Broken Glosa: an alphabet book of post-avant glosa, Stephen Bett, Chax, 2023, ISBN 978-1-946104-42-7, $21.00
Triangles, Marian Christie, Penteract Press, 2023, £8.00
Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document, Christodoulos Makris, Veer2, 2023, ISBN: 978-1-911567-56-1, £10.00
54 poems, selected and new, John Levy, Shearsman, 2023, ISBN 9781848618909, £12.95
concrete in the parallelogram, Mike Ferguson, Gazebo Gravy Press, 2023, £6.00
Drinking Watermelon Whiskey, Mike Ferguson, Red Ceilings Press, 2023, £8.00
Traditionally, a glossa goes like this; you quote four lines of a poem by another poet, then create a four-stanza poem in which the four lines quoted form, in order, the final four lines of these new
stanzas so that the first line of the epigraph is the final line of the first stanza, the second line ends the second stanza, and so on.
In Broken Glossa, Stephen Bett inverts this mould somewhat, as he uses the quoted lines not as the final but the first lines of his new stanzas. The glossed poems are by ‘post-avant’ poets, 60 or so, in alphabetical order of surname, with a bonus seven in a Covid 19 postscript. The result is a work of creative criticism, a way of rereading the originals. It’s also deeply hypertextual, with references to other poems by the glossed poet, other glossa in the book, other poems by Bett, nods to other writers, and frequent references to Bob Dylan (and occasional ones to other singer-songwriters). This hypertextuality is also underpinned by extensive footnoting (161 notes across 135 pages of text). At times the 4X4 rule is broken, with parallel columns of text, or five-line stanzas.
The result is by turns exhilarating, frustrating and impossible to quote from. Almost. Here’s the first stanza from the glossa on Paul Blackburn’s ‘Old’:
Shall we dance that one around again?
Twist again, like we did last summer…
Brisk strokes w/ troubadour folks
But deft like your own Franz Kline
In this stanza we see something of Bett’s method in miniature; the pop culture, the glancing reference to Blackburn’s work as translator of troubadour song, and the tendency to lean on sound as organising principle, with a concomitant delight in bad puns. This last is more evident in these lines from Jonathan Williams’ ‘At Brigflatts Burial Ground’
Eighteen months after you left us,
Full coarse bunting, bambaazled to a fault
& by the sound oop norf, you bet
Light airs of music /we are left with
(the last line being a quote from another Williams poem).
A very interesting read, but difficult to review coherently.
Marian Christie’s Triangles is a set of concrete or shape poems derived from a number of ways of generating triangles, from straightforward drawn shapes to mathematical sequences (triangular and primary numbers and the Fibonacci sequence) where numbers are converted to syllable counts per line to create centre-aligned shape poems.
Wait
With me.
Hold my hand
Through this long night.
The result is a something like a cross between Bob Cobbing and George Herbert. The poems represent a kind of generative mathematics and utilise the basic triangular shape in a surprising variety of ways. One particularly striking one, impossible to quote, is a sequence that starts with a lunar poem fitted within a drawn triangular outline which then develops into one of those ‘how many triangles can you see’ puzzles step by step, with each new set of triangles being blank so that the outcome is a process of progressive erasure. The description does it little justice; you’ll just have to buy the book to find out for yourself.
Christodoulos Makris’ Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document consists of a set of ‘post internet’ poems, with recurring themes and ideas that hover around the notion of the commodification of the self, a world in which the individual is a product, and the product is a brand:
solidifying my message attracts
new clients and grows my business
I will gain clout
at industry events attract offers from competitors
they want me to get more
out of my personal brand
here are a few tips
be myself
The irony, of course, being that there is no self for the speaker to be, just a set of brand projections and an algorithm. The language of these poems is purposefully drained of emotive weight, as flat as the pseudo world it documents, a world in which even the most intimate of relationships are commodified:
international playboy and I
posing in a club
oh I press my chest against your torso
lean and bling heavy
the expressions on my face swipe to see more
There are moments of resistance, as when the speaker in one poem says ‘hope I die before I’m sold’,
but the overall slant of Makris’ critique is towards a world that is dead to the human, a bleakness almost without escape.
By the end of the book this reader is left with a sense of a vein exhausted, a feeling that the book represents a final statement on a theme. If I’m right, then I’m very interested to see where Makris goes next.
John Levy’s 54 Poems is a selection of work covering half a century of writing by this seriously undervalued poet. Levy’s work as represented here engages with a handful of major concerns. The first of these is the poem as a series of engagements with a wider world of poetry, with many poems addressed to specific poets or poems. The poems addressed are woven into the wider web of experience, of Levy’s sense of being in the world:
I was reading
Ken Bolton’s poem,
“Footprints,” then
I began writing this
because the yellow butterfly (or more likely moth)
distracted me
I am trying to not
listen
to the voices
behind me I want
to get back to the poem
on the page
[from ‘To what end’]
The beauty of this is that Levy’s poem resides in the distractions, the journey back to the new poem on the new page is via the accidentally mundane facts of the world in which poems and other things exist.
Levy’s other main concerns here are the twin poles of memory and mortality. Many of the poems of memory are linked to specific places: Greece, Kyoto, Arizona, Paris. And many of them display the inter-permeability of Levy’s themes:
I have a terrible
memory, but it continues
to send me this, like a postcard
with no writing
on the blank side.
[from ‘Greek Hearses (1983-1985)’]
(On the matter of inter-permeability, it’s worth noting in passing that many of the poets addressed in these poems are also dead.)
The intertwining of memory and death takes on a specific weight in those poems where Levy ponders the meaning of the idea of an afterlife for someone who doesn’t really believe in it. To simplify greatly, it seems that his answer, unstated as it is, is that memory, the memories of the survivor, is its own continuity. This is exemplified, for me, in one of the later poems in the book which I feel constrained to quote in full:
My Late Mother
My mother has died
in many of my poems
after she died in
a hospital, when I
was too far away
and didn’t have a chance
to book a flight
to be with her. I write to
be with her, when I
write about her, which I
did when she lived too.
She lived, we talked, and now
it’s only me of the
two of us who speaks
to everywhere she
remains.
Apart altogether from the content, the great value of this poem is in the delicate verbal music that Levy weaves. For example, listen to the recurring long ‘i’ sounds that serve to emphasise the ‘I’ ‘my/died/my/died/I/flight/I/write/I/write/I’. This effect is emphasised by the recurring placement of the first person pronoun at line endings. This sonic patterning reinforces the importance of the surviving ‘I’ as the mode through which the mother remains present. Interestingly the weight shifts in the final lines to the long ‘e’ of ‘she/we/speak’; this sound binds together the action of conversation. Now, I’m not arguing that Levy set out to consciously do these things with sound, though he may have. I am arguing that in these lines we see the poetic instinct in action. The poet’s art is the art of verbal music. Levy has this art in spades. If you don’t already know his work, this book is a fine introduction. If you do, you’ll want to read the new poems in it.
With Mike Ferguson’s concrete in the parallelogram we return to the world of concrete poetry. Ferguson’s work in this genre reflects the British Concrete tradition, going back to Ian Hamilton Finlay and Bob Cobbing. Ferguson’s work here is full of visual and verbal puns, sometimes simple, and other times more complex, but as so often the case with concrete writing, easier to illustrate than write about. At the simpler end of the spectrum we have pieces like this:
The columnar structure serves as a visual representation of the process of waiting while the repeated ‘down’ enacts it verbally, setting up the ‘joke’ ending nicely. At the more complex end, WRITER also uses a column of repeated ‘write(r)’ more richly to serve as a kind of visual and verbal refrain, a point of return for the increasingly fragmentary erasures as the eye moves down the page:
Other works here are more purely verbal, such as the punningly titled HARD HAIKU, which is both self-explanatory and oddly but deeply satisfying:
CONCRETE POEM CONCRETE
POEM CONCRETE POEM CONCRETE POEM
CONCRETE POEM CONCRETE
Some of the text based poems point in a direction that is perhaps less ‘concrete’, like this small nod to Louis Zukofsky:
a
poem
that
begins
in
a
ends
in
a
In Drinking Watermelon Whiskey the reader encounters Ferguson’s text poetry this points towards. As the title indicates, these poems take off from Richard Brautigan’s novel In Watermelon Sugar. Ferguson picks up on a range of images and references from the Brautigan book, rivers and their sizes, trout, moths and above all the mysterious vegetable statues that are everywhere in iDEATH, the post-apocalyptic setting of the novel.
However, if Brautigan’s book is post-apocalyptic, Ferguson’s poems might better be described as pre-apocalyptic. He appropriates the older writer’s vocabulary to draw sketches of a society in turbulent decline. Central to this is his use of the statues as a means of commenting on contemporary culture wars, with the ‘Anti-Woke Vegetable Society’ turning apoplectic at the idea that an aubergine should be selected for commemoration. This satire on recent and ongoing debates around public statues reaches its clearest and most powerful expression in ‘The Rutabaga Statue’:
When things got seriously hard
for working people, politicians
decided to erect rutabaga statues
in the poorest communities. Urged
to worship at the notional feet of
‘Simple Things’, there was outrage
at this appropriation of proletarian
roots for the obfuscation of a ruling
class feasting on its corruption.
Clearly this is more overtly political than Brautigan, but the politics are part of the process of a world in terminal decline. My focus here is perhaps a bit one-sided, making Ferguson seem more heavy-handed than he is, so I’ll finish with another haiku-like poem that shows his more delicate touch:
Rivers Are Any Size
Metric or old-school
rivers can be any size
and don’t have to rhyme.
Elliptical Movements 
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