Rattle 28

There is much to be said for sticking to your strengths, for the exploration of a narrow milieu. In the twentieth century, artists as varied as Martin Ramirez, Charles Bukowski, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and A.J. Liebling exploited the concept of a niche aesthetic, either thematic or stylistic, to great effect. And while we all (or at least I) wish that we were Pablo Picasso, as native to “Guernica” as “Hands with Flowers,” we are instead generally closer to Jim Carrey: excellent at a specific brand of physical comedy, but mediocre in the dramatic roles to which he has more recently “graduated.”

Nearly all weighty-topic free-verse, Rattle 28 has opted for CCR over Picasso. Only one of the 98 poems features either a rhyming or metric pattern. In addition, the poems of Rattle 28 rarely attempt humor, and are explicitly concerned with Heavy Shit: assassinations, cancerous mothers, religious minority, child molestation, unity, the death of a parent. The scope is ambitious. My preferred selections, however, flash a self-centered wit amidst an often ponderous crowd. In “Underground,” Lee Rossi evokes the risk, disappointment, and bliss of romance against a spelunking/anal-sex metaphor. For risk:

Like a caver edging along a narrow gallery
who must stoop, then crawl, then shimmy
like his ancestor snake through the narrowest
possible hole, I slid my fat boy, weeping
now in anticipation, between her butt cheeks
and pressed. It was someone else wearing
my name, my body. What kind of faith
pulls him into that unforgiving obstruct-
tion?

Disappointment:

I’m not talking about mineral death,
of course, but the kind where you’re lying
in bed with someone you thought you wanted,
and then realize you don’t.

And bliss:

I pressed again,
and she relaxed, allowing me to pop
into that spacious underground, where
a man could lose direction and wander
until he’d forgotten why he wanted to leave.

Jenny Hanning’s “Known,” in which the speaker relates to her lover a memory of laughing at the “fat girls” in her health class who “started to sweat with shame/And I was skinny in that made of sticks way,” succeeds similarly, with a simple metaphor that is instructive on both sides— in this case, the speaker’s character and health class. “Known” is a short poem, but it earns the devastating intelligence of its speaker’s tone. And in my personal favorite, “Not Knowing Better,” Barbara Paparazzo describes a canoe-trip:

… to a small Hindu temple
where black and white goats played
in the sunshine. We snapped
pictures, sat on sun-warmed rocks
& admired the animals about to be
sacrificed, we found out later
& all that gamboling turned inside out
reminding me of that slice
unexpected, brutal
between my life when you were alive
and my life now.

As Hanning’s brief poem earns its speaker’s tone, Paparazzo’s earns its ending. “Not Knowing Better” is the diamond of Rattle 28: serious but not portentous, and unassumingly profound.

In addition to general poetry, Rattle 28 also features the work of the winner, Albert Haley, and runners-up of the 2007 Rattle Poetry Prize; “Tribute to Nurses,” poems and essays by nurses; and interviews with Tess Gallagher and Arthur Sze. Mr. Haley’s winning piece, “Barcelona,” has more humor than most of the other poems— which isn’t saying much– but suffers from the common malady of mixing narrative and lyricism to the detriment of both. Amongst the runners-up, I particularly enjoyed Glen Morazzini’s aptly titled “Ars Poetica Harmonica.”

The 21 poems by nurses are interesting in how they relate to the rest of Rattle 28. As you would expect, the general subject matter does not lighten once we walk through the front doors of the hospital. There is, however, in many of the nurses’ poems, a gallows humor that, although not always successful, examines and comments on death, sickness, pain, etc. where the non-nurse poets of Rattle 28 often simply insist on the existence and awfulness of such facts. And as T.S. Davis notes in his essay on the relationship between nursing and poetry, the potential for thematic and emotional monotony in “nursing poetry” is overcome, at least in Rattle 28, by a visceral intensity of image and language that distinguishes similarly-themed poems from each other. In much the same way, however, that I enjoyed the exceptions to the reigning aesthetic of the general poetry section, I preferred, amongst the pieces by nurses, poems not explicitly concerned with health care, such as Judy Schaefer’s “Dad’s Report Of A Tornado In Missouri When He Was A Boy.” The interviews with Tess Gallagher and Arthur Sze, which conclude Rattle 28, are pleasant, although not overly penetrating in regards to the work, methods, or lives of the subjects.

Rattle 28 reminds me of the dining-out scene in my hometown of Los Angeles: appealing restaurants like occasional plums in an overpriced and mediocre pudding. There are, however, plenty of good poems in Rattle 28, which should be applauded as a collection for its ambition and seriousness of intent. For while the supposed small-moment magic of a Billy Collins may be endearing, expounding on the significance of a cloud passing a hammock depends on an expectational straw-man to an equal extent (although opposite effect) as Steven Spielberg does in Schindler’s List: the universe is more complex than a single cloud passing a hammock, and individual action is more personal than genocide. Like the emotional effect of Schindler’s List, the vast majority of small-moment poems may seem momentarily counterintuitive, but are ultimately self-evident.

While competent small-moment poetry is easier to produce than competent weighty-issue poetry, Rattle 28 is emphatic in its embrace of the latter in a free-verse form. And while unrealized ambition is preferable to pandering, competence is always better than incompetence. How, then, to improve Rattle’s batting average? If Rattle was mine, I would either widen its aesthetic— specifically, to include more formal and thematically varied content— or reduce its length. In its current form, Rattle has a recognizable aesthetic— serious free-verse— but not enough successful poems. As I do not expect for Rattle to start restricting the length of future issues on the basis of this review, the success of these issues will be determined by the quality and number of weighty-topic, free-verse submissions— which Rattle obviously cannot control— or, conversely, by Rattle’s willingness, or lack thereof, to expand its aesthetic niche in regards to the “importance” of subject matter, comfort with humor, and diversity of form within its selections.