Let us get to the best first of Cave Wall’s winter 2007 issue: A. Van Jordan’s “The First Law of Motion.” Jordan writes lyric poems that bruise you. His semi-narrative style doesn’t lend itself to out-of-context sampling, but here are a few middle stanzas from “The First Law of Motion”:
She spots us. She tells Gerald, who can barely read,
to stand up and read a page aloud.
He shoots a glance at me for help.
For him, reading is an unfamiliar face.And though I’m a strong reader, I’m too scared:
if I get caught, she’ll walk me
into the hallway for swats
with her wooden paddle.And when I hear his prayers
rising and falling from his lips—
each breath, each whisper,
carries no god’s name, only mine—I’m too afraid to speak.
He tries to laugh, but laughter
is another way to pray.
And he looks at me, again, to feed him words.When I don’t, his face folds
like a sheet of paper
filled with mistakes. Don’t call it a grin
stretching over her. A smile shadows her voice.“Sit down,” she says.
But don’t call this mercy.
Don’t call this a lesson learned.
It’s merely the question:can he ever be again what he is right now?
This is confessional poetry in the best sense of the word— non-indulgent and authentic. Most good poets, at least every once in a while, attempt a poem in which they come off either stylistically or thematically as the kid who attempts to change his or her image—to invent some sort of tortured identity. Jordan tries more difficult tricks than most poets and still—as one can see above—deftly pulls the rabbit out of the hat.
Fred Chappell writes dense, pseudo-fatuous verse. He can be ironic, lyrical, and/or brusque. Here’s an example of Chappell’s lyricism from “All the Good Times Are Past and Gone”:
Here a spattered tarpaulin
Shrouds the dented, heroic frame
Of a Harley Davidson
That scoured this county like a flameBack in the time when Dad and Mom
Pursued with streaming locks the strip
Of bright horizon where would loom
That blithe utopia they would shapeAccording to a visionary blueprint
For a California dream that soon
Would stand irrefutable as the shoeprint
Of Neil Armstrong upon the moon.
You almost want to love that final stanza for the mere fact that it rhymes “soon” and “moon” to an uncorny, even un-ironic effect—but it undoubtedly must be admired for its consistent, pitch-perfect detail, as well.
Jim Peterson and Charlotte Matthews are also featured in the issue. Peterson’s “Woodcreek 1977” is fantastically illustrative, and Matthews—in her depiction of her daughter’s concussion and playing dress-up—displays an alluring and distinctive voice.
Overall, Cave Wall winter 2007 is excellent in the way only the best literary magazines focused strictly on poetry can be. In other words, its editorial choosiness is apparent in the quality of the writing it presents. Nobody bats .1000 if they have more than a couple at-bats in the majors, but Cave Wall—to mix my sport metaphors—is shooting 75% so far, publishing a range of impressive writing athleticism.
Soon after I turned in the above review, the Luna Park editors told me they had just received the Cave Wall winter/spring 2008 issue, and asked if I could write a short addendum to my previous piece, the results of which are as follows.
Unexpectedly, Cave Wall winter/spring 2008 pales slightly in comparison to the impressive, vigorous writing in Cave Wall winter 2007. There seems to me a preponderance of two types of poems in the more recent issue: underwritten/overtopic and overwritten/undertopic. I would offer as an example of the former category Gail Peck’s series of poems based on artwork by children who died in concentration camps. Certainly I am somewhat jaded from my years of watching Holocaust movies in Hebrew School, but poetry based on dead children’s artwork has to be—well, really good, and Peck’s are somewhat less than crippling in their urgency. This is not to single out Peck (whose poetry is accomplished), because the issue as a whole is disappointing when laid alongside the above-reviewed issue of Cave Wall.
There are stand-outs in this latest issue, of course, one being the writing of Tracy K. Smith. Smith picks mid-level topics—men, promiscuity— and writes the hell out of them. Here’s most of the second stanza from “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay”:
When they handed out fears, you thought
They said gears, and weaseled an extra serving.
It’s unnerving the way you wolf your food,
Slaughter the truth. Your heart’s a wad of phlegm
That hit my window and stuck. Beginner’s luck.
I was thrown off by the disparity in quality between Cave Wall winter 2007— the magazine’s premiere issue— and Cave Wall winter/spring 2008, the magazine’s third issue. I turned to Cave Wall’s second issue, summer 2007, to try and decipher the magazine’s editorial vision.
I was surprised, to say the least—astounded, really. Cave Wall’s summer 2007 is by far the best of the three. I enjoyed the majority of the poets, but my favorite was Elizabeth Hadaway. Here’s “And How I Dread Our Dying Separately”:
I swiped your Blue Sun tee from dirty clothes
and crammed it in my carry-on, your scent
a comfort when I sleep away. But now
it’s faded and the shirt just smells like me,
awake at 3:13, like motel soap
and secondhand smoke in my hair, and how
the words I said were worse than what I meant.
In all three of her poems, Hadaway is smart, and emotional but not sentimental. Also stunning were Patrick Phillips’ poems. Here’s from “Our Situation”:
In the dark we watch
our son’s chest
swell and fall,
a balsa-wood airplane
still clutched in his fist
as he sleeps.
How reckless it seems.
How naïve:
to love a thing
so fragile and so weak.
Some poets can make the difficulty of simplicity look easy like this, and Phillips’ other poems indicate that this above poem’s organic, easy-seeming commentary was not luck on his part, but applied efficiency.
Of there three issues to date, Cave Wall summer 2007 is the more accomplished. Though, admittedly, I didn’t enjoy the latest issue nearly as much as the other two, Cave Wall has already made its mark in the poetry world—and, what’s more, still well ahead of the curve.