What the Postcard Didn’t Say

by Shoshauna Shy

 reviewed in Wisconsin People & Ideas by Wendy Vardman

 Madison writer and editor Shoshauna Shy has a mission to bring poetry to the public, demonstrating this commitment through both her writing and its related projects. A member of the poetry performance group Prairie Fire Quartet, Shy has also created the website Book That Poet! (www.bookthatpoet.com), which links poets and audiences, as well as the imaginative Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf program, founded in 2004 to put poems in unexpected places. So far, those places include rented bicycles, Community Car glove compartments, neighborhood welcome kits, java jackets, and, coming soon,  postcards. This location is especially appropriate given the title of  Shy’s first full-length collection, What the Postcard Didn’t Say, a book of accessible, unsentimental, character-driven poetry, enjoyable as much for what’s unstated as what is.

Whether told in 1^st or 3^rd person, almost all of these poems incorporate fictional narrators, or persona—sometimes more than one to a poem—with a story to tell, secrets to hide, their own point-of-view. Memorable characters include a maid whose employer tempts her to steal in “Sting”; a grown man who lives with his mother and writes anonymous love letters to her bridge friends in “Back Route to Baraboo”; the child of a couple who had to get married in “Keepsake”; the checker held-up by an ex-boyfriend in “The Sound of Spite’s Name”; a mother desperately focused on her own clothing in “Bringing My Son to the Police Station to be Fingerprinted.” 

If some pieces are based on facts or on experiences of the poet, Shy’s personal relation to that “reality” is refreshingly inconsequential to the poem. Instead of  dwelling on her own biography, she explores the undercurrents of situations you might read about in the morning paper, or have heard, as a child, your parents discuss when they thought you weren’t listening, including infidelity, abandonment, sexual predators, messy divorces, abuse, social change, revenge, estranged families, suicide, murder, poverty—in short, the messy facts of life. Suggestive titles develop her stories quickly: “Emergency Surgery 3^rd Grade, “The Pill Arrives in Wilmette,” “Why You Got Your Wallet Back,” “When Ann Landers Asks, 70% Say They Regret Having Kids,” or “Dancing with His Ex at His Wedding.” Shy likewise has an eye for the visually vivid, significant detail: a mysterious pearl; a candy-cane print bathrobe; an ant on a court-room bench, or, in “For Better and for Worse”: “See orange peels the disposal/hiccupped, the dent above/the wheel well, the crash/of a pine through the neighbor’s roof, the lies our son whipped/out of his pocket.”

Divided into four sections that extend her title’s travel metaphor—“Accommodations,” “Luggage,” “Detours,” and “Souvenirs”—each part turns around the other meanings of these words: accommodations refers to marriage and its difficulties, for example, and luggage to secrets, while most of the last part’s souvenirs are memorable for some unpleasant reason. Each section  begins with a numbered “What the Postcard Didn’t Say” that draws our attention to omission as a narrative choice and to the postcard form itself: a form we all use, as well as a form through which we put on other identities, moving among locations and vacations, altering our words, even our selves, depending on the receiver. Unlike the typical, vague vacation card, however, Shy conveys a story through the presence, and absence, of a few carefully chosen words, as in “What the Postcard Didn’t Say—#17”: “Tonight I sleep/on this cabin floor/Tomorrow bleach my hair/change my name/From now on your dad/gets to deal with you/I’ll look you up/when you hit 18”.

Although these strong but fragile poems focus on the sometimes unpleasant, sometimes tragic lives of breakable people, they are, nevertheless, often comic, occasionally surreal, and always considerate of their characters’ humanity. After you’ve read the book once, read it again, slowly; examine a few figures at a time, run your fingers along their edges and hollows, feel for the missing chip, appreciate their contours and contortions.

What the Postcard Didn’t Say

by Shoshauna Shy

 reviewed by  Matthew Guenette, MATC

Shorts: 101 Short Poems of Wonder and Surprise 

by John Lehman 

from the Introduction by Harriet Brown, Editor of Wisconsin Trails Magazine  

I Was a Little Nervous

      I have never been a devotee of prose poems. Nor can I tell you what a prose poem is, exactly, any more than I can tell you what a poem is. Coming across a prose poem in a collection of "regular poems" has always been, for me, something like finding a stray Brazil nut in a slice of lemon meringue pie—a surprising experience that leads to a certain amount of pain.

     The pain—in this case psychic rather than dental—derives from the dissonance between my expectations of prose and my expectations of poetry. While I can't say what a poem is, I know a good one by the way it makes all the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And I know what a bad one does, all too often: tells me too much, waxes verbose, bores me.

      So I was a little nervous to open this collection of John Lehman's prose poems, nervous that I would be baffled and uncomfortable, that the poems would raise a lot of unanswerable anxiety-provoking questions about the difference between prose and poetry, the importance of visual versus oral poetry, and so on. My angst vanished with the first piece, "A Book of Poems," which compares the process of opening a book of poems to trying to get into a locked van. That image and metaphor were so true, so right, that I gave up worrying about incidentals like definitions and labels and just kept reading.
     Lehman has invented a form he calls the justified poem, a reference to the fixed line lengths and justified appearance of these pieces. It is a form that seems made for (in fact, was made for) his particular way of viewing the world, of both seeing the ordinary surface of things and looking beneath the quotidian to the bone of things. These pieces are both clever and addictive. Reading them is like eating plate after plate of dim sum—you keep eating and eating because they're so good, and pretty soon you're deliciously, magically full.
     Lehman's world is an interior landscape filled with dogs and Houdini, werewolves and funerals, wives and brothers and children. Each poem stands alone, but together they have a cumulative effect. In poem after poem, Lehman turns our perceptions upside down. In "What I Learn From Dogs," for instance, one of my favorites in this collection, he writes, "A toilet's a wondrous, indoor spring. / The bank drive-through, a nonstop / dispenser of

doggy treats. . ."

     A poem is a way to tell the truth—not necessarily the literal truth, not this happened and that happened, he said and she said, but the kind of deeper emotional truth that relies on metaphor, archetype and image. And Lehman is a consummate truth teller, pointing us over and over toward the skeleton under the skin of things. The justified poem form aids this process. After all, what could be more ordinary than prose, or a prose poem? The word itself is from the Latin prosa, meaning straightforward. The art is in the tension between the deceptive simplicity of these pieces and the complex worldview revealed within them.

   These poems feel quintessentially Midwestern to me, an East Coaster born and raised; the world they portray seems created on a human scale—not the vast wide-open spaces of the West or the crammed interior passages of the East. They take place in a landscape that is comfortable but not comforting, a place big enough to contain us and all our concerns and feelings, yet not so big as to be overwhelming. They are clearly narrative; something happens in each. A couple recollects a defining moment in their relationship, a man eats a bowl of mushroom-barley soup, a woman rides by on a bicycle. Their power comes from their ability to make the reader reconsider the quotidian, touch for a moment the feeling of wonder and mystery that runs under everyday life like an underground river.

     The title poem, "Shorts," embodies Lehman's often playful form. Its seven lines, each between 9 and 11 characters long, take the physical shape of a space between pickets in a fence, which is also part of the startling image the poem conjures. "Rest Stop," another of my favorites, ends with an image of spring leaves caressing the light—a reversal of the usual metaphor, of light falling against leaves. Lehman is the master of the telling last image or line, the kind that socks into place like a baseball hitting the sweet spot in a glove.
     In "Houdini Prepares for a Blind Date," Lehman plays with the notion of blindness, of seeing and being seen in the most intimate sense of the word. In "You Know the Way to the Place Where I Am Going" the speaker collects coincidences, the small mysteries of a life, and pulls them together into a moment of startling clarify and mystery. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I read "How I Learned to Drown," with its killer lines "…After the rescue he vowed he'd never / again go farther out than where he could touch / the bottom. I’d rather drown than live by that philosophy..." I wanted to leap out of my desk chair and shout "Hallelujah!"

     But then, so many of these poems gave me that feeling: "Eating Truth," which noses at the relationship between art and life, and "Power of Prayer," which made me laugh out loud, and the sly humor of "If Poets Did Useful Things." Well, some of them do useful things, as it turns out. Like write books that make you see the world differently. Like this one.

America’s Greatest Unknown Poet, Lorine Niedecker Reminiscences, Photographs, Letters and Her

Most Memorable Poems  

by John Lehman

reviewed by Talis Schorr, Free Verse

I don’t think there is a better example of a writer’s home symbolizing her work than the Blackhawk Island cabin where Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker lived most of her life. 2003, marked the 100^th anniversary of her birth. Her reputation has been steadily increasing over the years, both in America and throughout the world. Robert Creeley has said, “Lorine Niedecker proves a major poet of the twentieth century, just as Emily Dickinson was for the nineteenth.”                           

 Now there’s a very affordable new book about Niedecker. What makes this work different is that it loosely correlates her letters, photographs, reminiscences of people who knew her and her most memorable poems. Her life and work provide a unique touchstone by which we can answer questions such as: “What can we achieve through writing?” “How are we affected by where we live?” “Who inspires us?” and “Why is a piece of writing great?”  

At my own first exposure to Lorine Niedecker’s work I found her poems cryptic. Seeing them within the context of her life makes me marvel at how so many layers are conveyed by so few words. As John Lehman (founder of Rosebud) explains in his accompanying essay, “How to Make a Poem Your Own,” we like poems we can quote at a graduation, wedding or a funeral, poems that offer solace when we feel lonely or courage when we need to strengthen ourselves. Unfortunately, Lorine Niedecker’s work is less entertaining for the passive reader and not as easily accessible for someone wanting to make a quick emotional connection. He concludes: ”Despite its simple appearance, it isn’t easy. So what advantages does her work offer instead? It forces us to slow down. To understand, rather than be understood. It reduces life to essentials in a way few things in our overwrought world do. It is demanding of us, but the result is we leave the experience with a sharpness and intensity that make our own existence more precise.”

 Lorine Niedecker’s own letters reveal the quiet drama of her life.

A woman in Fort threw herself into the river off the bridge one night last week. “She must have been insane,” they said—you can’t help but feel it must have been a lucid moment among patches of ice. Was going to stay up Friday and go to the Schumann movie but it snowed so much I didn’t. At home I felt if only I could read something I had once written, some prose…so I dug around and found the letter that you have re. visit to Kumlien’s old homeplace (I made a copy of the letter to remember the place.) Where I am and who I am…everything else is so silly. In the midst of that ordeal two weeks ago I said to myself when I came home and saw a picture of the sora rail, “Only two or three things make the world, one of them you, sora…and those things must be made known…To you, sora…to you [Robert] Burns…to you, silence…child…”

Her relationship to the avant-garde, New York poet, Louis Zukofsky, and his ultimate rejection of her after forty years of correspondence (often more than one letter a week) is engrossing. She was shy and unworldly. He, an intense intellectual. I felt like Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Possession pouring over the letters and poems of a dead poet to discover the secrets of an amorous relationship.

What I particularly like about this book is that it’s meaningful and thorough.  For example, the author presents a poem by Zukofsky and then gives Niedecker’s poem in reply. There is her description in a letter of her mother’s death followed by the poem she wrote incorporating her same observations. We see the creative process at work and how Niedecker’s ambition to be a world-acknowledged poet ironically led to her becoming the quintessential poet of place.

 Her marriage at sixty to a one-armed maintenance man, the publication of two of her books and the influence she had on others after her death complete a story that’s as enthralling and psychologically intriguing as a novel.

 All the doors have never been opened for me in my life but closing some of them has let more of something else into a few or into one or two and there’ll be poetry and that’s that.

Two passages I found particularly moving involve her anonymity within the hometown where she worked nights scrubbing floors at a hospital and her last words that show such an inspiring commitment to her art that even if they weren’t on the cover of America’s Greatest Unknown Poet they’d be unforgettable. This book should be in every public library, high school and on every writer’s bookshelf in Wisconsin. Lorine Niedecker was a little-known poet whose real greatness may be that her struggles reflect our own.

…The business of loneliness—the mind has to be sharp to keep one from getting uselessly involved just for the sake of a moment of less loneliness. I have the Art News Annual, that large book you get from Marboro Books at one-fourth the cost when it’s a year old and I carried it to work one day thinking to ask the record librarian if she’d like to borrow it—she has a daughter in Milwaukee who paints. I didn’t approach her, after carrying the thing there! I think they know they have a cleaning woman who is a little different from the usual, but it wouldn’t do the slightest good to show them how different. 

—

“I think of lines of poetry that I might use, all day long and even in the night.”

                                                                    —Lorine Niedecker’s last recorded words

 The home where she lived (now privately owned) is marked with a modest Wisconsin State Historical Marker, but even more poignant to the knowledgeable visitor is the small, white hand pump outside her cabin.

Lorine, herself, is buried at Union Cemetery, two and one-half miles away on Highway J, in the family plot next to her father and mother. Beside her is the much smaller headstone of Al Millen.

 There’s a special room in the Hoard’s Museum down the block from the Dwight Foster Memorial Library on Merchant Avenue in downtown Fort Atkinson, which is now dedicated to Lorine Niedecker. The library maintains a collection that includes Lorine’s personal books along with copies of her own published works, original manuscripts, interviews, pertinent periodicals, photographs, tapes and videos. Visitors are very welcome at both the museum and the library.  

Dogs Dream of Running

By John Lehman

Reviewed by Bob Wake,Editor of the Cambridge Book Review, Reviewer for www.culturevulture.net

 Dogs Dream of Running collects forty-eight of John Lehman’s wry melancholic poems. Perhaps it’s bad form to recommend reading a book’s Epilogue before commencing with page one. However, Lehman’s end-of-the-book essay, “How I Started Writing Poetry,” is so revealing in unexpected ways that it’s an ideal starting point. The essay evokes a Michigan summer in 1972. On vacation from the high school teaching job he held at the time, Lehman sets about trying his hand at writing a detective novel. He recounts for us the opening chapter, which is vivid and suspenseful. But soon discouragement rears its head and he stops writing. Setting the novel aside, he finds a comfortable spot in the back yard and begins rereading Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler for inspiration. His wife grows increasingly irritated by what she perceives as her husband’s indolence. They bicker for days and finally he packs a bag and heads for Canada on his motorcycle. His journey on the road is studded with the kinds of small elegiac epiphanies—a rain storm, a detour to mystery writer Ross MacDonald’s hometown, the purchase of a junk-shop teakettle—that will come to define Lehman’s poetic sensibility.            

The Epilogue is, in a sense, a road map by which to navigate Dogs Dream of Running. Readers will recognize its themes threaded throughout the book. Detective fiction and film noir tropes appear again and again, sometimes humorously, sometimes with genuine foreboding. In the poem “Hard-Boiled, Retro-Pulp Neo-Noir,” we learn that “Mike Hammer is alive and/ operating outa Rockdale, Wisconsin,/ kicking butt as an ad copy writer.” Lehman, we’re not surprised to learn, has worked in advertising and currently lives in Rockdale, Wisconsin. The reconstituted Mike Hammer, when not composing “two-fisted advertising,” broods over his failed novel, something titled The Big Metaphor. “No one is/ ever quite what they seem,” the poem concludes, mixing detective story duplicity with a lament for lost dreams and unexpressed yearnings. In another film noir poem, “Danger Ahead,” the beckoning highway becomes a symbol of discomforting transformation: “When you/ arrive you’re another person.”  

In Lehman’s work, the self is shadowy and fluid, tenuously poised between Keatsian idealism and soul-grinding Hobbesian pessimism. The narrator in the poem “Note to the Insurance Company on my Sixtieth Birthday” compares life at forty to life at sixty and finds little to celebrate: “I was in financial/ trouble then as I am now.”  “I suppose,” he writes, “the subject/ should be death.” Vowing instead to change his worldview, he resolves “to live my life like a/ poem, each year a line with some/ rhyme and reason.” Can “a prolonged metaphor” transcend our desperation and rekindle our passion for living? It’s not an idle question in these poems. Painfully aware of the low-esteem afforded poetry in today’s marketplace, Lehman refuses to go gentle into that good night. “Have you ever stolen a collection/ of poetry?” he asks us pointedly in “Pornographic Literature,” a poem composed after a disastrous book-signing (no one showed up) in Appleton, Wisconsin. Fantasizing a shoplifter who is overcome with literary lust and slips a volume of verse into his pants, the poet imagines the “thrill/ of rushing toward the night with/ this forbidden shape pressed/ tight against your groin.”           

While the Epilogue suggests an innate antipathy between domesticity and unfettered creativity, the poetry tells another story: marriage and blood ties are essential touchstones for artistic contemplation. Poems such as “Mother’s Day,” “Editing My Wife’s Autobiography” and “After My Son’s Divorce” are memorable crystallizations of entwined lives. Sentiment is never indulged for its own sake. A lovely indirect eulogy for the poet’s late father is folded into the title of a strong piece about an ailing friend, “My Father, Too, Had Alzheimer’s.” Images of communion, theatrical artifice and doubled perceptions reinforce the dual tribute to father and friend:

 John Lehman has a wizard’s eye for the telling human detail and the rude pinprick, as well as the intricate ironies of the heart. Dogs Dream of Running sneaks up on you with its range and thoroughness of vision.