Three from Portland, Oregon

The poems in C. E. Putnam’s The Bird May Be Dead But It Is Your Bird look ordinary—mostly thin, flush left, mostly one page. But just start to read them and you see something a little different going on. A sense of humor I remember from some old Chinese and Japanese poets, but here brought into the 20^th/21^st century—a twinkle behind the eyes, a tongue waggling in a cheek, with some sense of subtle stand-up, word choices smacking of surrealism.

An unsteady hand
on a cocked  pancake
gun, a slice of black
powder pie, a Hungarian
hangover desperate
for cream and sugar

[“Breakfasts Exert on Each Other a Similar Occult Power”]

C. E. gives great titles, and the table of contents could be a poem in its own right. Just the title of the book gives you some sense of what to expect.

These poems are short-lined and rooted in concrete observations, but the mind doing the observing doesn’t see things exactly as we do, as if reality a mosaic with tiles drifting off untethered.

Green energy squirrel tails
cocked up some nut
veins melancholy
loving wooden
creek crack
and shine
to gradually ash the world

[“The Story of The Leaf”]

I love C. E.’s word choices, his surprising visions, his gentle voice.

Reminds me
that the time a bee
became my friend
was a great time!

[“Blacksmith School Waitlist”]

Fun and a-has throughout the book. C. E. is skilled at little twists, a word not quite what you expected, a clever line break, an unexpected period. His casualness can hide the precision of his writing, and the experience behind them.

Here’s the shortest poem, “I Thought Spiders.” which crystallizes a lot happening throughout:

I thought spiders building webs inside the goat’s eye.
And that goat was my only way home.

C. E. Putnam is at home in many worlds, though not always at ease. He sees new things wherever he looks. His birds are very alive, and always ready for a little metamorphosis.

How many poetry books contain a crossword puzzle? Charity E. Yoro’s ten-cent flower & other territories does. Besides the crossword there are poems of various shapes and spacing, including a short poem, “hana hou,” that is just a footnote.

Many first books—heck too many poetry books of whatever order—are cautionary, finding an approach and sticking with it throughout. But Charity busts loose, trying, and succeeding with a variety formats, shapes and attitudes. Fearless and fun, gentle and strong.

Charity was born and raised in Hawaii, and this book is steeped with that culture. But how do the parts tie together—or is variety of perspectives and forms and possibilities the point, one of the territories. It’s not for me to say. Moreso with books of poetry than with novels, there’s the difference of experiencing individual poems and having a sense of the whole books. Some poetry books are more thematic wholes—Diane Seuss’s Frank: Sonnets is a fine example—than others, including this one. So let me just give you some samples:

before spam mushubi, there were Vienna sausage &
a microwave, smashed saimin straight from the bag, MSG sucked
from a tiny foil packet, the yellow stain of artificial chicken on our skin

[“hurricane’]

a couple senses engaged, prose poem flow, the excitement of memory, some fun words.

in bangkok, I use the back of my hand
to extract a sooty, sticky drip from my nose
 
the smell of home: puakenikeni.
here the white fragile white flowers grace
 
shrines the size of birdhouses, next to
bowls of rice & deferential fruit flies &

[“ten-cent flower”]

This is another of the territories of the book, Thailand. The previous quote shows Hawaii. There are also the territories of poetry/language, Oregon, daily life, and trying to make sense of the world.

it is a language that takes up
space, pouring out car windows,
streamy, spilling out into wet
streets, occupying  whole lanes
with its swagger,

[“postcard from rome”]

It’s hard to pick a place to stop this quote, much joyous energy here.

Some poetry book are meant to be read sequentially. While this book has a strong ending Coda, one can happily jump around in the book and continue going to new places. Here’s one of the shortest poems (with the lines centered on the page):

houseguest
 
i’ll tell you how it ends
this story of crumpled sheets
cold toes drawing circles
—a sumi-e landscape
 
the way it begins running
lover to lover, a number, a knock,
spilled ink, staining, arranging
shapes on a page

Charity E. Yoro does a lot more than rearranging shapes, she opens windows into new perspectives, other cultures, the difficulties and visions of a growing mind and life.

While Yoro’s poems comes in a wide range of shapes and sizes, Casey Bush’s poems in Notes and Motes all look the some—rectangular  prose poem blocks filling over half the page. The titles are all word coinage, like “mandalliance,” ”cimiracle” and “teetotalization” making the table of contents—here called “Contentus” —a most wonderful poem/collection  of invented words  These poems were written as reactions—in lieu of reviews—of jazz CDs, which Casey wrote for a music site.

These poems also have the feel of stand-up—most of them have been done live in Casey’s monthly gigs with an excellent, improvsatory jazz trio—where the comedian is besieged and confuddled by the world and language.

Responsibility and success have led more to
ruin than booze or drugs.  When did I become
such a pliable knickknack on the Victorian
what=not shelf?  Squeeze fluoridated
toothpaste out of your slave-self.  Hock the
watch.  Park free or die. Tell it to the Marines.

[“knotintime”]

Casey pulls phrases from all aspects of life, from cliches to ads to media references. There is a wide variety of wordplay, some of it visual.

One overall tone of the poems is panic, exaggerated to effect, but still tethered to reality, as here in “liquidification”:

Get a whiff of Daddy. Asleep on the toilet.
Smoking a cigarette until it burns his fingers.
Imagine your best possible self and then lower
The bar. What outfit will you wear when martial
Law is declared? Failure is the primary value.

These are standalone pieces. I don’t sense any progression or sense of sequence. I can’t say there’s any reason to why I chose the poems to quote that I do. There’s a strong consistency throughout these pieces, in creative, tone and strength, and probably no wrong choices. Along with a wild intelligence, he has the attention that detail that he also displays in his skills in chess and tennis. He stays rooted in the physical:

Dirty water cleans the bucket. Connect these
dots with those dashes. Say a prayer for the
prairie. Discontinue continuity. Put a semi-
permanent crease in those trouser. Speak to
me only when you have nothing left to say.

The intensity, the lack of comfort (though plenty of laughs), the world view, all make this a book to be dipped into, in any order you like, never too many at once. Here’s how the last poem “Capitulum” ends:

Never doubted who I am, but uncertain who I
want to become. Good posture must be
earned the hard way. Go ahead and save
humanity if that’s all you want to do.

Notes and Motes sings volumes. The language is pyrotechnic, mind-expanding. With 64 poems it might be the new I-Ching, treating the dictionary like a bundle of yarrow stalks—pull carefully, you have nothing to lose but your illusion of limits.

Yes, poetry is alive and vital in Portland, but a bit on the downlow. Art funding is quite low in Oregon, and the chief literary organization, Literary Arts, is a lot more interested in national reputation authors than most of us locals—don’t get me started.

Note: I live in Portland so I get books from Portland poets. I’d love to get books from other places, though the book needs to strike some spark in me for me to review it. I don’t do negative reviews, and try for my reviews to be more expository than critical. See our Mission Statement.