"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!"
