On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 7:44 AM, Sarah Walko wrote:

This is the point where the person actually crosses into the field of adventure, leaving the known limits of his or her world and venturing into an unknown and dangerous realm where the rules and limits are not known.

With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the 'threshold guardian' at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world in four directions – also up and down – standing for the limits of the hero's present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant and beyond the protection of his society danger to the members of the tribe. The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored. The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades

- j. campbell

"...she is catalogue busty Oriental or steamy Latina. The girl next door is waiting for you to shoot your load"

“Young Americans birth gang rape over card games,” Barbara Jane Reyes calls out in her chapbook titled, Cherry, published by Portable Press @ Yo Yo Labs. In her opening poem, “Cherry,” Reyes masterfully evokes the ambiguous space of sexual pleasure within sexual violence. “[T]ears tender,” “ingests,” “pump fire,” and “invites entrance tinseled hostess” is experienced amidst the “liquored push,” “he advances inserts into girl,” “unripe cherry bleed/blow her rupture.” This collection is an absolute must read for those interested in gender and ethnic studies and for those wanting to better understand people in their life who have visceral, seemingly extreme reactions to the objectification of women in the mass media.

Ethnic prejudice and sexual violence, specifically against Filipinas, accumulates in Reyes use of a documentary poetics in the poem “E-Dialogue Over Bitter Chocolate.” News quotes discuss the colonization of the Philippines in relationship to contemporary consumerism: Wired News reports that the Spanish division of Nabisco defends the naming of their chocolate-covered cookie, “Filipinos.” A ten-year old male child to his Filipina nursemaid says, “Hey Cookie, I’m eating you!” After which follows statistics from the Centre for Philippine Concerns-Australia, on murders suspected or perpetrated by “the woman’s employer, husband, de-facto partner, ex-partner, or fiancé.” These images and news reports culminate in the poem’s final two stanzas. The reading experience is far too rewarding to ruin: you’ll have to see for yourself.

No aspect of sexualized ethnic abuse goes unexamined in Reyes inventive, fresh work. Every twist and turn in the poems' subjects provides a new way of seeing. Hope is given to the reader in the strength that we hear in the poet’s voice even when the speaker’s experiences, and by extension the readers’ experiences at times, “[become] tears in the wound, liquid, nude-come-shots, and singing, as we.” (Reyes, Cherry, “Selvedge”)

Cherry by Barbara Jane Reyes, published in 2008 by Portable Press @ Yo Yo Labs, Brooklyn, NY, is available for $7.00 at: http://tinyurl.com/yhg6ud2

“Mémoire” by Pierre Reverdy

Memoire is in the French feminine, memory, and in the masculine, memoir and in Reverdy’s poem, the shared experience of two strangers lost in their distinct thoughts and memories. Though this is an isolated state, all humans by virtue of sharing this experience are united in the act. Joined in “un monde plein d’espoir,” a world full of prospect—the potential and constant moment of becoming.
First the speaker is lost in thought with no recognition of what has happened around his body in the tangible world. “Scarcely a minute/And I’ve come back/ Having grasped nothing of all that passed.” We say that we have zoned or spaced out into the “larger sky.” In the last moments of being removed from the physical world, in the mental zone, there always is “The lantern going by/ The footstep overheard” that pulls us out of our mind and back into the material space that we inhabit. The entire world, in the setting of the poem, the zoo, is “in motion” but “someone comes to a stop/ They let go of the world/ And everything in it.” By letting go of the material constraints of our body in the physical world “There’s more space.”
In the open field of thought, imagination and memory we are rewriting our self-narrated autobiography. And as a community of humans, space is one of our largest concerns both personally and politically. Ownership of intellectual property and real estate and personal space and one’s own story is at play in the constant rewriting of history. In the realm of unlimited immaterial space, division of thinking does not prevent the shared human behavior from achieving communion. Each is not alone in the condition of being human that tends toward daydreaming or day-worrying. “All three of us were strangers/ And formed already” finding the potential self and community.

Face Forward

You find each of your thoughts so precious
that you follow their train
boxcar after boxcar linked by the hitch
rickety tracks, fear you follow to the train’s caboose

Clinging to each anxiety
you crawl carefully into a body sized
cargo box, drag a trowel across its walls,
awaken to a pattern cemented by your hand
systematically patting the hardened block

to tell yourself there is nothing beyond
In the arresting motion,
you missed a crack
emitting white light

“You don’t fail once/ you keep failing.” (Heather Christle, “Our Sense of Achievement”)

The poems by Heather Christle featured in Octopus Magazine number twelve “invite us…to join their endless adventures” (Lisa Olstein). “Half-Hedgehog Half-Man” begins with “talk to me” which immediately engages the speaker, and reader, in a conversation with a tree. Just as the reader acclimates to speaking to a tree it becomes clear that the “I” is half-hedgehog half-man. Christle’s poetry attempts to locate, articulate, and represent the speaker just before the subject position shifts and the speaker is seen anew. There is a familiar strangeness in the act of this searching for the “I” and finding the “I” only to have the “I” shift again. Haven’t we all questioned who we are, what effect and affect we have had, if any, and where we are from? In “Plot the Height and Distance” the speaker shakes a tree only to find that once fallen out of the tree “it was not me [the speaker] making things happen” as the tree shakes without the speaker. The familiarity felt in Christle’s poetry is of the cycle of searching, finding and falling back, yet again, into dislocation, misunderstanding or a new way of seeing. Christle expresses more precisely this condition of being: her poetry driving directly into a revelation about human subjectivity.

Heather Christle's poetry is published online in Octopus Magazine number twelve:
http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue12/main.html

The Poor Carry the Burden of War
by Jennifer Styperk

Du Fu: A Life in Poetry
translated by David Young
Knopf: 226 pages, $16.95

On election day, a poetic commentary on the problems of “modernity”, bureaucratic corruption, war, middle-class drudgery, and the plight of the poor, was published as quietly as the poet himself had lived. In his work, Du Fu reveals, among many injustices, that the poor carry the burden of the wars of ruling classes— a violence that devastates not only the soldiers and their wives but corrodes all families in the society.
This warning comes to us from the 8th Century A.D. during the corrupt Tang Dynasty in China. Repeatedly Du Fu writes that his heart is heavy as he contemplates the impossibility of a poor individual to develop in the context of their relationship to a ruling class that abuses its power. A meritocracy, generated from the philosophy of Confucianism, opened civil service to anyone who could pass the imperial exam as opposed to limiting positions exclusively to the aristocracy. Du Fu’s father benefited from the new scholarly-gentry class, however, Du Fu witnessed the favoritism and nepotism rampant just two dynasties after its inception. Later in his life, Du Fu directly calls out the ruling class for ignoring the highest ethos of Confucianism which is best translated to say, “do not do unto others what you would not want done unto you.”
Du Fu, a Confuscianist, integrates Daoist and Buddhist philosophies, which were recently brought to China from India through trading along the Silk Road. The 8th Century Chinese, inventors of gunpowder and the first printing press, also bring us the first lyric poet. Of most importance to classical Chinese literary criticism is a comprehensive and accurate understanding of the author’s historical context and biography. Young, a Professor of Emeritus at Oberlin College, presents the Western reader with the best opportunity to understand Du Fu’s work and life by arranging the poems chronologically, beginning each of the 11 sections with concise records of Du Fu’s life and time and including footnotes at the close of each poem.
In what is likely the first lyric poem ever written, “Five Hundred Words about my Journey to Fengxian,” Du Fu directly expresses personal grief over the loss of his son and insurmountable anguish over social injustices. After shaming himself for not being able to feed his family and blaming himself for his son’s death, he notes that he has never had to pay taxes or be conscripted to fight in the An Lushan Rebellion. He continues:
I realize I’ve had an easy life
and I think again of the poor

losing their farms, sons sent to war
no end to their grief’s

till my sorrow becomes a mountain
whose peak I cannot see (66).

Du Fu consistently laments the plight of the poor throughout his life. He weeps for the old woman who steals dates from his tree because she has been “skinned to the bone” by the taxes to pay for the wars (197). The poor lose their “help with plowing/ all their boys have been conscripted” (87). Elder to younger brother duties are nearly impossible to uphold with communication broken down by war and “the letters we [Du Fu and his brother’s] send each other/ never seem to arrive” (101). And while the poor are hardest hit by war, all of society suffers because “all of us know these times/whirl families in all directions” (85).
Long before Baudelaire aestheticized objects, Du Fu writes about hatpins and washboards (73, 109). Writing in the voice of a woman, an uncommon approach employed by his predecessor Li Bai, Da Fu emphasizes the hardships of domestic duties, especially during war times, in which “a woman uses all her strength/ beating the laundry with a club” to send the soldier’s winter clothes to where he is stationed. “Soon you’ll feel the cold,” the female speaker says, “the way I feel our separation” (109).
Young’s translation, while attending to historical accuracy, also provides echoes of the rhyming couplets, syntactical parallelism and contrasting content in the second and third stanzas that set Du Fu apart from other classical Chinese poets. Though the capacity for rhyme is vastly larger in Chinese than in English, Young skillfully employs assonance, consonance, slant and implied rhyme to evoke the chanting music of the lushi, the form that Du Fu mastered.
Not just for poets and historians, but for history buffs, feminists, World Civilizations students and all those wishing to be ethical, compassionate citizens, David Young’s definitive collection historically contextualizes the work of a man who describes himself as “a lone gull/ somewhere between earth and sky” (213).

Poetics Statement

There is a door.

From the inside, the door is white. Above the peephole, an index card reads: “poetry begins where language fails.” Understanding slips through. Without opening the door but rather contemplating the door, we better understand our entrances and exits toward knowing and beyond knowing.
Above the handwriting is a drawing sketched in pencil of a sun above two books above a figure acting and dancing above two small children, named though yet to be born, in the embrace of two parents.

“We have a soul at times./…Joy and sorrow/ aren’t two different feelings for it./ It attends us/ only when the two are joined./…We need it but apparently/ it needs us / for some reason too” (Szymborska).

Poetry more aptly names that which we can reach and that which borders the unknown. Poetry strives toward understanding that which has yet to be known.

“Poetry is to precisely name. To name specifically what is” (Samuel Hazo). Ask a child to more aptly name a bridge and hear: “river staple!” Rename the whiteness of the door like a child. Call this door a framed purpose.

On the white door, level with the drawing of dreams is a photograph of a storefront. A dark green, stenciled font, on a cream background reads “The Carson Street Deli.” Like a river staple, the sign links the cubicle inhabitants with their great grandfather’s working in the mills and walking Carson after a shot after a twenty-four hour swing shift.

Below the historically preserved sign is a photograph of another storefront’s window. Hand written, blue block letters read Bellview’s Jelly Preserves and hand written, red block letters advertise a savings of sixty cents daily.

The moment of poetry is the moment of vulnerability is the moment of opening the book to find the photograph on the reverse side of a birthday wish. The hometown bridge’s strong rivets in focus, the cityscape backgrounded. An antenna from atop the Highmark Health Insurance building, like a steeple, reaching.

Framed between frames at eye level: “To be so vulnerable as to believe.”