ginamarie lobianco: selected poetry 2006-2012

"A great poet always dissolves the technique -- the technique never shows -- is never showing -- true!" (Frank Samperi)


I received one day the most unexpected email from novelist/poet ginamarie lobianco who'd said that friend and mentor John Martone had mentioned my site to her. She'd wondered if I might like to review some of her work at my "Word-Dreamer". Both the self-introduction and affiliation to America's great master of the short verse, of course, endeared me to her instantly. Lately I've been in the mood to celebrate literary mentorship, verse purity and the future of poetry. I'm glad to know ginamarie lobianco.

ginamarie is publisher, novelist and poet but (as poet) successor to a tradition of American short verse and a spiritual poetry I could gladly compare (in its more minimalist haiku and pomes form) to that of Frank Samperi and John Martone. But in what she calls "epic breaths" I detect the freer movements of Ashbery and DiPrima . The haiku, pomes and epic breaths she's been kind enough to have assembled for me form the basis of my estimation of her poetical work. And hers, I find, are the delightful "dissolution" (in Samperian parlance) into oddly engaging literary types, spiritualties and even a (if interestingly postmodern) penchant of her own for opacity and ambiguity. What's resulted from this is a tenderness of the poet's own-- I instantly detect-- that's wedded fragilely to the frighteningly real world of what is, after all, the formless & the spiritless.

In the young artist the preservation of 'forms' in a literary environment not favourable to them will take the imprint of a particularly acute observation of place and circumstances: a style, in short, not different from (her)self at all. In her American haiku series 'form' is easily interchangeable with the place where she calmly gathers her impressions. For instance, there's nostalgia  for the youthful eternities of 60s culture-heroes that's ironic since it's either the Jack [Kerouac] of her poetry or the Jack [Kennedy] of her parents that may be intended:  "life is precious/dead jack", and  a kind of undergraduate reverence for that greatest iconoclast-traditionalist of them all, T.S. Elliot: "i have measured my life/in coffee spoons,/too". She's also capable of sudden (comical) denudations of traditional haiku form itself, as in "free guitar/no strings attached" and of playful versions of the (by now outworn ) language as representation conundrum: "caution:/caution sign". Haiku in lobianco turn into small and arrestingly odd stills but given every bit as much as Eastern haiku to illuminative (aha!) moments through lexical contrasts ("a/part/a/gain"), irreverent nature worship ("making funny faces/at mountains") and even comical effect ("eat a four leaf clover/shit out a luck").

The 'pomes' seem actually to be extended haiku, each line a succession of "stills" juxtaposed for the same sorts of "illuminative" moments as in lobianco's "american haiku". From the first "untitled" pome the following excerpt is typical of the 'haiku' verse:

     And in autumn, when our floor is a red carpet of leaves
      and the windows are covered with
     the bare bones branches of trees that lean towards us,
      from the pink sky,
      the sound of birds singing replaced by the hissing noises of trucks braking, rushing, roaming,
     our new sense of comfort, for anywhere we lay our heads we can call our home.

From this passage arise any number of short verse arrangements, such as "autumn/a red carpet of leaves" in the first two lines and in the next two, "pink sky/bare bones branches of trees", among others. The transformations into short verse are not so much procedural as connatural:  short intensely imagistic bursts that invite observation from many potentially merging viewpoints. Even where poet-narrator intervenes, as in the lines

     And I contemplate what’s frozen there, a gaze
     we’ve both gotten stuck in
     one that couldn’t be
     faked
     three inseparable chains
     and a phoenix from the recycled smoke, a call that never came…

the 'haiku' strands, disparate and yet working towards some unified telling, seem also to call out for individualized attention: such as "a gaze/I contemplate what's frozen" or the more fanciful "a call/a phoenix from the recycled smoke". Perhaps to see the intensely perceived in the quilt of the larger poem  is announced in lobianco's "you can harmonize with just about anything". It's perhaps what saves the poem from the surrealist ménage it might otherwise turn into. I see in her search for the "objective correlative” (again, T.S. Eliot) of keen poetical insight a clear indebtedness to Martone. The poetic pageantry of the young poet is, needless to say, not necessarily that of her teachers or even her own literary models.

Evidence of this poetical insight attuned to (but easily separable from) the intricate whole of  young poet's world is to be found in "The Wish" where the "But I am fixing my Lazarus legs" line acts as both refrain and composite (very Buddhistic) image of the death-in-life that is sexual attraction. As also in the poem's Eliotian anti-heroic images of "mermaids" in "The Wish" and "our sailboat drifting past the drain" in the second pome, "the shape of a home". Literary patrimony--and it's interesting to note the intentional "home" and "pome" rhyme here-- gets reduced to the tedium of home life. Almost every line in "the shape of a home" rings with a fake mythology to which it still laughably aspires: such as mytho-heroic sailboats skirting the drain's own deadly whirlpool, or the indirect references to the Atalanta story in "an awkward race" and "throwing stones/they told us were inherently gold", or the Orphean allusion to "the trees turned to you":

Indian names

our sailboat drifting past the drain

riding the trail

of a horse that never came

an awkward race 

 

throwing stones

they told us were inherently gold

the trees turned to you 

in the shape of a home

with your choice of straw or bricks

or awful tricks 

 

what to believe

when he swore he’d never leave

now his odyssey

a detour setting traps 

for when your horses turn to rats

The "epic breaths" (particularly "No Buffalo") enjoy greater scope with their own sustained lament for lost love or, more probably, a literary imagination native to place ("There is no buffalo"), but, true to its title, is likewise a product of conventions inherited from its predecessors, with every line a possible 'horizontal' haiku, for example, and the entire poem a field of many possible insights into contemporary poetics (very reminiscent of Ashbery). The opening lines give a fairly representative sampling of the whole, particularly in the purposely misapplied epics ("tales of Cyclops santa") and elegiacs ("There is no buffalo/There is no bohemia"). lobianco transgresses genre borders  this way with astonishing facility and offers every line as if it were the only line:

     There
 is
 no 
buffalo


     There
 is 
no 
bohemia


     The 
Indian
 blanket 
wrapped 
in
 winter
 and 
leaving
 me 
like
 some 
sad
 holiday


     Yr
 ghost
 that
 coughs
 like
 my 
heat
 come 
Christmas


     And 
the
 VACANCY 
sign 
is
 begging 
for
 the 
wise
men’s 
forgiveness


     Like
 the 
pizza 
delivery 
boy 
and 
the
 case 
of 
the 
missing 
Monroe



     Which
 wound 
up
on 
his 
door 
with 
tales 
of 
cyclops
 santa 
and 
my 
memories 
of
 you


     When 
it’s 
always 
time 
for 
you 
to
 go


     The 
long 
haired 
child 
left
 me
 with 
my 
balcony
 pre-stoned


     & 
now 
the 
Lost
 Boys 
climb 
it 
in
 the 
middle 
of 
the
 night
 and 
we 
sit 
in
 clouds
 of 
smoke


     And
 I 
don’t
 know
 how
 long 
I
 can
 fight 
them 
off‐
the 
loom 
was
 broke


     And
 I
 can’t
 sleep 
cause 
even
 the 
guitar 
leaks
 and 
we 
put 
the 
X
 in 
the 
box
 just


     As
 a
 joke


"Water Walk", even more freely inventive and daring (a case of lobianco coming more into her own), is both fiercely original and cleverly assimilative, a gradually evolving poetic process of which the poet is very aware. And what seems to be evolving is a sense of the jangling tunes of spirituality in the postmillennial world. Aside from the haiku it is my favourite piece and it's my favourite precisely because it's the most daringly spiritual. Again, only a few lines will give the sense of the whole:

     The
 white
 elephants 
lead 
the 
parade,
 it
 was 
on 
Good 
Friday,



     Coming
 back 
for 
their 
drums 
down 
the 
old 
Avenue



     Marching
 to
 Darn
 That
 Dream
 on
 yr 
wooden 
music box



     Bent 
out
 of
 key 
and 
stomped 
in 
the 
street
 once 
the
 saints 
marched


     Out 
of
 a
 crowd 
of
 circus
 silhouette s
and 
Side car
 Achilles



     Peter 
was
 carving 
disbelief 
with 
Caution
Tape 
to
 block 
the
 streets


     And 
setting 
up 
a 
roadside 
Arcade
 under 
tents 
and 
neon 
lights


     Standing
 under 
the 
awning 
out
 of
 the 
rain


     And
 yawning 
orcas 
carrying 
constellation s
made 
up 
of 
the
 blandly
 expressions 
on
 Jonah’s
 ivory
  face


     And 
when 
grandfather 
clocks 
finish 
up 
at 
the 
docks
 all
 of
 the
 shipwrecked 
orphans
 show 
up 
on
 the
door step 
of
 yr 
place


     And
 leave
 ashes 
on 
yr
 floor 
and 
trip
 down
 yr
 fire 
escape


     And
 yr
 alley
 marshes 
and 
sound 
of
 beer 
can
 crunches



    The 
way 
that
 we 
can’t
 afford 
postage


     Darn
 That
 Dream!


 The whole's either a dream or the nightmarishly real world in which the salvific (of "Good Friday", "Water walk" & "Solomon", "bedpost Beatitudes and Mount Olive mouth organs") fares no better than pure American "spectacle" (of "belching Holidays", "parables 
on 
plates 
at
 rest
 stop 
diner", and "Mount
 Olive’s
 stairways 
going 
out 
of
 business"). Particularly language itself can be seen to "dissolve" in this wasteland: "And
 a
 trapeze 
messenger 
in 
a
 vest
 telling
 tragic 
dangling 
in 
the 
balance 
the
 drip
/ dried 
plastic 
cups
 and 
empty 
tables 
and 
throw
away 
chairs 
about
". I might be tempted to call the poet a viator figure herself and say the "Water walk" journeying is only marginally figurative, the landscape too unmistakably Eliotian, the human drama hidden in thwarted speech all too Beckettian. I even wonder as I read 'Water Walk" what the dialogue and actions of characters referenced here could possibly have been or what they might have meant to anyone if we'd had them. But they did signify to her at least a poet's world and the startling "
euphoric 
machinery 
hum" of American life which it is her unique mandate to record in the most vividly real terms.

I am glad indeed to have met ginamarie lobianco. I couldn't have been more pleasantly startled to discover that (even in the digitized glossolalia of contemporary poetry) introductions are still possible and traditions can be respectfully loosed by the young into new ways to walk on water.  "Darn That Dream!"