Posted on: June 23, 2011
Review of
Alan Gilbert, Late in the Antenna Fields
by Robert Mueller
The writing in Alan Gilbert’s volume of poetry, Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem Books, 2011), feasts on sarcasm and dispirited bitterness, not to mention a certain snagging anomie. Putting it better or worse, the reader might think to assimilate it to some kind of art adhesion. One is led, or profited, to hear, and to sense and to pick at, a general vaguely petulant and vaguely disinterested and yet persistent patter of ambient petrified displeasure. There is thus less of a danger than a foregone captation in this approach, inherently. So far so good if it sticks; so far so good so long as it educates even, guides, charts and winnows. But when notes of whining and griping swirl in, as they sometimes do, the reader may well wish to give pause.…
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Posted on: June 21, 2011
New poetry from Joseph Milford graces our front page now, along with an essay by Robert Mueller on the poetry of Alan Gilbert. Both bring in a touch of the surreal, which is always welcome here. Because, poetry is like … a simile. Or, as Ernest Hemingway would say, “Do you want to box?”
Which reminds me of the film I saw last night, Woody Allen’s wonderful “Midnight in Paris.” An ode to the city of light, an ode to love, and a trip through time with Scott, Zelda, Stein, Picasso, Dali, Bunuel and a host of great artists, writers and composers. Why? Why do we go with them, through the streets of Paris, into the cafes and nightclubs? Ultimately, perhaps, to learn that there is no place like the present for love, and that without it time and place matter not at all.…
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Posted on: June 20, 2011
wanderlust
The sand would scrape itself
I heard it whisper
as i breached the whitewashed torrent
with my chest
emerging forth everclear and green
drench-dripping in the first
positive moment
hungry for the textures
of earth and flesh
the mortal opacity.
I carved a monument, an easel.
Then portrayed a pastoral.
I will try to find you there again
around and behind every root and knoll
into the craters of every erosion and explosion
straining
the furthest inherent peripherals.
The wind separates my limbs, it tousles
the hair of the soldiering trees
I lie on my back and shape cloudshapes
around your name
I lie here barren in your memory.
Spinning under the moon, hand in hand
with the animals
into the torn lace outskirts of evenings
the blue the pale the pagan
suckling an entirely different oxygen
and I saw you there
your arms flung open
the mouth of churches
spilling light.…
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