December is the plank, the timber, the stone lying under the door to the New Year – the threshold to the door that is January. In this January winter season of time moving and standing still at the same time, I think of how thresholds encapsulate passage and change because they are barrier and entrance at the same time. A threshold can be conjured simply by drawing a line in the sand (“Don’t step over that line”) or by bringing to mind the threshold of dreams and the threshold of desire. There is even a special word, limen, for the threshold of our senses.

Think of the following recommended readings as doorways to the human psyche; come, step over the threshold:
 

THE BOWER OF NIL
A NARRATIVE POEM
Frederick Glaysher, Earthrise Press

This is a doorway into the future. Frederick Glaysher was a Fulbright-Hays scholar to China in 1994 who studied at Beijing University and the Buddhist Mogao Caves on the Silk Road and a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar on India in 1995 who explored the conflicts between the traditional regional civilizations of Asia and modernity. He is an outspoken advocate of the United Nations and an accredited participant at the United Nations millennium Forum (May 22-26, 2000). The reason any of that matters is that the subtleties and complexities of the aforementioned cultures inform his subject matter and his political interests circumscribe the work. THE BOWER OF NIL is an Orwell meets Nietzsche meets C.S. Lewis mélange of despair, madness, and hope. Not lyrical, not tidy and not information-byte-sized, your fingers come away heavy with paint—rather than print— after reading this. Colored richly and satisfyingly with symbols (e.g., the name Peter, the lily, the lantern) that speak directly to the psyche—the way that artwork spoke to the illiterate in the Middle Ages, here are three excerpts:

I

An indescribable uneasiness swept over him.
More than two thousand years of philosophy,
he sighed, to end only in nihilism.
That strong enchanter Nietzsche saw through
the pretensions of the modern age.
After the owl of Minerva had taken flight,
like a madman with a lantern, he ran
into the marketplace in the thickening gloom,
seeking God, proclaiming we have drunk up
the sea, wiped way the entire horizon.
We stray through an infinite Nothingness.

II

Staring at the fixture Peter let go
of the concerns that had plagued him for years.
Gone, his disappointment with the children;
gone, the grief over his and Mary’s stormy love.
His gaze took in only the lily.
Fifty-six years of life numbed him while
the darkness exceeded that without.
Lying in the dark he focused on
only the lily, its primordial shape.
Nothing could be heard in the late hours
until suddenly the dark night was pierced
by the first solitary morning bird song,
its profuse strains soaring, as if from heaven
or near it, soaring into the darkness,
shattering the gloom of long black hours,
breaking the strangling grip of despair.
With each fresh breath the bird heralded
the new day, trilled, twirled, flew, dove,
rippled the darkness like a frog jumping
into the waters of an ancient pond,
blasted through Peter’s despair like a trumpet
dispelling the darkness of error, the mist of
doubts and misgivings, the slumber of negligence.

III

Darwin is as outdated as Newton.
Some vast universal genetic code
guides the evolution of the cosmos,
unifies the four forces of nature
into one living, pulsating pattern.
Aristotle intuited the endlessness
of the the universe—our own but a bubble
in a mysteriously interconnected
structure demonstrating design and purpose,
evincing a single, rational,
elegant, beautiful principle.
Matter and the space-time continuum
are alive as any sentient organism.
Modern physics intimates Being.
Worship of the Divine Essence frees us
from worship of state tyranny.

Available through the publisher or from Amazon.comfor $21.95 

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
SELECTED VERSE
A Bilingual Edition 
Edited By Christopher Maurer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Publishers

The threshold of understanding, the doorway of communication between the two halves of the brain, that which allows those two hemispheres to talk to one another is the corpus colossum, an organ that carries messages from the one hemisphere to the other. The corpus colossum was cut during experimental surgery to save the lives of people with life-threatening epilepsy and it was discovered that there are different thinking processes taking place in the different hemispheres.  Scientist have found that left-handers typically have larger corpus colossums than right handers and have subsequently theorized that the two halves of left hander’s brains communicate more efficiently with each other. Think of Christopher Maurer as a left-handers corpus colossum elegantly facilitating communication between the two hemispheres –the two languages, Spanish and English— processing Lorca’s verse in this must have edition (Spanish is laid out in text on the left side pages and English is laid out in text on the right side pages of this book).

Excerpt:

Trasmundo

A Manuel Ángeles Ortiz

Malestar y noche

Abejaruco.
En tus árboles oscuros.
Noche de cielo balbuciente
Y aire tartamundo.

Tres borráchos eternizan
Sus gestos de vino y luto.
Los astros de plomo giran
Sobre un pie.
                    Abejaruco.
En tus árboles oscuros.

Dolor de sien oprimida
Con guirnalda de minutos.
?Y tu silencio? Los tres
borrachos cantan desnudos.
Pespunte de seda virgen
Tu canción.
                      Abejaruco.
Uco uco uco uco.
                        Abejaruco.
 

Back of the World

A Manuel Ángeles Ortiz

Disquiet and the Night

    Bee-eating bird.
In the dark of your trees.
Night of skies slurred
and tongue-tied air.

   Three drunks perpetuate
motions of wine and grief, blurred.
The leaden stars pirouette
on one foot.
                   Bee-eating bird.
In the dark of your trees.

    Aching temples confined
in a garland of minutes deferred.
What of your silence? The three
naked drunks are singing.
A backstitch in virgin silk:
your song.
                Bee-eating bird.
Heard, slurred, blurred, deferred.
                           Bee-eating bird.

Available through the publisher or from Amazon.com for $16.00

WHAT WILL SUFFICE
Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry
Edited by Christopher Buckley and Christopher Merrill
Gibbs Smith, Publisher

Turning the door handle, pushing aside the leather flap, following the fox past stacks of bones, brings one to the living room-lair-den, the heart of where the poet lives and breathes in this collection of essays/reflections/samples and commentary upon said samples of what makes, breaks and delineates poetry. From forces that move the spirit (e.g. Duende and the Blues) to spirit that forces movement (Ars Poetica), this fine exploration attempts to encompass the mythmaking/wordsmithing engaged in by the makers, shakers, tellers and spellers, that poets be. With contributions from John Ashbery, Michelle Boisseau, Christopher Buckley, Mary Crow, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Donald Hall, Juan Filipe Herrera, Philip Levine, Maxine Kumin, Charles Simic, DianeWakowski, Robert Bly, Robert Hass and Heather McHugh, among others, you’ll be coming back to this door often –and finding a different room on the other side of the door each time you revisit. This collection is laid out with composition first and commentary by the author of each piece following said composition. A few contributors, however, like John Ashbery, provide no commentary, choosing, instead to try to allow the work itself to communicate their thoughts.

Excerpt: 

Tom Andrews

Ars Poetica

The dead drag a grappling hook for the living.
The hook is enormous. Suddenly it is tiny.
Suddenly one’s voice is a small body falling
through silt and weeds, reaching wildly…

James Thurber was once interviewed by a reporter who had read Thurber in a French translation; after reading Thurber in English, the reporter said he preferred the French translation. That’s always been my problem,” Thurber replied. “I lose something in the original.” While writing a poem, I hope to be confronted with a moment when, as William Stafford put it, “The material talks back,” often frustrating my original intent or design for the poem. At that moment I have a decision to make. I can insist on my original intent or I can try to listen to and follow the poem’s emerging direction. Invariably I find that if I insist on my original design, then “I lose something in the original.” Increasingly I’m interested in letting my poems (as in “Ars Poetica”) engage directly the tension between my own desire to speak and the language’s tendency to displace the speaker. The more I write, the more I discover the truth of something Michel Focault wrote: “Language always seems to be inhabited by the other, the elsewhere, the distant.”

John Ashbery

What Is Poetry?

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boys scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid
Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believe it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us—what?—some flowers soon?

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Letter from My Mother in Spanish

She writes to me as if we still shared
the same language. The page
a laden sky, filled with flying letters
suspended just above the lines
like blackbirds on the horizon;
the accents—something smaller
they are pursuing.

                               She says:
after a lifetime of tending to people,
my grandmother is obsessed
with useless endeavors—raising fat hens
she refuses to eat, letting them live
until their feather droop and drag
on the dirt, like hems
of slovenly women.

                             “Listen,”
she writes, forgetting that the words
cannot pull me by the elbow, “she will not pick
the roses she grows, so that walking
through the garden is like following a whore—
the smell chokes you; makes you
want to loosen your dress.

           “She fills her house with old things:
baby pictures she misnames, mistaking me
for you, undoing the generations; yellowed ads
for beauty products and clothes; headlines
for the War; her last child’s obituary—
the one who never tasted sugar,
then he died of something simple.

             “She has no use now
for those of us who survived. Your aunts
and I take turns at her side, but if we burn
 a light in the dark room she prefers,
she covers her face as if ashamed.
If we dust the picture-frames, she claims
we are trying to erase the past.

“Daughter, basta. Enough for now.”

I read her letter aloud, for the sound
of Spanish, and it becomes a Kyrie,
a litany in a mass for the dead.
I take each vowel on my tongue.
La abuela, brings tears to my eyes
like incense; la muerte,
sticks in my throat like ashes.

Her blessing is a row of black crosses
on a white field.

Some Spanish Words (a small excerpt)

Palabras: I came to writing by being curious about the secret meaning of words, palabras that were spoken in my presence in two languages and not always explained I began to think about writing as I heard the stories told by my grandmother and other women in my family. At some point I took note of the performance of language, learned to appreciate the subtleties of emphasis, tone, placement of words, of images called forth by carefully selected words. Before I knew terms like metaphor or analogy, I heard people being compared to birds, beasts of burden, rocks and mountains. I listened carefully as the women drew comparisons between their lives and the way of the cross, and even to Calvary. I heard key words of a woman’s vida spoken with force and resonance: La sangre, la muerte, el amor. These syllables would later come to me as I faced the page like tiny messengers from the past, bearing images.

Available through the publisher or from Amazon.com for $17.95

LOST BAGGAGE
Poems By Charles Levenstein
Loom Press, Publisher

A revolving door whisks you through this collection of poems by Charles Levenstein divided into Travel, Home and Solitude. These poems are more than exotic locale guidebooks and Charles packs lightly – no overstuffed luggage here. There are postcards from the psyche, souvenirs of experience, somethings to write home about. He leaves us exiting this doorway with our backpacks road-ready.

An excerpt:

Grand Hotel

I see people across a great closed courtyard
They are masked by grills and gratings
The yellow globes that light this place
Transform them: golden icons waiting

I hear voices from distant occult corners
They speak languages I hardly know
They whisper noddingly but their agreement
Escapes me: not even a mote in their flow

I am safe here and secret: I see
Their comings and goings, their knocking
On strange doors, they accumulate for
Dinner, I am invisible in brown.

Is this why I came to Mexico City?
To disappear, to blend like a chameleon
In the over-stuffed furniture, I
Am invisible and safe, in this dream.

Available through the Publisher:
Loom Press
P.O. Box 1394
Lowell, Massachusetts 01853