Sink Review

Dan and I, along with past Sink contributor Maya Pindyck, will be performing at The So and So Series on November 3^rd.

We hope to see you at the distillery.

in memoriam, Liam Rector

In an email forwarded to me that Liam wrote a day before his suicide, I came across a brief quotation he had included:The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living. The line is from Auden's “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”. Liam Rector knew much about influence and mentorship, as he was very close to Donald Hall and a protégé of his for many years. The words and thoughts (and, in Liam's case, a bounty of quotations) live on primarily in the mouths and minds of those closest to the deceased. There is nothing more satisfying than being close to someone so articulate and dedicated to those in his circle—someone so dedicated to aesthetics and the plight of the poet.

The peculiar exchange near the end of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou— where Cate Blanchett seems to be accommodating Zissou before he needs it— voices the preoccupation threading through all of Wes Anderson's films, from Bottle Rocket to The Darjeeling Limited. Why else would the pregnant reporter say, “In twelve years, he will be eleven and a half,” if not to let Captain Zissou reply, “that was my favorite age”?

The charming and sometimes talented outcasts of his films collect a nucleus of people around themselves to replace reality— Anderson's films are like tree houses, but whereas action movies in particular can put playtime on steroids, Anderson often gets his actors to literally play like kids: Royal Tenenbaum's shenanigans with his grandsons, or Max Fischer and Mr. Blume jogging together to shape up. Scenes come complete with costumes, rope ladders, plans, insignias. Where else, except childhood, do the plans become the point? If it seems too harsh to say that his films are populated with liars, it is because of Margot with her cigarettes, or Max with his neurosurgeon dad, are not out for harm or substantial gain. They coyly hold information so that you can become part of the club… should you get to learn it.

What undid the house for us
above your porcelain chest?
What has the body left me?
— Antebodies

This is Part Three of a “Coleridgian Triptych” that is based on the original paintings of the great poet. Part two, “The Distant Dreamer” is coming next week.

I should note that the purely biographical parts of the essay are informed by the work of Richard Holmes– it’s highly recommended.

Tonight I am lighting a Yarzheit candle and putting it on the windowsill; it’s the one year anniversary of my mother’s death at forty-nine from lung cancer. We’re not Jewish, but she was adopted and raised in a Jewish family– this is one tradition I plan on keeping.

That picture was taken just six months before her death, after I’d gotten home from my summer job in construction. I miss you mom!

The Princeton Dante Project is a fantastic site where you can stream any part of Dante’s Commedia, unabridged, in either the original Italian or English (Hollander’s translation…).

This is a great place for poets to hear the work in its original language— the poem read the way it was meant to be. Personally, I don’t know a lick of Italian, but thoroughly enjoyed the Inferno and Purgatorio over the course of the weekend… the only thing better is hearing that incredible E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle in Saint John’s Cathedral, at the stroke of midnight on Good Friday during their annual Dante gig.

Arthur Sze’s book Quipu emphasizes how disparate experiences, thoughts, and ideas interconnect. These are not poems obsessed with intellectual or linguistic exercise, fusing together for that sake in itself. The earnestness of the tone makes clear that the poet feels the connections he identifies as very real and having an influence on his life. He quotes the definition of “quipu” from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary: “a device made of a main cord with smaller varicolored cords attached and knotted and used by the ancient Peruvians (as for calculating).” Sze fuses together ideas and imagery from nature, science, art, philosophy, history, human sexuality and behavior in a way that makes each necessary in the functioning of other parts of the poem. One might contend that while the composition of the poems is in keeping with the model of quipu, the function of the poems do not. For all of Sze’s attentiveness, there is not a lot of genuine calculating in the poems which, perhaps, Sze finished long ago.

You who read Paradise Lost, the sublime poem of the great Milton, what do you read but the whole poem? That book contains all things, the first beginnings of all things, their destinies and their final ends. The innermost chambers of the great world are thrown open…

Douglas Messerli, the prolific writer of poetry and dramas, anthologizer, and publisher of Green Integer Press, has published a book of poetry that escapes the conventional descriptions of “language poetry,” the movement with which Messerli has typically been associated. The poems in his recent book First Words, have the requisite wordplay and syntactical manipulation, but altogether speak in a lyrical tradition, seemingly taking themselves away from the readers expectations of Messerlis earlier work. The overt attention to language and its interaction with the interior/exterior (with whats going on within the poem and with whats going on outside the poem in the readers mind) is apparent from the first experience of the book.