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Diane Wakoski's ambitious new book is odd, if I can say that without any
trace of pejorative. The poems in The Butcher's Apron aren't
culled from any single time period, as the author wanted to avoid discounting
her widely-read Emerald Ice, an earlier collection. As a book of
selected poems it's odd as well, because it has a theme: food, and even more
particularly, food as still life. No one but an extraordinarily prolific
poet could accomplish such a thing. Wakoski has published 40 books, half of
them substantial volumes of poetry. Part of this book's oddness, for me,
resides in the author's polished, low-key surrealism; Wakoski's work reminds me
of Wallace Stevens' colors and juxtapositions, but it requires careful
reading not to be put off by the "jumps" in image and subject.
I can't quite find words for Wakoski's final oddness. It is, I guess, the
assertiveness of someone who has been doing exactly what she wants for a
great many years, without having to be accountable to anyone but herself.
(Now in her mid-sixties, Wakoski has been churning out poetry for more than
forty years; she's also one of the rare writers who makes her living
entirely from her poetry). For example, the first and title poem of the
book, "The Butcher's Apron", begins with this unusual epigraph:
"When I was a child, we lived in the midst of orange groves on Russell
Street in Whittier, California, just up the road from the Nixon family
grocery store, where I bought my popsicles from old Mr. and Mrs. Nixon,
father and mother of the late president. When they expanded, adding a much
bigger butcher's counter and a coffee shop, their son Don Nixon, later
featured in real estate scandals, became the butcher."
The poem that follows, which runs some 60 lines, leaps from the bloodstained apron,
to cooking in "our manless house", to her school cafeteria, to her mother's
dirt-floor childhood, to Sylvia Plath and Andy Warhol. It then brings them
together in three brief, final lines: "...Crimson blood on canvas, the
art/of childhood. Unhealed scars,/still capable of bleeding."
One of Wakoski's best known poems, which I believe is also the only one of
her poems to have been reprinted in Best American Poetry, is "Ode to
a Lebanese Crock of Olives". It is an exuberant poem -- at least three
people have made me sit down over the years so they could read it aloud to
me. It has the same sensual focus as the opening of a recent movie,
Tortilla Soup, in which hands chop, strip, braise, ladle and sprinkle
a rainbow of ingredients into one splendid, steaming dish. Wakoski does the
same, but as a poet, she stirs in lean surfers, hummingbirds and Reubens.
Determined to do exactly what she pleases, she creates some of the oddest
line breaks I've ever encountered ("These are words to say thank
you/to/Walter's Aunt Libby"), and somehow makes them work in the service of
the poem.
The next-to-last stanza of the piece immerses the reader in detail:
Beauty is everywhere,
in contrasts and unities.
But to you, I could not offer the thin tan fashionable body
of a California beach girl.
Instead, I could give the richness of burgundy,
dark brown gravies,
gleaming onions,
the gold of lemons,
and some of Walter's Aunt Libby's wonderful olives from Lebanon.
Despite her surrealism, Wakoski never writes as that most loathsome of
American creatures, the Academic Poet, and can speak with a disarming
directness, as in these lovely, plainspoken lines from a poem with a fairly
off-putting title, "Image Is Narrative": "The tricks in life/are that
nothing is hidden, only obscured/by desire, which makes us long/for what we
do not have."
In an essay, Wakoski has written that "Poetry is the art of saying what you
mean but disguising it," as in, perhaps, these lines from "A Dangerous
Hermit", dedicated to the "Motorcycle Betrayer".
She's not crazy, just doesn't like
to explain herself. She eats pecans
fresh little ears in their paper boat shells
and thinks of how
those shells are as smooth as
a certain hand.
Wakoski's dictum has annoyed me for days, and I've reflected on the
statement while reading The Butcher's Apron; it's even forced me to
reread some of my own poems in the light of her assertion.
(Am I trying to disguise anything? I hope not.) I've clanged it against my
wife's definition of poetry, my touchstone for years: "Poets feel what we
feel, and say what we can't." But I'm dreadfully afraid Wakoski might be
right, as her poetry evinces a rare determination, succeeding beautifully in
saying exactly what she means.
-- Bill Noble is a poet and fiction writer in Marin County,
California. His joint manuscript with poets William Keener and Michael Day,
Three Crows Yelling, won the 1999 National Looking Glass Award. He is
fiction editor at the online magazine Clean Sheets.
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About the Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
"Since the mid-60s, a single small press in California has made a profitable
and growing business -- without advertising, without relying on grants,
without leverage, and without press coverage -- by publishing precisely what
it wants. And what it wants to publish is the original, the
counter-cultural, the avant-garde, and the overlooked. Black Sparrow Press
was launched in 1966 by a Southern California businessman, John Martin, to
publish the work of the then little-known (though highly respected) poet
Charles Bukowski. It has continued over the past 30 plus years -- growing
steadily -- to publish American poetry and fiction that, whether one cares
for it or not, can only be described as determinedly noncommercial. And from
this mix has risen some of the finest avant-garde and experimental work of
the 20th century." -- Neil Gordon, Boston Review
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