Our Titles Will Kick Them
by Christopher Arigo

An essay review of:

Jonah Winter. Maine. Slope Editions, 2003.
Laura Solomon. Bivouac. Slope Editions, 2003.
Jenny Boully. The Body. Slope Editions, 2003.

           Slope has made the move from its online journal to print with Slope Editions, whose first three titles announce a promising and eclectic future. Slope has, in the words of publisher Ethan Paquin, been fostering "since 1999, a wide international audience of readers and contributors, and the kind of viability many cynics thought an online journal could never have. Given these successes, it was only natural to make the transition into print publishing."
           One thing that stands out about Slope Editions’ first-year offerings is what Paquin calls the "x factor:" all three of the poets are virtually unknown, which he says has "worked out well for us: the books have gotten the attention they deserve, and our role as a press that is interested in celebrating emerging poets is being realized." When asked what kind of work Slope Editions seeks, Paquin said, they want "to keep pushing [the idea] on the reading public that American poetry is still churning, still kicking, and our titles will kick them..."

Maine by Jonah Winter

          Jonah Winter’s debut collection is first and foremost funny–a conceit so often forgotten in contemporary poetry. Winter’s collection was selected by David Lehman for Slope Edition’s first annual poetry prize. Lehman, in his introduction, says that "Jonah Winter is unafraid to have a good time in his poems, and that is fortunate, because a sometimes overlooked law of poetic composition is that the more fun a writer has, the more fun the reader will have." And indeed Maine is great fun.
           The laughter provoked by Winter ranges far–from belly laughs to nervous, uncertain chuckles. One of the immediately noticeable vehicles for his humor is the very conversational, yet disjunctive language, of the poems themselves, much like O’Hara’s "I did this, I did that poems," though with Winter, it is more like, "I had this slightly neurotic thought, then I had another, more neurotic thought."
           These poems teeter constantly on the brink of bathos, pathos, and dead seriousness. When things get too serious, the speaker withdraws to let us breathe a bit: "Whoops! didn’t mean to get serious." But then he comes back with more:

It’s just that I love you, love you
autumnally, and look at all the leaves
and the patterns they make on the sidewalk after the rain

and look at my hand–it’s shaking.
Why is my hand shaking? Why
are you not saying anything?
Are you at the bottom of a lake, smiling?

Thus ends the poem entitled "Mollusks and Mankind." The almost cinematographic leaps from one line to the next is reminiscent of a another darkly funny poet, Walid Bitar–while Bitar’s humor tends more towards the political, Winter’s tends more towards the self-deprecating.
           Winter’s irreverence suits him well and carries him laughing into the realm of formal poetry. The sestina form becomes absurd in his deft hands, when he chooses teleutons like "barcalounger" (an intrinsically funny word) or "anthroposophy," "costermonger," and "pulchritudinous." His "Sestina: Bob" begins:

According to her housemate, she is out with Bob
tonight, and when she’s out with Bob
you never know when she’ll get in. Bob
is an English professor. Bob
used to be in a motorcycle gang, or something, or maybe Bob
rides a motorcycle now. How radical of you, Bob–

We get a sense not only of the absurdity of the form, but also of the speaker’s righteous indignation towards this über-hip character, Bob. As with Gertrude Stein’s repetitions, Winter’s use of the word/name "Bob" alters slightly in tone and character as the poem progresses, and the effect is definitively comic.
           There are moments in this collection that are ecstatically joyous, as when New York School meets Jackie Gleason or a less-serious Dean Young, when Winter’s lines sprawl across the page as though unable to contain their energy. In "Ode on Complexity" we find such an ecstatic accretion of facts:

The fact that you’re a lesbian.
The fact that your imitation leopard-skin panties exist.
The fact that I exist in relation to your imitation leopard-skin panties,
Other facts:
The moon,
The ocean,
Dostoyevsky...

These are the opening lines which start a snowball effect tumbling down and across the page, as if the world is too much with the speaker, as if there are way too many things to consider in this one single life–obsessed as he is with those panties.

Bivouac by Laura Solomon

          Laura Solomon has managed to distend language, squeezing it until bursting–the result of the tension between political and personal violence which feeds many of these poems. Even the title comes to mean more than just a temporary encampment, gaining a physicality for the three, unusual syllables. By focusing this type of attention on language, through a kind of temporary repetition aphasia, menacing titles like "International War Crimes Tribunal" become juxtaposed with the first lines like, "Lapping of lake in a dog’s bowl" undermining the insidiousness of such a phrase. Other titles like "Rations" and "Meet Me in the Mess Hall" reminds us that even the most inhumane aspects of violence depend on human need, that even murderers must eat. The effect is that we sense that no matter how distant war/violence may seem, it is inextricably linked to our humanity.
           Solomon introduces Bivouac with an epigraph from Henry Miller: "On the meridian of time there is no injustice, only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama." Solomon’s lyric (pushed to its limits) is one of staying in motion, disallowing meaning to settles–truth and drama are found among the flotsam and jetsam of language, and her momentum.
           Like Winter, Solomon is not afraid to be a bit silly either, as though at certain moments she is exhausted by the efforts of her more serious labors. "Among the Trees without the Trees" opens:

We found no Indians.
We found no muffins among the discarded.
We were hoping for muffins.
Our stomachs growled with irk
And then headed off toward the park.

Presumably the stomachs head off to find muffins. Moments of levity like this are far rarer than in Winter’s collection. However, the voice that does frequently emerge from the din is one that is smart and sexy, one that juxtaposes lines like these from the end of "As Ordered by the Monarch Twice Beheaded":

10

Take me from behind.

11

Trace the diameter transparent: end in Ecuador itself
                                                                          (sweating, panting:
balance of power restored:
                                     my hegemony foiled again) again) again).

The element of politics, whether it be body or otherwise, pervades many of the poems in this collection. However, it is a politic made very personal as in "Longing for Monogamy" which is worth quoting in whole:

I thought of you today, Kazakstan.

Missed the spelling of Czechoslavakia.
Missed the old duel, the all’s fair logic to it.

I hear little from you these days and often wonder
My offenses. Should I have paid for dinner?
We have always had this bizarrish connection.

You are the loveliest of the -stans:
Kyrgystan eyes you with envy.
Tajiki-, Uzbeki-, Turkmeni-

You remain aloof, as do I. Still, I suppose
We all have a bit of the reactionary within.
Nostalgia for colder days.

Summer steams too hot
We adjust thermostats with enthusiasm,
But there is too much fecundity. Too much of the green and lush.

Fall approaching and glorious October
Where one feels infinitely secure, almost touchable

                   & then the impact of snow: instant, precipitant.

This is a poem of tongue-in-cheek nostalgia–a poem that reveals how the speaker loves language, the names of a little-thought-of part of the world, a place of great political upheaval. We get a sense that the speaker does in fact take these events very personally, has fully internalized them and is forced to debate: Is it my fault somehow? "Should I have paid for dinner?"

Solomon moves rapidly from the brassy:

Instead we wallow in the fuck-me of the afternoon
which is nice in its own brutal way. 
Window propped open & rain pouring in, down, above,
tickling the roof until it loses itself in laughter.

And just as we feel as though the center cannot hold in these poems, Solomon reminds us that "You must conjure the whole." In one of the title poems, we find a distillation of the glee in Solomon’s language in its almost-nonsensical accretion of words and their sounds:

I punt a dopey echo
Hooting heroic, it arrows, slices field
The field is the mosey alongside it
Gleaned of frou-frou
An efficient stack of straw in which to lie
(If one is careful to avoid its tulle embrace)
(If one quietly sulks the summer solstice)

This poem resists a conventional close reading. There is no asking, what is this poem about? Instead, it begs the question, what is this poem doing? It is in motion–Miller’s "poetry of motion" again–moving rapidly like snapping synapses from one homophonic association to another. These poems have a kick.

The Body by Jenny Boully

         The most cutting-edge of Slope Editions’ first year publications, Boully’s collection abounds with paradox–though subtitled "an essay," what we actually get is a collection of fragmentary footnotes, bits of explanation and exegeses for a text (or a body) that no longer exists or never existed at all. We are forced to consider the white space, the emptiness of the page above the notes as a text–which raises even more interesting questions: Is the white space a metaphor? Is it a missing text? Is it silence? Yes. Yes. Yes. This simultaneity lends itself to a complexity that pushes us to consider all of these angles, constructing a very artful and contemplative work.
           Boully forces us into a mostly unfamiliar reading space by having the partially blank page as a centerpiece of/for the notes which fully engages us in the creative process and provokes us to imagine these sometimes radically juxtaposed fragments salvaged from the creative process. In other words, the reader must act like a detective to reconstruct the "story" –but the text pleasantly resists this neat assemblage. What, for example, are we to make of these two concurrent notes:

47In this case, it was not the deux ex machina who was responsible, but rather a certain type of zeitgeist.

48It was after this incident that the leaves began eavesdropping.

What text could these possibly amend? The questioning this book leads to is a large part of the delight–an absolute reveling in uncertainty but one which the author quickly settles us into. This is no formal gimmick. It is smart and dead serious in its intentions, but not completely lacking in humor.
           Very rarely do I pick up a collection of poems and read from beginning to end. The Body, though, lends itself well to this type of reading, building a pseudo-narrative from the fragments, creating an arc that travels through the course of the collection. The fragments/footnotes range from epistolary excerpts to journal entries, from quotations from Delmore Schwartz to allusions to Euclid, from self-referential blurbs to autobiographical notes, from film studies to ancient Greek to the Bible. The speaker comes across as adept and edgy, a speaker who tries to make sense of the past few years of her life in all of its messiness and confusion. All of this is punctuated by moments of lyricism: "not a sepulchre, but an envelope; not an envelope, but a door; not a door, but a fire escape."
           Overall, this book never comes together enough to allow us to piece out what has happened–the clues do not reassemble to announce whodunnit or why or how or if there ever was a who at all. But I was not left feeling unsatisfied by this. Instead, I felt as though I had read an honest ethnography of a self in all its lovely disjunction and confusion.

What plenitude! Slope Editions has managed to debut with such abundance and diversity. When asked where he sees the press in ten years, Paquin replied:

At the top, with other small presses who have a seize-the-world approach towards marketing and promotion–Verse Press, Fence Books, Salt Publishing, Open City and others. Maybe our titles will be standard ones in university classrooms, and that’s starting to happen anyway, but maybe the public will be interested in poetry for the first real time in ages and they’ll know which "brands" to buy. Maybe, too, poetry will be illegal by then. Who’s to say.

Backed by this sort of optimism, combined with a market economy realism, I suspect this is a press we will be hearing a lot about in the next few years. Slope Editions’ goal to support emerging writers is a bold decision and I wish them the best. And if poetry is ever outlawed, then it seems likely that Slope Editions will be on the most wanted list.