Jen Bervin’s Nets is a deceptively quick read, I think. I didn’t read the actual Shakespearean sonnet from which each of her poems is derived, and I am not sure that I should or need to. That said, I think Nets can also be thought of as either a deceptively simple project/experiment, in which much much more is going on in each netting than we apparently get upon first read. Or the opposite: there really isn’t too much to it, that there is no requirement for the resulting netted poem to have anything to do with its sonnet original, and that the netting is random or arbitrary. But even then, this arbitrariness is interesting. I suppose what’s most interesting to me about this project or experiment is the idea of the palimpsest, or the act of creating one or participating in the creation of one; is there an act of erasure here or the opposite. Or is this one (of many) ways in which we bring Shakespeare into our time/place/space, or find new meanings to the texts, or find ourselves in the texts.
Juan Felipe Herrera’s Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream. This is a quick read, or maybe it’s just me. I got through it in one sitting, and I think part of what propelled me through it was that its overarching opening poem “punk half panther,” which is a cosmic and hip Mexicano Whitman-esque poem containing Multitudes! Multitudes, I say. I think once I surrendered my need for the narrative to make conventional “sense,” I got that the rest of the book would deliver that same “lack of sense.” Herrera uses the poems to enact the mixed-up cosmic urban migrant laborer politicized and indigenous voices all inhabiting the same space and speaking at once or all competing for the platform on which to speak. There is a section of poems addressing a “fool,” and a “hey baby.” These poems are as familiar in tone (as in the speaker’s physical and emotional distance from the addressee) as they are chastising or patronizing; indeed, “fool,” can be either a term of affection as much as it is a derisive one. Same with “baby,” I guess. I read this section of poems and their lack of “sense” almost like the addressee, who is the Border-Crosser, is trying to understand all these American colloquialisms, academic and political speak, legalese, pop culture speak with which he is barraged. It’s all coming at him at rapid fire speed, from speakers he hasn’t figured out yet whether he can trust.
So these poems convey or enact or demonstrate a struggle for grounding, and then there’s a shift to an I, in a longish poem/canto. In this canto, Herrera brings in Huichol terms for the community members, and rituals in which his speaker partakes as he continues trying to make sense of mothers on the streets lined with porn clubs in North Beach, a menacing Big Al pimpish figure, and the speaker/I, all in collision with one another. Sense of place is all mixed up here, as we move between sacred Huichol places and the grandfather officiating ceremony there, and the place of poetry and poetic voices in these porn-y streets. Hence, the music is all mixed up here. I think of Coltrane’s Ascension, or some hefty Ornette Coleman. Hectic. And now I haven’t read Andrés Montoya’s “Pakatelas,” in the recently released In the Grove, but I see there are formalistic similarities here, as well as that mix of the spiritual and earthy with the urban.
A clue to help the reading: Herrera states his poetics clear as day in this phrase: “Your rot, my epistemology.”
And this might become my mantra.
Tags: Border-Crosser With A Lamborghini Dream, Jen Bervin, Juan Felipe Herrera, Nets
15 April 2008 at 4:37 am |
i posted some quick thoughts about nets but the more i think about it, the more i am uncertain as to whether nevins has created an effective book length poem or just an effective poem that didn’t need the blurred text.
either way, i would say that she has brought herself into the text–a bold move, for sure–and forged a poem that honors the classic while bringing in the speaker’s contemporary voice. in that, by fusing the macro and the micro, i believe she has created a successful poem.
my question still stands: did she have to use 150 one sided pages to get to that poem? i guess the fact that this reader is still asking that question can qualify as another marker of a successful poem.
15 April 2008 at 5:01 am |
are you viewing the entire resulting (or remaining, or netted text) as a poem? you are right that the fact that we are continuing to talk about it, whether or not we particularly ‘enjoyed’ it is indicative of some kind of success.
i don’t know so much about ‘fusing’ together, or i don’t know if that’s how i’d describe what i think she has done. it seems more to me like “using” shakespeare as raw material from which to create a poem, like we would with google search results and other found texts, though i know you are addressing my ‘erasure’ question here. so ultimately i don’t think using a text as found text is either honoring or erasing it.
15 April 2008 at 10:03 pm |
i’m viewing the netted text as one poem.
i prefer the term ‘fusing’ over ‘using’ because bervin utilizes iconic text; hence the macro of canonic poetry with the micro of the contemporary poetry. (note: i dont mean to make one seem larger over the other, i prefer to think of both terms inhabiting a similar space but there relative size based on perspective. in this case, bervin shifts here text to the forefront and makes shakespeare’s text the micro.)
based on the fact that bervin goes to the iconic, i believe there is opportunity to honor and/or erase. if she was just using last week’s headline, maybe not so much.