Green Light by Matthew Rohrer

I just finished reading Green Light by Matthew Rohrer (Verse Press, 2004) which a friend bought from the poet at a certain New England workshop and lent to me. (When I find out the name of that workshop, I’ll revise this post accordingly.) Rohrer, who was born in Ann Arbor and now lives in Brooklyn, is also the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, which won the 1994 National Poetry Series and was published by W.W. Norton. I found the poems in Green Light engaging enough that I read through the entire book (about 85 p.) in a couple of days. A poem that caught my eye, as exemplary of his style:


CATECHISM


Of my parents and origins I have little to say.

In church they actually told us
Catholicism was
“a big house full of cool, old stuff”.

I spent my time sitting
in the darkened apse
imagining the actual house.

Your Dominican mind tricks don’t work on me.

My knees suffered through Kumbaya.

Then there was the incident
of the professor who sneaked the holy water
out and poured it into the ocean.

He wrote a letter to the bishop
informing him that
all the world’s water was holy now.

He was also a harborer of homosexuals.

I am still in the dark
imagining the actual house.


James Tate on the back of the book writes, “There are poems in A Green Light that can break your heart with their unexpected twists and turns. You think you know where you are and then you don’t and it is inexplicably sad. You experience some kind of emotion that you can’t even name, but it’s deep and real. That’s the power of Matthew Rohrer’s new poems.” Break your heart? My heart is not exactly broken. That I take as literary hype-erbolese. But the unexpected twists, the strange emotion and inexplicable sadness, are very apt description. The sadness has to do with abrupt (but eminently artful) juxtapositions, incomplete resolutions, and the blasé-seeming sparseness of Rohrer’s work. All these suggest disenchantment, inner deadness, emotional damage…. and yet the poems crackle with sardonic, understated wit. Rohrer sketches a mini-cosmos. Darkness abounds. The second poem in the collection, called I Hail From The Bottom of the Sea, The Land of Eternal Darkness is a ferocious, if highly ironic, tract. It establishes for us that he’s serious. But also (somewhere UP THERE, he writes) there are skies with “mysterious machines, burning and turning in our heads”, that questionable God, and everywhere, the Unnameable (or semi-nameable, as it turns out):

In the center of the universe
is an enormous emptiness
that’s teaching us something
about ourselves.

Sometimes, though, I feel that Rohrer’s deadpan style is a pose. In the poem above, Catechism, does he really have little to say about his parents/origins? There are poems that twist toward trendiness, like one called We Should Never Have Stopped at Pussy Island. But still. But still. There are frequent lines of great pith and resonance, evidence of great intelligence at work…

Reading Rohrer, other writers come to mind, but such inner reminders I find extraneous, so I tack them on at the end of this review: I think of Yannos Ritsos, whose poems could be described as picturesque little postcards with disturbing cracks in the corners that catch you up short with their reminders of mortality, violence, etc. Or of the Bosnian-born fiction writer Aleksandar Hemon (The Story of Bruno, Nowhere Man), whose every mordant line expresses the great solitude and brutal violation of his own past, that of his ancestors, and by extension, humanity…

THIS PAGE

is now
a test tube
in my laboratory.
Surrounded by
bubbling beakers
and alembics, I
am peacefully at work
creating myself.
See?
My foetus
is seated
in the test tube
curled
like a fiddlehead
or a face
bowed in prayer.
His transparent heart
beats
under a veil of skin.
Dark
glass bead eyes
stare out at you.

-- Guatemala & Other Poems

BRIAN CAMPBELL BIO

Some official stuff about me, just for the record (and until my profile gets set up...)

BRIAN CAMPBELL

Brian Campbell is a Montreal/Toronto poet/singer-songwriter whose first book, Guatemala and Other Poems, was published in 1994 by Window Press in Toronto. The Imaginary Album, a solo cassette of original songs, was released in 1996; The Courtier's Manuscript, an independent CD, in 2002. One song from the latter was a runner-up in the 2001 Unisong Competition; another will be used as a theme in Le Don du Nile, a large-scale musical production to be staged in Quebec and France in 2006-7.

Poetry published in the following reviews and anthology (selection):

Continuum: Time, the 4th Dimension (Cranberry Tree Press Anthology: Windsor, Ontario, 2004)
New Century, July 2004, March 2001
Pouèt~cafëe! #3, printemps-ete 2002
Poem, 1991-1994(various issues),
New Canadian Review, 1990
Acta Victoriana, l989, l979
Grain, Winter, l988
Phoenix Rising, Dec. l987
Poetry Canada Review, June l984

Translations of poetry by Francisco Santos from Spanish
published in Indigo (York University, Toronto), Summer,1991.
Translations of poetry by Etnairis Rivera (Puerto Rico) and Hebe Bonifini (Argentina) from Spanish in Ruptures, #4, 1993

Associations

Approved Writer, Writers-in-CEGEPs Program (Quebec Writer's Federation)
Currently gives lectures on creative writing and conducts poetry workshops in Quebec CEGEPs (Quebec's system of pre-university colleges)

Full member of the Canadian League of Poets, Quebec Writer's Federation

Editing/Reading Series
Co-editor (with Allen Sutterfield) of Window Press, Toronto, 1990-94. Window Press published three books, Guatemala and Other Poems by Brian Campbell, Midnight by John Tarnoc, and Medianoche Desnuda (in Spanish) by Francisco Santos; two chapbooks, No Straight Lines and Amor/Agape/Eros by Imre de C. Nemeth; poetry broadsides, postcards, and Poem, a small magazine. Also with Allen Sutterfield, started a reading series that eventually became the Art Bar Reading Series, widely regarded as the largest and longest-running weekly poetry-only series in Canada.
This now takes place in the Victory Café in Toronto.

Awards/Citations
University of Toronto: Norma Epstein Award for Poetry, l978
Unisong Competition, 2001 (London/Hollywood, CA): Runner-up, folk category, for To My Whimsical Love (song on The Courtier's Manuscript).

Brian Campbell was born in Toronto. He graduated with a B.A. in English, University of Toronto, in 1980, and completed his Diploma in Education at McGill University, Montreal, 1991. Currently he lives in Montreal, where he does freelance translating and teaches English as a Second Language.

Website:
At League of Canadian Poets

INSTANT

The day stands, bright and still.
A sheet of sunlight through the window
lies square on the dusty floor.
I set aside this heart, sad and blind,
just to look.
The day stands, an altar in the sun.
Here, its golden mandala.

-- first published in Pouèt~cafëe, Printemps-été 2002

I've been at Blog-City ... but I'm slowly moving here...

I started at http://briancampbell.blog-city.com/
I think blog-city's service is fine... but their community is rather small. There are thin pickings among the poets there... nobody I would truly care to dialogue with. (Believe me, I did a careful investigation...). Here some truly fine, with-it, well-read poets reside, among them

Ron Silliman
Bill Allegrezza
Victoria Chang

to name a few. Practically all of you guys are with blogger aren't you? And as a branded blog... well, we're branded. (Ssssssss.....)
So slowly I'll be moving my posts into these new digs. And getting used to protocals, making friends with the doorman, the meter man too. Not to mention the neighbours.
Yep, so far, I like the accommodation, the neighbourhood, the view!
Hi everybody! Welcome!