Breaking Down the Boundaries

Coley continuedfrom previous page throb of poetry. But we were speaking of how these poems evoke unwelcoming Manhattan, where intellectuals survive in a meanly lean environment, and big men speak to little men about budget cuts and outsourcing . "Exit From Uncle Vanya," dated February '03, catches a moment sitting in the theatre, "as the light / goes down and never goes out...." The elegiac futility of Chekhov's characters is uncomfortably familiar: "We're leaving them for life in the new / empire and the prospect of war." In the city, impatient crowds in black or drab plaids claw for a foothold in dark cliffs above the sea. Glass, steel, brownstone, granite, and yet, passing a window—soft light, bookshelves, prints, pre-Columbian ceramics, two orange dahlias in a crystal bowl. Or, glancing into an apartment building on a winter night, you see the lobby through a curved grill: a yellow Qing vase on a marble topped table, a mural recalling the 40s, a mirror reflecting light from a turquoise lamp. Phil Fried's poems, closely woven, subtly and generously felt, capture those openings, little worlds where we meet ourselves. Lern Coley teaches at Nassau Community College on Long Island. He is writing a book on the Bollingen Award controversy of 1948/49. Breaking Down the Boundaries Paula Koneazny Shake Joshua Beckman Wave Books http://www.wavepoetry.com 86 pages; paper, $12.00 I originally read each section of Joshua Beckman 's new book. Shake, as if it were a single long poem, an approach that still makes sense to me, even after having been disabused ofthis notion by the poet himself. According to Beckman, the three sections of his book—"Shake," "Let the People Die," and "New Haven"—are simply groupings of individual, untitled poems. Although the choice not to title his poems was apparently an organic ratherthan a formal one, it nevertheless carries significance, as it breaks down the boundaries of the poems and allows them to "flow into one another." A publisher's blurb associates Beckman's poems with those ofGinsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Whitman . Indeed, the fourth poem in the book, in which an opening rant upon the occasion ofa father's death spills over into a larger social indictment, quotes "Howl" explicitly: and I saw the best minds of my generation living in lofts thinking they were the best minds of their generation while the world hacked up tax breaks and jet fighters.... Beckman is not the only member of a younger generation of poets to have been likened to Ginsburg recently (Nicole Kocot, also with a new book out from Wave Books, comes to mind). It occurs to me that such apparent kinship may have something to do with the events of September 11, 2001, widely perceived as a rupture that redefined a peculiarly American sense ofbefore and after. In any case, many poets writing in the post 9/1 1 context seem to be experimenting with more viscerally persuasive forms, such as direct address, rant, and the apocalyptic list. Speaking out, rather than speaking in, appears to be back in vogue. Beckman's poems, however, shift back and forth between extroversion and introspection. A poem may start off in a place where both speaker and the one spoken to are subsumed in history and, then, as the poem progresses, reenter a more personal space and time. The book's second poem, which begins with an account of how it was "[ijn the days of famous want," follows such a trajectory. Two major shifts occur in this poem: the first, a change from past perfect to present tense, immediately precedes the introduction of "I"; the second, an anecdote about Carl, who "once wrote the most horrible / poem. . .," moves the poem from a general to a more personal accounting. Thoughts about Carl are followed by larger thoughts, "of/ the sea, the unbecoming ways / of everyone, and other moments," then return to the immediacy of "your red pants, your cradled purse, / the next man who will leave/ his lover for you." The second section ofthe book, "Let the People Die," forms a twenty-five poem sonnet cycle, in that each of the poems is composed of fourteen lines...