waist, thought how a human head

Weighs 8 pounds, lifted that weight

            Of a newborn, zipped the bag.

The startling imagery of these poems also presents the forces of nature, as in “Cyclone” (“The twister lifts a home’s petticoats, / holds its skirts/high over the pasture, …”) and “The Bear” (“A grizzly crawls into the station wagon— / its left leg mangled—finds a plastic soldier / and red dinosaur on the backseat.”) and ultimately, the force of life itself, as in “baking in the 8^th month.” She recalls “rosemary-soaked olives and sea salt, my mouth / in licked delirium from this warm bread. // yeast swells, opens the well of yearn and ache/ for the grain at its start. dark under the cheekbones, // darker from the navel straight down, this rise / a sign of life inside, my acre swollen to the brim.”

Mend & Hone is a fine collection of distinctive voices that brings pleasure in the discovery of what ails and heals us. Each poet captures the confounding and consistent challenges of being human with language that seeks emotional detent with its subject matter.  It is a welcome addition to Toadlily’s quartet series.