Ugly Duckling Presse's Lyric Hunter and Robert Fitterman double down on challenging #poetry, #review

Ugly Duckling Presse designs kick-ass poetry chapbooks. The chapbook, in my humble opinion, is the album, the record, the proper format for poets to collect poems; a short cyclic collection of work in the same key. And Ugly Duckling Presse generates sharp, collectible books that reward the reader visually, textually, and graphically. They print the kind of books critics of electronic books should champion. Seriously, go look at them. Order them at your local bookstore to feel them in your hands. The printing rewards the buyer. The binding, the feel of the books, the graphics, the varying sizes of the book elevates the content.

Lyric Hunter’s Swallower ($12) is a gorgeous little chapbook, three inches wide and six inches long and printed with a lovely vine graphic. Swallower is set in Paris, the most delicious and sensuous of literary cities, and part of what makes Swallower a success is Hunter’s eye and ear focuses on the city’s penchant to digest beauty and grotesqueness; it’s ability to gobble everything up and make it its own. The same could be said of the poet, a throat of the world, swallowing all and pushing it all back out with a breath.

Swallower is essentially about language, language as a garden of words, memes, phonemes, and meaning that grows, dies, returns to the earth and grows up again. The opening poem “Gare de Lyon” opens with “piss at the mouth...their toilet paper/comes from the Relay at the entrance...found tucked/under old papers/lost bears and scarves/in a scarred phone booth.” The train station depicted as a haven for the lost and found, the unwanted, the harried and hurried; I’ve been to Paris several times and can vouch for the smell of piss blossoming from some of the city’s most beautiful and grotesque places, and Hunter shows us that within the amidst some of the cities oldest and most beautiful streets, stations, and city wonderments, mankind’s waste is a flower waiting for someone to sniff, pick, or pause at its lonely beauty. Sometimes it’s memory, sometimes history, and sometimes a detail from the speaker’s external and internal life, and in the end the city, like the poem, swallows it all.

“Gare de Lyon,” the opening poem, condenses Swallower’s motifs of language and history into a long imagistic (how appropriate for a poem about Paris, no?) meditation on swallowing. The throat is a metaphor for the station, it’s high ceilings, the long airy halls where the trains pull to a stop, the milling of travelers moving in, about, and out of the city of lights. Hunter hears the music, the white noise of the station and beyond as the speaker moves through the rain, “I am/an extra e/extra feminine/ an echo a double/Paris twins/repeat.” There are moments within the poem, and within the cycle of poems where narrative is lost, or is excerpted for image, and meme. The bare language leaves holes in places, as if poet is cataloguing the associations.  Language, bubbling out of the throat, is what the poet collects, and identifies with.

And language, sound, can be a political weapon, a sly motif in Swallower, from the Algiers man in the Jardin des Plantes, to the children speaking “Parrot English” behind a wall, to the Nazi occupation during World War II. Paris is an appropriate setting for a throat that swallows language, memory, history, violence and beauty and survives on the diet, even flourishes. Language invades. It permeates. It flowers in the throat. Hunter does not make commentary, or philosophize, she presents language in the mode of breath and allows the reader to see the garden as it is, as it sounds.

Hunter does not always stay in Paris, the speaker moves between Wisconsin, moves through the American South via blues riffs, moves through Rome, but Paris, and French remain the soul of Swallower, and Hunter’s speakers feel both at home in Paris, as well as separated; a happy wanderer of the city, whose eye and ear swallow up the sights and sounds be it hate, “to spit is to symbol/an aversion of spirit” (from “La Hargne”) or the “quiet way/ we leave an old and famous church” (from “Le Pâques”).

The chapbook ends with “A Garden” and Hunter buries her hands in it, the “garden catalogue...the garden is a mess of things” a wet damp place where what has died has come up again. I imagine the garden to be a city garden, not the country garden of my rural south, but a garden behind a fence and a gate, the city not far beyond the edges of the humped up earth. The kind of place a city wanderer might discover upon a new route home from the cafe. By the end of the garden meditation the poet cannot speak, has been rendered mute by the wealth of compost. The poet ends the book by saying “everything I want/to say I swallow,” and the poet has become like the train station in the opening of the book and like the garden at the end of the book; transformed by experience, enriched and humbled in the language rich world.

Robert Fitterman’s No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself ($16) is a long song of woe. Fitterman’s speaker, who by the way is not Robert Fitterman but a personae, has bottomed out emotionally. The speaker’s lonely mind is laid bare in this beautiful complicated book. The simple cover is bare of graphics, and the title is printed in scrawling black against ochre, and the almost 80 pages of poetry within is printed upon a hearty stock that rewards the skin as you read it.

No, Wait. is constructed as a single poem of, for lack of a more accurate description, unrhymed couplets that build and shrink and build again as the poem lurches forward in it’s loneliness. But aside from the crafting of the lines there’s not much “poetry” here. No, Wait is composed with the subtle music of performance poetry that can be lost upon the reader as the reader “reads” the lines across the page. Hearing No, Wait “performed” is probably a scream, for the humor is sly, dark, and subtle. What would soar in the breath of gifted reader does not necessarily soar on the page.  Glide certainly, but not soar.  The language is frank, and laden with pop culture and literary references and homages. This is a choice by the poet, to speak frankly and with modern idiom about loneliness, sadness, depression, and self-loathing.  And Fitterman is successful. This removal of artifice allows the reader to walk into the speaker’s loneliness (technically major depression or at least cyclothymic depression) but as poetry, the work does not do so much in terms of creating music, or harvesting image, or employing other tools of the trade. Not that it has to; Fitterman chooses to step away from poetry, to be anti-poetic. Which by my book is a valid choice. There are more poets publishing today than in all of history combined, and certainly there is room for the anti-academic, the anti-establishment, and the good old-fashioned expression of feeling, which is really what No, Wait is, an expression of despair. Perhaps rhyme, meter, rhetoric and elegiac imagery would make No, Wait come off as phony, or silly, or over the top, and Fitterman seeks to craft a personae that is an authentic spokesman for the lonely, the depressed, the dejected.

At times No, Wait reads like an addicted mind rationalizing the need for substance abuse to numb the boredom of loneliness. The speaker is bored with himself, with his lonely existence, which has led to self-loathing. The poem’s motifs: loneliness for sex and companionship, numbing the pain with booze and pot, the skull shattering heartbreak of rejection repeat and vary, repeat and vary, and layer the poem in a knot. But here’s the catch: the speaker doesn’t want to get better, or doesn’t know how. Often times the speaker is choosing not to.  “I used to blow off everyone who wanted to talk/or hang out at school/Now look at me! Now I’m the one nobody wants/ to talk to!...If I actually go out /It’s a miracle”...and I figure I’ll be that crazy cat person/Soon that everyone sees on the news.”   The speaker later bemoans, “I know rejection like the back of my hand...or I feel so sad/ all the time.” This bruised center of self is the one gift the speaker has been given, “it’s my super power. I’m like a comic-book hero with/a double life. By day I go about my business and by night/I sit at home and disappear by myself.”  No, Wait is not without humor, a black, dark, sour humor that no doubt leaps from the page when Fitterman performs this howl of woe for an audience. It isn’t lost on the reader either, but it is buried within the litanies of woe.

And that’s what weighs down No, Wait, not the emotion, not the exigency of the poem, but rather the poet’s delivery.  It is poetry by name, not by construction, as it is written No, Wait would be as successful in prose. It isn’t poetry by reduction. It is an expansive emoting of the ego, of the I. Is it experimental? Maybe. Is it post-post-modern? Maybe. It certainly has emotional resonance, but I’m not so sure it has the intended effect. If Fitterman intends for the reader to sympathize, many will, but just as many will find the speaker whiny and spoiled. After all, the speaker here has everything to live for. He has his plusses, and his minuses appear to be both pathological and created by choice. By the end of the poem the speaker is in his room, his sad little room that is a bastion of safety against the world. But will the reader care? Will the reader empathize? I’m not so sure. It’s sad for sure, heartbreakingly so, but my internal reader couldn’t help but wield the hammer of judgment. After a point, I kept thinking of Denis Leary’s bitter stand-up show, No Cure for Cancer, where the character in the monologue goes to a shrink and the shrink tells him to just “Shut the fuck up,” pain is everywhere, deal with it. But maybe that’s what Fitterman’s speaker is railing against, that very voice of judgement that tells the depressed, the lonely, the consciousness-fatigued to just deal with it. Because some people in this world cannot deal with pain, they are super sensitive to it in all of its manifestations, and these are the very people Fitterman gives a voice to.  No, Wait is challenging in that regard, and it bludgeons the reader with sadness. And as poetry, as it is constructed, as a machine of language, No, Wait shares the theatre and dramatics with poetry, but leaves the other vestiges aside.