Spencer Dew essay on Future Blues and Ancestor Worship

Spencer Dew has written a review/essay on Future Blues and Ancestor Worship for the online literary journal decomP (May 2013).  Here is the link:

http://www.decompmagazine.com/outofyourlanguage.htm

Here also is the essay in full:

“out of your language”:
The Poetry of Michael S. Begnal

Spencer Dew

Two things that make Michael S. Begnal such an impressive poet are his range and the delicacy—the grace—with which he expresses that range, balancing erudition with freshness, distilling broad learning in a sound like a baby’s scream. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who case up their smarts in a vitrine, for display, Begnal’s skills drop with wisdom and humility. Indeed, there is, in these two collections, a voice one could easily mistake for a much older poet, and each of these books reads like a “selected volume,” in which the library poems and alleyway poems, the rainy-window poems and post-coital hotel poems are all artfully arranged to give a sense of the scope of a long career. But Begnal is young: he’s just that good. In Ancestor Worship (2007), a narrator visits Montparnasse Cemetery in a piece that bounds from sex to shit in two pages, from suicide to the yeasty immutability of crotch. As an act of worship, an offering of the vernacular: “Baudelaire’s grave / covered with green Métro tickets, / many-coloured flowers, / and a sketch—/ Beckett’s bare— / Sartre’s respectable—.” Because the “worship” imagined here is

not like the imagined
rituals of an old old age
before iron or bronze,
the metal of our mythology,
. . .
but the warm blood
that flows through to this age, dangerous and violence in veins
. . .
the right hook of history,
the slow arc of the punch,
the strange figure
on a modern city street
who burrows into your eye
and says, “Who’re you?”

In these poems of street wandering and port wine, one ancestor being worshiped sure seems to be Kerouac, in the best sense, of child-like wonder at the sounds, at the endlessly fascinating task of describing the world, “Grab the polaroid / and head down to where they spray graffiti / on brick walls / and piss in alleys” reads a poem in Future Blues (2012), the more recent collection, wherein a No Parking sign is as likely—along with “piles of pallets / & another broad wall of brick”—to constitute the subject of a poem, or the raw material out of which a poem, about the act and function of poetry-writing, is constructed. That on each of the pages of these two volumes Begnal makes us see something anew—a fresh perspective on delivery trucks as well as seasons and wine and weather and libraries full of previous writers, from Li Po to James Liddy—is their great success. Yet here, amidst “my songs all of lonesome” and reevaluations of surroundings—an ancient “stadium of white stone, / cracked blocks of sun” where men eat tacos and sneak pills “and the peanut vendors never come around”—the major themes of Begnal’s work are advanced, these being language as a product of a given context—not only a place, but a time, a particular moment on a particular street, be it Galway, Derry, San Francisco, or Madrid—and the sense that through language not only are voices of the dead, our ancestors, preserved, but that a community is established in and through such reading and reciting. “Ancestor Worship” is thus the active establishment of a community of voices the enduring presence of which is a defiance of time and death.

This is a sophisticated concept, that, on the one hand “There’s no present / just a continual becoming / past” on the page, in the text—there is only ever that which has always already been written—and, as a result, poetry thus offers collective “resistance to certain fixities.” Begnal is here informed not merely by study of things written in English, but by global travel and—too rare among Americans, whom he refers to, in a poem set in Prague as “too many shorts-wearers, / oblivious to their own / incongruity”—serious engagement with other languages. Most importantly, this mean Irish, in which Begnal writes.

Both books under consideration here have poems that, to a non-Irish reader, remain—as Begnal writes about French television—inaccessible. “I am denied,” he writes, straining “to penetrate the sound barrier / extracting random phrases but no coherent sentences.” Yet there is a lesson here: that these are words still living; that here is a poet assembling community from more than one culture. This dual sense for language—again, one thinks of Kerouac—grants Begnal a blessed ear, a sense for the entanglements of imagination and place, memory and words. Here are lines set in Madrid: “I don’t really speak Spanish / just know a few words / but I can fake it pretty good.” “Because I, in my American, think of Mexico / I think Juárez while wandering . . . thin uphill streets lined with cervecerías, / eat tortilla yum egg patata onion, / wandering, restaurants full of pigs, / plates of fried squid in windows.”

As one can travel with language, one can travel through language, as well: “The closest I can get / right now to Mexico / is Texicanos corn chips, / ‘manufactured’ (not baked) / in Coolock.” Or dig this fantasy, tinged again with what I take to be the inheritance of Kerouac, and Kerouac’s San Francisco: “‘cause just up the street / was my Mexican place, Burrito Salvadoreño, / and a hot married Salvadoreña // I always got hot peppers, / always got hot peppers, / left impressive tips, / but feared the imagery / of the black Latin moustache, / murderous, / vengeful husband.” In the same poem, Begnal warns that “deep in the Mission / it was even more dangerous / ‘cause you were / out of your language.”

It is refreshing and useful to read a young American poet so aware of that sense of being in and out of language, whose poetry acts to “celebrate all the dead in their graves” in their own contextual voices, even while he also rhapsodizes about 25 cent porn booths and the neon pulse of a city rippling through the night. I believe Begnal’s bilingual status grants him a rare gift; that while he can write of “Solitary room freak-outs nobody knows the panic of” he never confuses the subjective experiences of the self with the limits of the world, knowing, rather, that the world inhabited by the living, reading, poet is one in which—as he writes in “Samhain,” in Future Blues, one exists in concert with those who went before. We are a compilation of our ancestors.

Indeed, Begnal roots what he calls the “rebellion” of poetry in language’s disavowal of temporality, that the written word maintains an “ancient revolutionary movement / forever.” To “trust in language always” is thus to “trust in a world, in a flicker, / in an echo, / speak, and they are present . . . they are there, in a word or line / you thought was your own.” Forget the spook-show metaphysics of Halloween, where the dead wander for a day: Begnal is interested in poetry as a particular class of engagement with language—“the poem is an action among / the most human (and animal) of actions”—which, in this reading, becomes truly revolutionary, a defiance of time and death and a revolutionary catalyst for an ideal community, “different but together and equal, / agency and valency, / multi- Multi- MULTI-.” The fantastical “city City CITY” of Kerouac is here given a new gloss, one of ethical and political urgency. The dead speak, and these subjective flashes from beyond the grave contribute to what Begnal sees as a resistance not merely against “stasis” but also the status quo of the capitalist “market.”

Not that the author—like certain still-singing voices from the past—is not also “freaking out” about the unknowable concrete reality of his own death, but simply that life itself, as experience through language and manifest in the process of writing poetry, is always collective, always involves our ancestors, acknowledged or not. The Irish pieces here represent one form of acknowledgement, as do the many references—from Goya to Ferlinghetti—sprinkled throughout, and even the recognition that we are our own ancestors, that our own writing represents some voice speaking from a moment now past, lost. I “cannibalize myself,” the poet says, “I wrote days ago some of these lines.”

The particular roots of the written word, testifying to a past by continuing to speak, the community of poets assembled through veneration and continued engagement with the voices of our ancestors. That these themes are engaged in two books so fresh, so multi-faceted, smelling of assorted street cuisines, desire and fear, drunken ecstasy and philosophical consideration—that is more than impressive. These are remarkable books.

James Liddy, On Irish Literature and Identities

A new volume of James Liddy’s essays, edited by Eamonn Wall, titled On Irish Literature and Identities (Arlen House / dist. Syracuse University Press), includes an interview I did with Liddy.  This interview was originally published in The Burning Bush number 8, Autumn 2002, and I am very pleased to see it finally reappear.  The whole book is great, in fact, and includes essays such as “Nationalist and Worker in the Poetry of Thomas Kinsella and Thomas McCarthy,” “Ulster Poets and the Catholic Muse,” and “How We Stood Our Rounds: Bohemian Dublin in the Sixties.”  The back cover sums it up nicely: “This is a book of literary-academic-and-bohemian witness written in an engaging, brilliant, and unique voice.”

Begnal Interview at The Reading Life

I was interviewed by Mel Ulm for his website The Reading Life.  Ulm asks me questions about literature, poetry, Irish literature, Ireland itself, and a little bit about my own writing.  Read the interview at:

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2013/04/micheal-begnal-question-and-answer.html

Free State Review

A new print literary journal is a rare thing these days it seems, with the lure of the internet growing ever stronger.  And it makes sense — web skills are not extremely difficult to learn, and the medium reaches so many more people than print can in this day and age.  So the launch of a new print magazine is, for me, simultaneously welcome and anachronistic (in a good way) (though they do have a website, here).  As someone who has edited a literary magazine in the past, I appreciate the attention to layout and the strong production values encompassed in the Free State Review issue one (including a cover painting by, but no poetry from, Mark Stand), which was sent to me recently in the mail.  The journal is based in the Annapolis, MD, area, but its contributors seem to be pulled from Anywhere, USA.  It is hard to distinguish a particular aesthetic focus or editorial policy, though the Editor’s Note states that “Every contributor centers his or her life around action — engaging the world, scratching surfaces.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it seems intentionally designed to lend itself to a broad interpretation.  Their website avers, “Our focus is place and experience. We look for authors who live the poem — story — essay before they write it.”  To me this implies that they are more interested in subject than language.

Thus, the FSR, as with any such journal that casts a wide net, with less of an emphasis on a particular poetics, is a mixed bag.  There is a lot of work here that I like.  Barbara DeCesare’s poem for Babe Ruth offers irony and imagism in lines like, “A thousand people swim dark water. / You take baseballs, glowing white, to the shore // and hit them, two or three hanging in the air at a time…”  Nikia S. Leopold’s “The Miracle” is a pleasant reflection on Italy, ending “We found a place / to lie together full length.... / I swear by San Gersolé / our murmurs / made that fountain weep.”  A couple of poets I liked happen to have been published by presses who have published me as well — Drucilla Wall’s “Laurel Oak” includes some strong nature imagery which is subverted by juxtaposition with technology and subtle humor.  Jessica Fenlon’s “seed station” subverts its imagism with popular culture: a cardinal is described as having a “tweed jacket [and] / feather mohawk.”  Edgar Gabriel Silex’s “Mother’s Day Poem” exhibits an interest in use of language more than some in this issue, as does Chris Toll, who, his bio note unfortunately states, recently died.

I can’t quite figure out why Tony Barnstone’s “Samsara” and “Wheel” are dubbed short stories in the Editor’s Note, when they appear very obviously in verse lines.  I’m all for blurring the boundaries of genre, but this didn’t quite seem to make sense — they appear as prosey narrative poems but would certainly read just as well as actual short stories.  On the other hand, I imagine Barnstone knows exactly what he’s doing and the matter is simply one of terminology.  Juliana Spallholtz’s “Strangers” works nicely as the prose-poem that it clearly is, its spare “sentences” emphasizing the piece’s sense of alienation.  Naturally, there are some pieces here that didn’t especially appeal to me, also.  Those who know me or read this blog know that I often tend to prefer work that is, as some might call it, “difficult,” and the Free State Review editors clearly are interested in more accessible work.  But this is a sturdy debut.  I would actually like to see the journal in future issues narrow its focus a bit, to foster more of a sense of identity for itself in relation to the type of poetics it is interested in, even if it were to veer further away from my own aesthetic concerns.

In any case, the Free State Review is an active force and is organizing a number of readings, including one in Pittsburgh on Wednesday 4/17 at the East End Book Exchange, Bloomfield (4754 Liberty Ave.), from 7:00-9:00 pm.  There will be four readers, and admission is free.  It promises to be a worthy event.

Heart of Darkness (the band)

I almost always write about literary matters here at this blog, with occasional political intersections.  But as long-time readers will know, I’ve also written a number of music-related posts, including on bands that I’ve been in myself (I was/am, mostly was, a drummer), such as Wasted Talent and Oblivion.  The band I was in after these was Heart of Darkness, based in State College, Pennsylvania, from about 1986 till our eventual break-up in Hollywood, California, in 1991.  We (self-)released three demo tapes and a 7” single (on blue vinyl), and at one point had some minor record label interest, but it seemed to me that the band’s impact was minimal at best, at least outside of a small but dedicated local following.

HOD’s original singer was Mike Scalzi, who went on to create the legendary metal band Slough Feg.  (Not a lot of people know about Scalzi’s pre-Slough Feg career, though he discusses it in an interview here.).  My brother, who was HOD’s founder and rhythm guitarist, is now in the New York-based punk band Chesty Malone and the Slice ’em Ups.  But HOD is virtually unknown in the annals of rock, punk, or heavy metal history — probably deservedly so, since no one has done much in this digital age to foster awareness of the band (we tried and I guess failed at the time).

So it’s interesting to me that all of the sudden one of our demo tapes (from 1988!) turns up in Des Moines, Iowa, of all places, and someone posts a blog piece about it: http://idontlistentopunkanymore.blogspot.com/2012/11/heart-of-darkness-leeway-usa-demo-tape.html, and kind of raves about it (at least some aspects of it).  I guess you never can tell what will resonate for people, whether now or in the future.

(The lead guitarist, by the way, who the reviewer loves, is Eric Borkovec, my brother is on guitar and vocals, the bassist is Rusty Glessner, and I am on drums.  The songs are downloadable.)

Easter 2013

 

James Connolly wrote, “An Irish Republic, the only purely political change in Ireland worth crossing the street for, will never be realised except by a revolutionary party that proceeds upon the premise that the capitalist and the landlord classes in town and country in Ireland are criminal accomplices with the British government, in the enslavement and subjection of the nation. Such a revolutionary party must be socialist, and from socialism alone can the salvation of Ireland come” (The Harp, March 1909)

The exact meaning of “socialism” I think in this time period is contested and up for debate, after the history of the 20th century, and I can’t subscribe to any such overarching theory, but his basic premise remains correct.  I am not sure what exactly the solution is, but Connolly is at least a good starting point for thought.  The British govt. may not even be the worst problem right now (though they certainly contribute to it).  The problem is both global and local; Connolly’s words are relevant everywhere.

The “Next Big Thing” interview

My friend and fellow poet Shannon Ward suggested that I do this.  This is a thing where poets send around these interview questions to poets they know (& I think fiction writers do too).  I’m not sure who started it, but it’s ongoing, apparently.

What is the working title of your book (or story)? 

My latest book is FutureBlues from Salmon Poetry (2012).  Also working on some new stuff.

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

I wanted to do something different from my last collection (in both above-mentioned instances) and push myself forward.  I didn’t want to just do the same thing over and over. 

What genre does your book fall under? 

Poetry.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters, in a movie rendition? 

It wouldn’t be the kind of film where there were actors, necessarily.  The closest analogue I can think of is the work of abstract filmmaker Stan Brakhage (if that is not too presumptuous on my part).  He did occasionally film shots of himself, his wife, and poets who were friends of his. 

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 

“Inasmuch as any poet’s work is a continuing narrative defined by nothing more or less than chronological time, Future Blues is the collection that follows its immediate predecessor and so cannot help but be aware of it” (from the back cover description of Future Blues).

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

Future Blues was recently published by Salmon Poetry.  The next one is a chapbook-length thing that doesn’t yet have a publisher.  Poets don’t usually work with agents as far as I know. 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

Future Blues is poems 2003-2012. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

Muses. 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 

Future Blues cover art is a painting by Kyle Fitzpatrick called “Theater,” which is a dark-hued, red-hued, textural, surreal painting of a theater being flooded in a rainstorm, like out of a dream or something.

***

I’ll pass this along to (tag) a few other people at some point soon.

Books at Awesome Books

Pittsburghers and tourists: Copies of my books Future Blues and Ancestor Worship are now for sale at the downtown location of Awesome Books (929 Liberty Ave., Pgh, i.e. Liberty & 9th).  If you happen to be around, stop in and pick them up.

Update: Awesome Books has been sold to new owners and renamed Amazing Books (no kidding).  Same location, etc.

Reading in Pgh, March 7th

I will be reading some poems this Thursday, March 7th, 6pm, at Awesome Books, 929 Liberty Ave., downtown Pittsburgh.  The event is a book launch for fiction writer Spencer Dew, and Karen Lillis will also be reading.

James Franco, The Broken Tower

James Franco’s Hart Crane biopic, The Broken Tower (2011), has been criticized for all the usual reasons that people criticize abstract art of any kind — it’s supposedly disjointed, meandering, pretentious; in short, too “arty.”  Having finally watched it, I have to say I agree with some of this, but instead of seeing these as negatives, see most of these criticisms, these supposed weaknesses, as strengths instead.  Yes, it’s disjointed and somewhat non-linear.  But more often than not, I prefer that.  Most of the time, for me, plot comes off as contrived.  The film follows the basic trajectory of Crane’s life (as rendered in the Paul Mariani biography), but it is not given the over-dramatized treatment of most Hollywood biopics, thankfully.  Instead we get incidents or moments rendered beautifully (in black and white, except for one signal scene of Crane in Notre Dame cathedral — did Franco perhaps get the idea from another great overlooked film, Coppola’s Rumble Fish, which is mostly b&w but turns to color at the end?).  Okay, there was one lingering shot of the back of Franco’s head that made me laugh a bit, but on the whole the camera work is powerful and well handled.  The film unfolds episodically (in segments titled “Voyages”), but the emphasis is always visual rather than narrative.  Or rather, the narrative exists simply in the juxtaposition of the images.

There is also lots of talking and lots of poetry reading.  Critics have asserted that the film isn’t quite carried on the strength of Crane’s words being intoned by Franco.  For example, Stephen Holden writes, “despite earnest attempts, Mr. Franco can’t bring the fervency of Crane’s poetry to life in the extensive recitations.”  But I would say that this does indeed make a very strong contribution in the film.  The sense that I got from the scene of Crane reading “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” in some wood-paneled room maybe was something like what it might have been to actually be there.  Poetry readings can be dull, sure, but if Hart Crane is reading it’s going to be a different story, and Franco did a pretty good job at being Crane, I think.  This scene forces the viewer to become a listener, to hear Crane’s words, to tune into the poem itself.

In fact, it made me go and grab my copy of Crane’s Collected Poems and later read along to other poems while the film was still playing (doubly difficult as I didn’t want to miss the visual images before me on the screen).  Hearing the lines of “The Bridge” being read in juxtaposition with Christina Voros’s cinematography was amazing — to “see” Franco’s vision of the poem (the “Proem” specifically, I should say), whether or not it accords exactly with my initial sense of the poem, was something of a revelation.  Similarly, the scenes of Crane composing “The Broken Tower” on a typewriter in a lonely room were handled just as well.  In many places, Crane simply walks endlessly, by himself.  Forget about story — this is more important.  Since watching the film, I’ve had the Collected Poems lying around and have been dipping into them again.  If this film can do that, with a sense of like-mindedness and sympathy imparted to the viewer (rather than, say, a sense of needing a corrective), then it has more than accomplished its purpose.

Keith Gaustad, High Art & Love Poems

I know Keith Gaustad, and I also blurbed his recent chapbook High Art & Love Poems (Broken Bird Press/The Conium Review, 2012).   So I guess this isn’t a review, really, but I just wanted to say a few things about the book anyway.  My blurb reads, “Keith Gaustad’s poems are concise, deliberate in diction, at times terse — they are, as Pound would put it, ‘free from emotional slither.’ Yet there is deep feeling here, which emerges side by side with Gaustad’s subtle sense of satire.”  There is even more to his work, though.  As satire, it is often funny, and many of the poems turn on wordplay and puns.  The book’s title obliquely references James Liddy’s Art Is Not for Grownups, which, as Brian Arkins writes in his introduction to Liddy’s Collected Poems, is “the volume of Liddy that most obviously employs wit…. Here the target … include[s] literary pieties of various kinds.”  And so it is for Gaustad, whose first section in High Art & Love Poems is titled “The Poet Warrior” and begins with the quip, “I’m not afraid of paper cuts.”

Where the aforementioned Liddy collection is composed of short epigrammatical pieces, Gaustad gives us lyrics of a page, two pages, some even three pages in length.  The book’s structure of five sections seems to add up to a narrative of sorts, and the poet has told me that this is a conscious echo of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, each separate section representing a stage of artistic and/or personal development.  Gaustad, however, is not Irish like Joyce (though he was a student of Liddy’s and shares his idiosyncratic Catholicism).  Instead, he is Wisconsin German, living and writing in the poetry mecca of Milwaukee.  His satire, his own irony, works against the hipster irony that one encounters in any such American city. 

In “Philosopher’s House Party,” for example, he writes of “The men in the kitchen from the city with beer in their / beards” while in “Apollo the Cubist and Paul and Saul” he charges, “Post Modern lovers / you / never seem to fall off your horses.”  Many of these poems reflect a struggle with alienation and the desire for some sort of communal feeling.  Their speakers are alternately appalled by people’s displays of vapidity or posturing, and galvanized into seeking out a semblance of meaning, whatever that could be (here I’m reminded of the singer Jonathan Richman of the band the Modern Lovers [emphasis mine]).  He is serious about this.  Thus, his work will no doubt be rejected by about three-quarters or more of all current poetry outlets, since jokey, quirky, prosey stuff is what’s in now — there’s a difference between serious joking, which is what Gaustad does, and quirky/silly, if that makes sense.

Perhaps this chapbook’s subject matter is nothing more than the struggle to become a serious person in a hipster world.  But then, isn’t this similar to Stephen Dedalus’s struggle, only in a vastly different context?  And the poetry that springs from it here is both unique and strong.  Of that same struggle, Gaustad has also written to me, “maybe I’ll get lucky and leave that behind with the book.”  High Art & Love Poems is overtly what it is — a poet’s first book well-composed, a well-structured short collection.  It is a substantial book (that is, it has substance), though, setting the stage for what one can only hope will be a substantial, ongoing career.  Incidentally, it features cover art by the great Milwaukee painter Kyle Fitzpatrick, one of my favorite contemporary artists.

($9.95 from the link above, 37 pages including Gaustad’s humorous bio note, perfect-bound)

Review of Joesph Horgan, An Unscheduled Life

My review of Irish poet Joseph Horgan’s collection An Unscheduled Life (Agenda Editions, 2012) is online in the new issue of The Burning Bush 2.  Here is the link: http://burningbush2.com/reviews-essays/michael-s-begnal-reviews-joseph-horgan/

Poem in Wake: Great Lakes Thought & Culture

I have a poem titled “Uptown 2” in the new issue of Wake: Great Lakes Thought & Culture, which can be read here:

http://www.wakegreatlakes.org/content/poetry/michael-s-begnal-uptown-2

Future Blues reviewed in the City Paper

Future Blues is nicely reviewed in today’s City Paper.

The link to the online version is here:

http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/potent-verse-fills-michael-s-begnals-fourth-collection/Content?oid=1601533

Here is the text:

Potent verse fills Michael S. Begnal’s fourth collection

The poet ranges from Irish-American themes and empathy for caged animals to appreciations of protopunks the Stooges

by Bill O’Driscoll

Seeking to recreate the world in words, some poets spread their text purposefully across the page, with big horizontal or vertical stretches of white space. In his fourth collection, Future Blues (Salmon Poetry), Michael S. Begnal uses this technique more often than most. But it’s a measure of Begnal’s skill that all that white space never seems an affectation. Rather, it’s just another way he immerses us in his potent, often challenging voice.

Begnal, 46, was formerly editor of the Galway, Ireland-based literary magazine The Burning Bush. And indeed Future Blues often explores Irish and Irish-American settings and concerns. “Waterworld” limns an Old World street scene and a millennium’s arc of history in a handful of lines (“r e i n c a r n a t i o n back on the agenda”). The stunning “Dead Rabbits” captures in a page the immigrant experience from Potato Famine to third-generation Middle American dissolution. Four other poems are even in Gaelic (and defiantly go untranslated).

“Angles” — about Western European colonists planting “trimmed bushes regimented in rows” in new-settled lands — is built on a delightful bit of Joycean wordplay (“The Angles are coming”). And with “Application for the Provision of Catholic Beverages,” Begnal, employing a barroom stoicism, offers a detailed yet concise allegory on the Church’s defunction.

But there’s lots more to Begnal. His verse can be pleasingly visceral (“the canal flows nearby/ clogged with dead leaves of limitless autumns”), or delve into personal torment, as in “Shade,” about the speaker’s relationship with a man who “sick or dying pretends health / in a black turtleneck.” Begnal includes an “Homage to Li Po,” and indeed displays a special facility for Eastern-inflected poems simply depicting a physical scene in lucid detail — or even, as in “Homage to Allen Kirkpatrick,” merely describing a series of old photos.

There’s also strong political sensibility, with evocations of imprisonment, characterizations of poets as endangered visionaries (“Manifesto”) and deep empathy with animals caged (“Thylacine”) and threatened. “[T]omorrow I will kill the poachers,” the speaker vows in “Primates.”

Other highlights include takes on pop-cultural touchstones. In “Bettie Page,” Begnal goes a bit T.S. Eliot on pinup icon Bettie Page. And a series of poems on the Stooges includes a witty appreciation of their alternate-universe third album, complete with titles like “Fresh Rag” and “Big Time Bum.”

Review of Barbara Smith

My review of Barbara Smith’s collection The Angels’ Share (Doghouse, 2012) is online at Eyewear:

http://www.toddswift.blogspot.com/2012/12/guest-review-begnal-on-smith.html

Future Blues reviewed in the Galway Advertiser

In today’s (December 6 2012) edition of the Galway Advertiser (Galway, Ireland’s free weekly paper), my friend the poet Kevin Higgins reviews Future Blues, along with our mutual Salmon Poetry press-mate Patrick Chapman’s A Promiscuity of Spines.  The review appears on page 112, and can be read here (click link then scroll down).

Below, transcribed is the part of the text which deals with Future Blues:

Children of The Burning Bush

By Kevin Higgins

Michael S Begnal lived here in Galway for several years and was editor of The Burning Bush literary magazine. Mike was keen to push the boundaries of Irish poetry and impatient with well made but dull lyric epiphanies about family, church, or the field across the road.

Mike’s view has been that too many Irish poets are nice boys and girls with excellent degrees who write acceptable little poems more designed to impress the poet’s parents than do anything else. He’s interested in the wayward strand of Irish poetry typified by the work of the late James Liddy, whose poems are perhaps the place where Allen Ginsberg meets Patrick Kavanagh at his most raucous.

If you think poetry should rhyme and be about girls with flaming red hair going to school barefoot through the fields, then Mike’s new collection Future Blues (Salmon Poetry) is definitely not for you.

In poems such as ‘Dead Rabbits’ Begnal doesn’t take the easy route of obvious autobiography, but instead disturbs the reader with images and makes us think: “mouths stained green with chlorophyll,/ the corpses lined the roadside then// the economy warped in its spasms,/ died or passed to America.”

He really gets into his stride in the longer poems, ‘Homage To Allen Kirkpatrick’ – which runs to four pages – and the Ginsberg style ‘Manifesto’: “WHEREAS/ they want to kill us—/ even now when I stand/ with my back to the window/ it’s like I might get shot/through the blinds.”

Here and there Begnal shows he shares Ginsberg’s weakness for profound sounding, abstract words, such as “transmigration” and “genealogies”. All in all, though, a strong collection. If you like Tom Waits’ stranger albums, then Future Blues may well be the poetry book for you.

Reading at Duquesne University 12/4

I am doing a reading in Pittsburgh at Duquesne University, at their Barnes & Noble café on Forbes Ave., this Tuesday, Dec. 4, 7pm, with the renowned essayist Peter Trachtenberg.  I  will have books for sale and that sort of thing. . . .

Details here and here.

The photo is the Duquesne English Department’s very nice display for the event, with a Xmas theme!  See you there.

Poem in the City Paper

I have a poem in the Pittsburgh City Paper titled “Uptown, Pittsburgh,” which you can read here.

Shannon Ward review of Future Blues

My friend Shannon Ward has reviewed Future Blues at her blog (November 26, 2012):

http://shannoncamlinward.com/2012/11/26/michael-s-begnals-future-blues/

Here is the text:

Michael S. Begnal’s Future Blues

One of the pleasures of the writing life is getting to know the other people who gravitate toward that sphere. Writers are fun. They spend prolonged periods holed up with their creations, and then (with the exception of your Dickinsons and Salingers) they emerge from their caves into the bigger world, usually feeling somewhere between mildly disoriented and bat-shit stir-crazy. Excellent company, by my standards.

Among the other great pleasures are getting to watch a friend’s work evolve, to hear the voice in its varied contexts, and to notice the patina building over time. It’s such a long process that (for me, at least) it’s hard to envision the finished form. So I had no idea how delighted I would be when I opened my mail and found my friend Mike Begnal’s poetry collection, Future Blues, right there in my hands—so many of the loose pages we had pored over a few years ago in workshop all bound up in a beautiful, proper book:

Reading these poems feels a little like watching footage of fish in the deep ocean: their forms have evolved for purposes logical—particular to their terrain—but a little mystic somehow too. The images float by strangely, yet there is a sensibility in the negative space between them as well as between the lines and stanzas:

nothing will  be okay

nothing remains pristine for long

stretched out in a dark bed,

the spectacular lights of death

all this terror,

the flying humanoids in the air for real,

the sinister people who want

to come back from the past,

a leafless time

that wind shook.

(“Blues for Tomorrow,” 13-22)

The form and content are raveled together artfully here. The poem’s stanzas hover much like the flying humanoids, in some places vaguely threatening my ability to navigate the current of the page, yet never drowning me in it entirely. Although Begnal steers toward an abstract place, when I arrive, I get the sense that I have been there before, lying sleepless in that room, antagonized by those ghosts. The metaphor triggers an unsettled feeling a little like déjà vu, but the resulting tension is appropriate and complementary to the concept.

These poems not only reckon with the dead, but also commune with them. An informal ode called “Samhain,” for instance, pays tribute to those dead who “are there, in a word or line/ you thought was your own,/ and walk among us to/ night” (30-34). In this poem, Begnal is particularly conscientious of the line, as evidenced by the break between “to” and “night,” suggesting both toward our own demise and tonight, as in on Samhain (the Gaelic festival which begat Halloween.)

The central concept is broader in scope, though, and extends to the idea that we invoke the dead by simply speaking, so many of our words weighed down as they are with history. Fittingly, the poem is dedicated to Mongán, a seventh-century Irish chieftain whose namesake is a semi-divine figure from Gaelic literature. Such ghosts rustle through the lines, and in the introductory stanza especially, the rift between words reflects the rift between worlds:

for all the dead who have spoke before
me        spoke for all the dead who have before
spoke       for all the dead who have before
dead       for all who have spoke before the
me

I trust in language always.

(1-6)

This is a poetry that makes room for its ghosts. The intentionally muddled syntax of the worried line leaves an impression of language as an inheritance, something that (as those of us who teach freshman composition know all too well) sometimes comes in jumbled variations and barely decipherable waves. Just when the syntax pushes my patience toward its limits though, I am soothed and surprised by that single, simple line, “I trust in language always.”

Future Blues reviewed at Eyewear

There’s a very nice review of Future Blues now up on the Eyewear blog (posted 23 November 2012):

http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2012/11/guest-review-mayhew-on-begnal.html

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Jessica Mayhew reviews

Future Blues 

by Michael S. Begnal

Beginning at the end of this collection, Michael Begnal notes the poet’s refusal “to fix ourselves/ in time or ink” (‘Manifesto’), and this would serve just as well as an epigram to Future Blues. This is a collection aware of the fragility and harshness of time and language, and a refusal to be rooted in the stasis of either. Begnal’s poetry is fluid and immediate, and his use of textual play allows it to slip from being pinned to the formal.

In ‘Primates,’ Begnal explores the “conception of the word/ HUMAN.” This poem examines a photograph of a group of chimpanzees, comparing it to an early-morning glimpse of the self in a mirror, “a face so secretly and fiercely familiar,” which readers will be able to wryly identify with. However, this poem also goes much deeper than the “3:10 A.M” stunned and squinting eyes, and the knowing nudges of aging; the parallels drawn between poem and chimp highlight the “iron light of sentience,” the harshness of knowledge.

Begnal excels at finding just the right words to root a sentence. ‘Primates’ opens with the line, “His eyes intimate knowledge, this chimpanzee,” the deliberate choice of “intimate” suggesting both an ancestral closeness and the implication of communication, and from this, the poem works around suggestion. The poet guesses – the chimp “maybe the poet of his tribe,” and the speaker’s own “sapience” is “unknown.” This disturbance to the ability of language to express meaning builds to the final stanza:

tomorrow I will kill the poachers

                /I will murder the colonists

                /I will cut down the loggers

                /I will exterminate all the brutes  (‘Primates’)

What seemingly begins as a threatening wish to protect the chimpanzees of the first stanza begins to splinter, reflected in the use of the forward slashes, building to the Heart of Darkness climax. However, in Begnal’s poem there is no Marlow to act as editor and tear off the postscript. The speaker becomes a Kurtz-like figure, and the violent ambiguity of “brutes,” leads the reader back to deeper concerns of role of language as communication.

Darkness and language surface again in ‘Dithyramb.’ The pattern of the urban/ rural couplets are broken when:

...I enter the poem

and am immediately strong-armed

into a dark garage

where there are no shining mirrors,

no strains of deathless song...  (‘Dithyramb’)

The entry of the speaker disrupts the flow of the poem, and yet seems to begin the dithyramb, which is a wild hymn to the ancient Greek god Dionysus. Begnal attacks the urge to define:

they claim they can define

everyone, that I’m this or that,

a maker of cloudy cadence...  (‘Dithyramb’)

An urge which he ultimately defies, setting the poet alone in the urban/rural landscape:

and I’m out along the leaves,

olive-green under the

streetlight lampglow   (‘Dithyramb’)

Begnal uses the juxtaposition of the rural imagery against the streetlights to create a hallucinogenic rebellion which both harks back to the ancient poetic tradition and places it firmly in the contemporary.

The theme of the poet existing outside of the established order is revisited in ‘In an Unknown City, It Seemed.’ There is a distinct modernist atmosphere to the poem, not in form but in content. The poet becomes a flâneur-like figure, roaming through a disorientating city. Temporality is disrupted:

in this part of the city

were buildings

when you looked at them closer

were constructed of Mayan ruins…  (‘In an Unknown City, It Seemed’)

This sense of timeless isolation is shattered when the speaker of the poem encounters another figure. There is a sense of threat at the end of the poem, when another man emerges to see the speaker, “like a priest.”

One of the strong points of this collection is the shift of tone between poems. In ‘The Fluctuations,’ Begnal observes, “death & loss in your twisted black guts like shit,/ in the stark stochastic scald.” This sits alongside ‘At the Cliff,’ where death/ time sits in contrast, “time wilts and willows,/ residue builds sweet on the tongue.” Here, the softer assonance gives a much gentler impression of time ebbing and flowing, rather than the harsh sounds of the former. Throughout Future Blues, Begnal consistently compliments the themes of his poems with a studied ear to the sounds they make, which is apt for a collection at least partly inspired by music. This attention to the aural is particularly effective in ‘Bettie Page.’ The classic monochromatic pin-up image is created in the third stanza:

black her hair

and pale white skin,

the classic black/white

“raven” “porcelain”   (‘Bettie Page’)

The sound echoing through “black/classic,” and the half-rhyme of “skin/ porcelain” draws the reader into a poem which centres heavily on the notion of darkness, not just in colour (or lack of), but also in tone. This builds to the final proper stanza, in which decay is emphasised through consonance, and the final rhyme acts as an evocation of the pin-up herself:

and clay collects in the cracks below the window

and the furniture begins to show its age –

Bettie Page,

            Bettie Page,

                        Bettie Page  (‘Bettie Page’)

“Sexless” is scored through in this poem, an ironic nod to the epigram from Bettie Page, “I had less sex activity those seven years in New York than I had any other time in my life.” Begnal’s use of typography and textual play works well throughout the collection. In ‘Dead Rabbits,’ he introduces coloured print with the word “red,” emphasising the visceral nature of the poem. An image of a horn is added to ‘Horn,’ further breaking the text and bringing a visual element to a poem focusing on sound. This typographic play could be used more often to bring more of an impact.

Future Blues ends with a ‘Manifesto,’ summing up the poet’s intents and beliefs. This collection flits between deaths – death of the body, death of language, death of the self – and in this movement is the escape of expression. In ‘Manifesto,’ Begnal writes, “for death is stasis/ and poetry moves everywhere.” This collection looks to a mythic past, even as it passes through the present. In this poem, as in the others, there is a lack of concluding full stops, which serves to emphasise Future Blues as a continuous, supple body of poetry. 

Jessica Mayhew is a British poet, and reviews regularly for Eyewear.

Avant-Post on Goodreads

This by way of Litteraria Pragensia Books in Prague:

“As part of LPB’s tenth anniversary, we’re making a wide range of titles from our backlist available online via Goodreads, for you to download or read for free. Check out Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under “Post-” Conditions, featuring Johanna Drucker, Michael S. Begnal, Lisa Jarnot, Ann Vickery, Christian Bök, Robert Archambeau, Mairéad Byrne, R.M. Berry, Trey Strecker, Keston Sutherland, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Robert Sheppard, Bonita Rhoads, Vadim Erent, Laurent Milesi, Esther Milne...”

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13578565-avant-post

My chapter in this book, “The Ancients Have Returned among Us,” is a study of recent Irish poetry, particularly its “experimental” strands.