by Siobhan Senier
ssenier@prairienet.org


DARKWAVES & LARKWINGS: VOLUME I
edited by jewel
published by a gleeful press!, Minneapolis, MN, 1996
reviewed by Siobhan Senier

There are two kinds of poetry in the world, or so we've been taught: there's the labyrinthine, heavily structured and symbolic stuff of a canonical big gun like T. S. Eliot--you know, the kind you need reams of footnotes and an English teacher to understand. Then there are the simple, immediately accessible, monosyllabic pieces you find in small magazines and maybe in the notebooks of angst-ridden adolescents. We hate it all. We hate the first kind of poetry because we had to suffer and struggle through so many damned essays in high school, trying to unlock those sonnets' meanings, and we hate the other kind because we've been taught it's bad. It has no "deep meaning." Worse yet, it sometimes rhymes.

Underwriting such poetic segregation--what academic types might call a "false binary" except that, oops, academic types made the distinctions up in the first place--is the assumption that "real" poets know poetic craft. They know how to use the elaborate rhythms and meters, the mystifying forms (what's a villanelle?) and the inscrutable images that keep poetry outside of Poetry 101 safely out of reach. Those "other" poets--now celebrated, sometimes, in academe as "working-class," "marginalized," "resistant"--either don't know or don't care about aesthetics. They want DIRECT communication with their readers, and so they lumber inarticulately in that direction.

Darkwaves and Larkwings: Volume I, a new anthology edited by Minneapolis poet jewel (a.k.a. Julie Brown-Micko), effectively blows such FALSE DICHOTOMIES out of the water. I belabor the academy and its cliches (or should I say "tropes"?) here because Brown-Micko, a refugee from the English PhD herself, straddles so many worlds. She's spun out her share of the hifalutin' critical jargon that's now the bane of even Newsweek; she's worked as a loving tulip-planter and even more loving chocolatier; she's an Internet dervish. Now, out of her days at a bindery and her nights on-line, she's produced the first work of a gleeful press!, of which let's hope there will be many more.

Friend and co-worker Brad Waryan helped design the cover, a smoky blue with a minimalist--and gleeful!--bird in flight stamped in silver in the lower corner. In keeping with jewel's own minimalist aesthetic, too, the pages are weighty and cream-colored, the layout spare and elegant. A quick flip through the slim volume visually displays the range of voices collected here, most of them jewel's Internet friends and fellow poets. Cliff Goodman's "Watership Wail" spins vertically downward like the rabbit down his "frackin' hole"; Ren Cummins's "Of Self-Loathing" hurls its painful and striking lines across the page ("tear this sorrow from me/ so like the stars in which I was born/ which sends its tendrils burrowing deep under my skin"). La Shawn Patrice King's "Dis/jointed," also about the devastation that intimate relations can wreak on individual selves, takes a more tight and contained approach:

Thematically, relationships loom large in Darkwaves, but these poets use a tremendous variety of content and technique. Krista Landry writes "He has everything to leave behind/ While I have everything ahead" in "Me, Someone," a smart revision of the metaphor of the road; it's a poem that invites lingering over and re-reading just as its speaker hovers between moving and waiting. DeAnna Knippling, meanwhile, offers up a series of wicked "jellopomes":

And totally different again, Tim Blackwell puts rhyme, so uncritically shunned by so many, to fantastic use in his eight-line zinger, "Hell": "Hell is us/ in a torched embrace. // Hell is my heart:/ that joint's cased." Jewel's own contribution, "Your stars are my stars," is a heartbreaking farewell to a close friend, a working-through of the "blurred whir of abandonment." In one of its most powerful moments, it describes the shock of recognition as the speaker looks at her friend's childhood picture:

The poets of Darkwaves, as their witty self-bios reveal (or often don't reveal), are a varied gang of coffee-drinking cyber-surfers, and their works reflect urban settings and urban states of mind. Some of the writers oscillate skillfully between those urban realms and more goth/fantasy-like images. Laura Smit, for instance, wryly regrets that "no one has offered/to pay for the expense of scanning/a twelve-foot angel onto the front/ of your average 9 1/2"/ business envelope". Geoff Brent limns an engaging picture of a dragon at a jukebox while waiting for the bus, "wearing shoes/ carrying two bags and a ticket/ still dreaming of a sudden fierce unveiling." On the darker side, Peter Constantine creates a surprise encounter in his apartment with a rock star. It's an encounter that quickly grows too vivid, leaving his persona wondering "if it really is so good to meet your heroes/ Or if larger-than-life characters/ Might lose their mystique as they fumble with tubes of Polygrip." David Micko's "Merle," the last poem in the book, follows a train of drug users and pushers, again showing the varying effects of rhyme, when deft poetic hands deploy it:

The urban cyber-poet culture has apparently inspired a fantastic subgenre of coffee poems; jewel prints several of these, intentionally or not, in succession. "Black Coffee" by Nicholi BlackShadow compactly traces the first taste of "condensed bitterness/vitriolic bliss" to "ephemeral happiness/momentarily sweet," to "finished off/temporary dreams." Marcel Feldmar, a fine poet with a small press of his own, terrifically plays out "a slow lapse into mental roadkill" in "CaffeineDiariesNumberSix." Caine, another versatile writer who's also represented by a deep and dark city meditation on rain, sends from England a marvelous "ode," not to coffee, but "to a serrated teaspoon": "Holding you up,/the kitchen is reflected,/curled up,/ no bigger than my thumb,/ and the twisted caricature of my face/ stares out at me."

Obviously, these poets think carefully about what they say, and they struggle with how to say it. They aren't just recording or reflecting their experience, but using it, and their gifts with words, to make verbal art. Julianna Smit, among other poets in the collection, self consciously demonstrates this concern with expression by playing with words strung together: "graymentality redthoughts blackmind/ yellowconsciousness." And Feldmar, who has two wonderful selections in Darkwaves, eloquently hits the concerns of many of these writers:

Darkwaves & Larkwings is finally a kind of open invitation, one that gets readers (always potential writers) involved in the problem of making poetry out of everyday (and not so everyday) experience. It presents poetry not as something remote and artificial and pretentious but as something hugely communicative and interpersonal, not unlike the technology that helped inspire this collection. That strikes me as very much the spirit of the book, one summed up by what is maybe one of my favorite poems in the collection, jewel's preface: "To poets who do not speak or write their words/ but hold them gently, in their hearts."

a gleeful press! can be reached at P.O. Box 6724, Minneapolis, MN, 55406 or through jewel's e-mail, jewel@mm.com. Her luscious web site, with links to many of the poets represented in Darkwaves, is http://www.prairienet.org/~jjewels/jewel.html




[table of contents] [contributors] [ordering information]

crown o' gems | main press! page

jewel@gleeful.com
a gleeful press!
a seraph production