Rena Priest, “Sublime, Subliminal”

SUBLIME, SUBLIMINAL, Rena Priest, Floating Bridge Press, 909 NE 43rd Street, #205, Seattle, Washington, 98105, 2018, 48 pages, $10, paper, www.floatingbridgepress.org.

This August I am once again not doing the #SealeyChallenge. I gave some thought to it—reading a poetry book a day for the month of August, then simply posting a picture to Instagram—but…I get so much out of my April poetry-book marathon that I can’t imagine not sharing a longer reflection. The April project always ends up trashing any other plans for the month, and it always ends up being worth it.

I think what I’m trying to say here is that if you feel led to read a poetry book a day, and reflect on what you find, I HIGHLY encourage you to do so.

Today, because it was left over from my April book stack, I decided to read Rena Priest’s Sublime, Subliminal, which was a finalist for the 2018 Floating Bridge Chapbook competition.

I always love Rena’s poems. She was our Washington Poet Laureate for two years, 2021-2023, and, among so much else as part of her heart-filled service to the poetry community, edited the brilliant I Sing the Salmon Home.

The fifteen poems in Sublime, Subliminal are not straight-forward, easily understood poems. They challenged me. When I let myself drop fully into the project, they also delighted me. Opening lines such as, “Your kiss is backlit pixilation” (“Canadian Tuxedo”); “The bookshelf is a psychic vortex” (“The Final Word”); or this sentence, “In the darkness of the cupboard, / the inner life of the water glass / is not empty” (“Inner Life of the Water Glass”) pushed me to see and think differently.

When I reached the acknowledgments page I was tickled—and not altogether surprised—to discover that the poems were inspired by Jim Simmerman’s “20 Little Poetry Projects.” Years ago, when my children were young and I was a new not-yet-tenured college teacher, I came across this exercise in The Practice of Poetry (edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell), and it worked so well for me that I stopped using it after a few poems. It felt like cheating! Rena Priest, so much smarter, put together a whole book.

The poems are longish, but you have to see at least one. I chose this poem because it’s sexy and unexpected, and has an opening conceit that blows my mind. The poems, the book over all, has an opaqueness that makes me think of my professor who used to say, “It’s a poem! Stop making sense!”

Indistinct Features

Your face is a movie screen.
There are two matinees
and three features every day.
Your smile incites the Theremin
to which I react with acumen.
You were one thing. Now another;
tasted like sugar, now like butter.
Mr. Tom Savini, Sultan of Splatter,
Godfather of Gore,
the orchestra can see you
around that corner, behind that door,
cooking up some violence.
The violins are going crazy
and I will react with the antonym
of acumen when you come to slay me;
But the angels will sing a chromatic hymn
when your demons come for you,
to do you like Mercutio,
find you a grave man tomorrow.
“YOLO,” the kids will say,
“There’s something about an open grave
that makes me amorous—libidinous—
downright horndog AF.”
Gotta replace a life with a life.
Gotta get in the pudding club.
I’ll give you the sweet pearl
of my sympathy, swathed
in the nacre of my spiritual oyster,
mounted in a shining ring.
Poke a hole in the curtain between
the living and the dead. Now
it’s a peep show for your soul.
If you peek, you’ll see the day
where we all go back to analog.
Colloids and emulsions on reels
instead of coitus and emotions in files.
Tomaten auf den Augen Haben.
Images flicker
24 times per second across your face.
I can’t keep hold of your features.
There’s a feather
where your mouth is supposed to be.
It flutters when you say,
“Oh come on baby—
don’t look at me that way?”

—Rena Priest

If you are interested in trying out Simmerman’s Twenty Little Poetry Projects, you can find it on-line. Or you could buy a copy of The Practice of Poetry, which is packed with detailed poetry prompts. Many many used copies available.

Reading in Bellingham

Just a head’s up for my Bellingham friends.

Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award

My poetry manuscript — The Pear Tree: Elegy for a Farm — has won the 2023 Sally Albiso Poetry Award from MoonPath Press.

I’m feeling stunned and honored and — even after a week has gone by — a bit disbelieving.

I’ve shared here some of my process in cobbling this book together, but just to recap, it’s the book that wouldn’t lie down and be “done.” Three years ago in a Hugo House course taught by Deborah Woodard, I rather shamefacedly introduced myself by saying I was working on a book of poems about losing my parents, adding, “I really should be finished with these poems.”

Deborah said, “Maybe the poems aren’t finished with you.”

That is exactly what it felt like. It’s about more than my mother and father; it’s about growing up on a farm, and it’s about giving up that farm after my dad’s death in 2010. It’s about letting go of trees, fields, cows, fences, wells, ponds, bee boxes, books, orchard trees, creeks, barns… It’s about my mother’s memory loss, and how keenly that paralleled our folding away the family place, the farm my grandfather had owned before my father owned it. It’s about…so much.

Last year I began sending the manuscript out as “Genesis” (meaning to evoke an idea of where I began, where I set out from), and despite having paid some hefty entrance fees, I withdrew it. It didn’t feel ready. Early this year I began sending it out again, rearranged, with poems added (and quite a few removed), with a stronger theme, or thread, poems about my maternal grandmother, running all the way through it, holding — I hoped — the long chronology together.

In May I reworked it yet again, and it was only then that I felt brave enough to retitle it as The Pear Tree.

I could not have been more shocked when it won. Lana Hechtman Ayers wrote in an email, “These are poems to feed the soul.”

They have certainly fed mine.

The book will be out this winter, and, never fear, I will be here, telling you all about it.

 

Kevin Young, Brown

BROWN: POEMS, Kevin Young. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2018,

Luis Alberto Urrea did such a fine job capturing this book in his 2018 New York Times review, that…well…why should I even try?

Kevin Young’s necessary new book of witness creates a parade through time, and I love a parade. Especially one with such good music — the poems in “Brown” dance through bebop and into James Brown’s megafunk. Marching players include B. B. King and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Sitting on that float decorated with bombed churches and flogged backs, baseball bats and basketballs, Fishbone records and railroad tracks, are Lead Belly and Howlin’ Wolf playing dusty blues for Big Pun. The parade is coming all night, blowing up dust in the crossroads, churning with music, mad for music, swearing “I Would Die 4 U,” grinning just a little so the initiated will feel the love burning like Jimi’s guitar at Monterey. Scrappy kids dive into public pools and hit line drives with broken bats. Every line of “Brown” is aware that this storm must scare the hell out of people who have locked their doors and kneel before Fox News Channel asking God what went wrong. —Luis Alberto Urrea

Yes, yes, yes. All that, and more. 161 pages of sparkling, pure Kevin-Young vernacular. A delight to read aloud.

Kevin Young is current editor of The New Yorker (to which I proudly subscribe), and recipient of so many awards (see his page at Poetry Foundation for the particulars).

Here’s a poem, which, trust me, is only a tiny sample of what’s possible in this book:

James Brown at B. B. King’s on New Year’s Eve

The one thing that can solve most
our problems is dancing.
And sweat,
cold or not. And burnt ends
of ribs, or reason, of hair
singed & singing. The hot comb’s
caress. Days after
he dies, I see James Brown still
scheduled to play B. B. King’s
come New Year’s Eve—ringing
it in, us, falling to the floor
like the famous glittering midnight
ball drop, countdown, forehead full
of sweat, please, please,
please, please,
begging
on his knees. The night
King was killed, shot
by the Memphis moan in a town
where B. B. King sang, Saint
James in Boston tells
the crowd: cool it. A riot
onstage, heartache
rehearsed, practiced, don’t dare
be late or miss a note
or you’ll find yourself fined
fifty bucks. A fortune. Even
the walls sweat. A God-
father’s confirmation suit,
his holler, wide-collared, grits
& greens. Encore. Exhausted
after, collapsed, carried
out, away, off—not on a gurney,
no bedsheet over
his bouffant, conk
shining, but, boots on,
in a cape glittering bright
as midnight, or its train.

—Kevin Young

In his review, Urrea also says,

Did I say this was a political screed? A radical’s blurt of invective? Forget it. The Rev. Kevin Young has opened the Book of Jubilees and the Book of Lamentations, and he is here to pray.

It’s an urgent, necessary poetry, a poetry of witness, as Urrea says, contemporary American letters at its best, a perfect book to wrap up my 30 days of blogging for National Poetry Month.

You can listen to any of numerous podcasts, listed at Young’s website. This one, at the Slowdown with Ada Limón, shows another side of Young’s obsessions (start at 1:09 to skip the ad; Young’s “Egrets” begins at 4:30):

https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2022/02/28/620-egrets