Reviewed by Paul Corman-Roberts
Sirens: Five Femme Fatale Poets
Edited by Victor Thorn
Sisyphus Press, 2008, 298 pp.
www.sirens5.com
“…I’ve got an iron hair stuck deep up my ass
and I’m always in search of just the right set
of pliers to pluck it out.”
- From “Needle-nose or Lockjaw?”Cynthia Ruth Lewis
Babel editor Victor Thorn has brought us what he calls “the five female representatives” he would choose if he “stood before the Pulitzer Prize committee.”
Some of us out here might not completely agree with Victor’s five choices (fair disclosure: your reviewer has unsolicited blurbs and working relationships with several of the authors in the book) but credit Thorn for realizing the need for an anthology of modern, underground female poets and with choosing five who can all easily lay claim: the raw, primal and truly confessional Lewis, the dirty, guilty-and-don’t-really care prose writer Jude Lynn, punk performance legend Iris Berry, trash goddess/post-partum “she-bitch” Misti Rainwater-Lites, and the serrated, tortured howling of Debbie Kirk which proclaims all of the above. The hard truth is that there just aren’t that many female poets who work mostly as poets. Many often do poetry on the side or as a hobby while working the non-fiction/fiction/performance circuits. The book is slick, sexy and its content delivers on much of that promise, but it isn’t necessarily going to create a wave of fearless alpha girls on the poetry circuit. In theory, it should sell like hotcakes to legions of depressed alienated beta-lit boys…but it’s a poetry anthology, so it won’t. And part of the reason for that is that there isn’t a whole lot of feeling good to be found in its near three hundred pages (as is so frequently the case with poetry, not just with “underground” or “indie” poets.) It serves as exhibit one that sex, drugs and rock are failures as some sort of commodity salvation but empirically successful in having integrated with the landscape of the apocalypse. You can only take the redemptive moments in the rare cases where they occur:
My therapist said
I absolutely
Could not have
Any more unprotected sex
With strange men
Because it was self destructive Behavior
So, I shoplifted condoms
And lube
To use
When I have sex
With strange men
Sometimes improvement
Is subtle.
-“Improvement”
Debbie Kirk
But these little “improvements” or miniature calms in the storm are more the exception that the rule:
“…because despite all the insanity
and hard times
we had a lot of good times too.
We did have a lot of fun
scaring the other kids
and playing tricks on them.
It was that whole
us against them thing.
We were bad.
I never discuss it
with my brothers,
we buried a lot of it
with my dad
when he passed away.
Sometimes I think
they don’t even remember.
I’ll bring something up
and they’ll just give me
a real foggy look
and say, ‘God Iris,
how do you remember all that?’
And I’ll think
God how do you forget?
…
they all came out unscathed
and well, I kind of didn’t.”
- From “Greetings From Branford Park”
Iris Berry
Kirk and Berry bring a heavy punk aesthetic to this collection (Berry has collaborated w/Exene Cervenka and Kirk has toured with the Dwarves) and both hearken back to the spoken word renaissance that barely caught flame, and only then briefly, in the early 90’s. Kirk in particular has kept that flame burning in times (especially post 9-11) when it was not trendy for “girls” to be in “hard” lit, which arguably, it still isn’t. The good times here though are primarily memories.
In some cases, like Cynthia Ruth Lewis, they don’t seem like they ever really existed. Her poems may be the most frightening in the book, full of homicidal impulses that appear to be quite well thought out. Neither is Lewis work here all give and no take. Her poem, “Aftermath,” is simply the most brutal and dehumanizing piece in the entire book, explaining why this pure rage, perhaps more “confessional” in its plain and honest depictions of unthinkable violence than consciously confessional poetry, stands above the others. In many ways, she is the most outside outsider of this quintet: “I never call myself a poet; I even cringe at referring to myself as a writer, because if you’re talking to the wrong person, that proclamation can open up a whole bunch of idiot question…”
This doesn’t seem to be an issue for the other four writer/poets in this collection. Rainwater-Lites in particular is clearly more comfortable than most in wrapping herself in the poet’s charge. “Anorexic Rant” in particular stakes MRL out as a self-realized prophetess by doing the Whitman thing, addressing history’s most self-conscious and neurotic empire:
“go to jail, America
go to jail and visit
your illiterate single mom on welfare raised tattooed criminals
go to hell, america
the hell that is your prison system
visit Damien Echols on death row in arkansas look into his eyes and beg
for his forgiveness
look in the mirror, america
see how ridiculous you are
your hair is a mass of writhing
hissing snakes
your eyes are bugged
your ribs are showing
you have become a grotesque caricature
you are over the hill but still dressed i
n a raggedy ann costume
no one believes you…”
This take on manifesting “America” is as old as Walt Whitman, hell; it’s as old as the prophesy “America” by the reverend George Berkeley in 1726. Rainwater-Lites is immersing herself in one of the oldest dialectics of romanticism (appropriate…she has recently published that she reads Mayakovski to her young son…now that’s subversive parenting.)
Rounding out the collection is longtime Babel contributor Jude Lynn, whose poetry is almost entirely confessional style prose, but of course, without the typical confessional “remorse” that one gets with say, Elizabeth Wurtzel or James Frey. If anything, Lynn’s style smacks of a hesher Denis Johnson:
“He calls the next day. He doesn’t sound the same.
He’s less interesting. Annoying. We meet up again.
There’s nothing to talk about. Now that we’ve played the
cat & mouse word game prior to the fuck, there’s nothing to
say. He likes sports. I like foreign films. He likes Heavy
Metal, I like jazz. He’s a Republican. I’m not. He talks a lot
about his car, his clothes, his college days & his wild
“buddies.” He no longer gets my sarcasm. My wit. I
put it away and sit there with a bored look in my
eyes.
His phone calls become infrequent. Mainly when he’s drunk
and all the other girls have told him no. Months pass. I don’t
even answer my phone anymore. I don’t go to the same bar.
My hair isn’t clean. I put my cleavage away, hidden beneath
comfortable clothes. I spend my nights on the couch, in the
dark, perfecting my smoke rings. And I laugh thinking about
him, him, him & him. Whoever they were. The boys of my
past who hopefully went on to
become men.”
- From “A Myriad of Cock-N-Balls: A Brief Study of
Esteem, Repetition & Antagonism
At times, Lynn’s vignettes seem to serve as the synopsis for the whole collection here; at times an endless parade of half downed drinks, half smoked cigarettes and half fucked lovers. I
t’s a bit unfortunate that all the poets here are white, primarily hetero and none from the East Coast. A little more diversity might have made the whole thing seem less repetitive, possibly even less depressing. One wonders if the collection might have benefited from contributions from poets such as MK Chavez, Jennifer Blowdryer, Cindy Emch, Kathleen Wood, Daphne Gottlieb, Lydia Lunch, Danielle Willis, Maggie Estep, or Juliet Cook; certainly hard writing, fast living sirens at some point or another.
But it’s true that after this list, the number of “underground” or “counter-cultural” females who traffic primarily in poetry gets quite thin. The hope is that this anthology does get into the hands of enough younger, and even older female poets, who might feel the urge to indulge a bit of their darker auras and lower chakras and prevent them from giving up on a world the irrepressible Debbie Kirk herself refers to as “the endless dick dance.”
Last update : 05-06-2008 23:49
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