What So Cal Poets Are
Reading
Edited by liz gonzález
This month
we review
Displeasures of the Table
by Martha Ronk (Green Integer Books) and
Shadow of the
Plum
by Carol Lem (Cedar
Hill Publications).
 Displeasures
of the Table
by Martha Ronk
Green Integer
Books, 2001
Martha Ronk is also the author of Why/Why Not (University
of California Press, 2003), Eyetrouble (University of Georgia
Press,1998), State of Mind (Sun & Moon Books, 1995),
Desert Geometries (Littoral Books, 1992) and other works. She
resides in Los Angeles and teaches at Occidental College.
Self-Reflexivity
Brought to Table
Reviewed by
Christine Zembal
Of course I thought at age nine,
anyone would chose poetry. I loved it from the get-go...
(“Boiling water”)
In her multi-faceted work, Displeasures of the
Table, Martha Ronk is able to weave the central themes of memory,
philosophy, the craft of writing, along with biographical elements
surrounding the importance, or non-importance, of food. Ronk
examines America’s affinity for eating and the preparation of food
and fuses these elements together to create a series of compact,
delicious prose poems. Many of Ronk’s poems are testimonials to the
act and craft of writing as she is able to bring up the questions,
dilemmas, and choices writers face with the written word—especially
poets.
In her
poem “Christmas cookies,” Ronk interchanges the need for adjectives
with the act of decorating cookies:
We always made rollout cookies
cut into shapes and decorated.
In the German man-
ner the cookie sheet was
covered with anise seeds and
after the baking the cookies
were spread with white
icing and sprinkled with green
and red colored sugar.
The seven minute sugar icing
cooked in the top of a
double boiler and the kitchen
smelled of steam and
sugar as the icing was got on
quickly before it hard-
ened into crystals and stuck to
the sides of the pan.
What to do about adjectives
perplexes many a writer I
know. Others reject them
outright, altogether, and
always; others pile them up as
if the ornate prose of the
last century could be
maintained by will power and
skill. The Christmas cookies
were clearly too rich and
gooey and these days I make
them plain or no one
would eat them at all.
(“Christmas cookies”)
The address and tone changes as Ronk draws
attention from the decorating of the cookies to the actual
construction of the poem. Inserting a self-conscious shift in
subject gives the reader insight into how Ronk fashions the written
word. The conversational tone allows the poem to become a more
personal experience for author and reader. In “Christmas Cookies,”
Ronk comments on how adjectives, icings, sprinkles are indeed all on
the same plane: too much excess and you are left with an inferior
poem and cookie. This same technique is at work in the prose poem
“Creamed tunafish on toast.”
The
problem with syntax is that is so demanding,
demanding of explanation, of meaningful connection
between the past and present, of causality and drama,
of
art and belief. The problem with giving it up alto-
gether, as much contemporary writing does, is that it
asks us to take that which is missing on faith, as if it
were more complex and compelling because unsaid.
(“Creamed tunafish on
toast”)
Through the first line of the poem, Ronk
self-consciously wields words to her will and makes the case that
rules should occasionally be broken. The opening line also implies
that sometimes a thing or an event does not require explanation.
Ronk illustrates that sometimes the frills, “why” and “how,” are not
always the point or necessary.
The first two-thirds of the “Creamed tunafish
on toast” describes an autobiographical account of a moment Ronk
experienced in college:
The
minister and his wife didn’t eat I don’t think; they
were gracious in ways I couldn’t then see. I was young.
I
hated grace. I hated religion. He climbed the
belltower and we all sat leaning on our palms in the
grass watching as if it were and were not happening
as
the sun went down. It had the stillness of going on
and
on, as we watched him inch his way up, not only
because it took so much time, but also because it was
so
potently and embarrassingly symbolic. The grass
was
August brown and warm.
(“Creamed tunafish on
toast”)
Although stirring, there is no way to know
exactly what happened in this scene or what it means in the larger
context of the poem. While the reader might be inclined to attach an
interpretation, Ronk-- in the final stanza—advises against this:
“that which is missing on faith, as if it were more complex and
compelling because unsaid.” Just because the luncheon scene is
unexplained doesn’t mean there is a “compelling,” hidden meaning in
it. Here again Ronk’s conversational tone and constant engagement
with her audience is apparent.
Ronk admits that we need food, even though it
may be an interruption: “Cookbooks seem to me as preposterous as
poetry, the imaginative leap as great.” (“Rappini”). Like food,
words are also necessary, and throughout Ronk’s poems, she addresses
this need for these different elements. She distills the bare
essence of concepts in spare, rich portions spread out like a
five-day feast for the reader.
I
like yoghurt in small cardboard containers, also for-
mal
poems, especially sonnets. Most everyone I know
likes process art and the unedited, run-together de-
tails of daybooks or lists. The vanilla is cold and as
easy as babyfood and nostalgia. The shape of the spoon
is
as delicious as if it were silver and one could eat
color.
(“Yoghurt”)
Christine Zembal received her B.A. in Creative Writing from the
University of Southern California. She is currently studying with
Suzanne Lummis through the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension and
lives in Los Angeles.
 Shadow
of the Plum
by Carol Lem
Cedar Hill
Publications, 2002
Carol Lem, who lives
in Temple City and teaches creative writing and literature at East
Los Angeles College, has recently published poems in The
Chrysalis Reader, Red Rock Review, and Runes. A reading of
selected poems from Shadow of the Plum may be heard on her
CD, Shadow of the Bamboo, with music by Masakazu Yoshizawa.
For more information, contact her at clem64079@aol.com or visit her
website, www.carollem.com.
A Review that Ends
with “and …”
Reviewed by Gary Soto
I gave up reviewing
poetry books several years ago, but this week I received in the mail
Carol Lem’s Shadow of the Plum, (Cedar Hill Publications) and
began to admonish myself for my failure to display more affection
for reviewing. I beheld a wonderfully designed book and fanned the
83 pages so they created a breeze that smelled of ink and glue—it
was hot off the press, as they say. I read these poems in their
rightful order, from first to last, and over again. I make no bones
about it; I know Carol Lem, a much-loved instructor at East Los
Angeles College. She has invited me numerous times to campus, and
she and I have put our heads together to try to make her students—my
students, indirectly—readers and, thus, wiser and more fulfilled
people.
Before I review her
book—actually, only a single poem will be addressed, a poem titled
“Didn’t They Tell You Stories?”—let me give you a picture of Carol.
She is Chinese-American, born in the 1950s and raised in Los
Angeles, and has been for many years an instructor of English at
ELAC in the heart of Aztlan. Most of her students are Latino, many
of them recent immigrants. Her favorite language is Spanish. Orale
pues! Her favorite food? Mexican, of course, with a penchant
towards enchiladas. She plays the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, and
likes wine. In the photo on the back cover, she’s holding a glass of
red wine that has circulated to her cheeks—she’s on her way to a
stately bliss.
Now the poem “Didn’t
They Tell You Stories?,” which operates as a preface to the
collection and which sneakily negates her inability to tell a story
while telling a story. The poem begins with Carol and a student
walking across the college campus lawn littered with “broken
blossoms of East L.A.”—a lovely image that suggests the students are
broken yet still flowers in their own right. This student at Carol’s
side naively asks if her parents told her stories (presumably
Chinese, thus exotic and mysterious) when she was a girl growing up
in the 1950s. The question startles Carol. She doesn’t know how to
answer. Did my parents tell me stories? she wonders. Then she
realizes that she can only provide facts about her family, not
luxurious details about growing up in a Chinese household where
there were plenty of cultural references at her fingertips—language,
food, customs, music, religious, tea, incense, superstitions, etc.
Her family was more prone to tense silence. The reason becomes
evident as the reader delves into the book—her father, for instance,
liked betting on losing horses. He was also not careful at Las Vegas
roulette tables.
For Carol, then,
there were few stories, only occasionally remembered moments through
the lens of memory—the sweetness of her early life was rock candy
after an evening bath and the babble of the television that kept her
parents from arguing. This is what startles her. The question
(Didn’t They Tell You Stories?”) from the student is perhaps idle
chatter on the way to class, but for Carol a profound shocker. Did
her parents pass on a story for her to tell? Does she have
something to say? This reviewer believes so, and it’s a familiar
story for those who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s and shared names
like Deborah or Gary or Carol—god, how ethnic families wanted their
young to assimilate.
It’s easy to ask a
simple question, but often difficult to answer it—or so Carol
discovers. And it’s the simple question that often provokes us, and,
as a result here, gets us going if we’re introspective, if we’re
soul-searching, if we are poets and writers. I will even argue that
“Didn’t They Tell you Stories?” is about “art.” Consider the line,
“[I] tell a boy there’s a life in the sky . . .” In some regard this
phrase has a religious connotation—i.e., heaven and the
afterlife—but I believe Carol is saying that the life of writing is,
well, up there, in that sky a poet sometimes touches and pulls down
onto the page. She is telling this student, her other students, her
future students who will walk at her side, that the art of writing
is life and—
—Originally
published on Gary Soto’s website:
www.garysoto.com in October, 2002
Gary Soto
is the author of numerous books of poetry, including New and
Selected Poems (Chronicle Books, 1995); Canto
Familiar/Familiar Song (1994); and Neighborhood Odes
(1992). He has written two novels, Poetry Lover (University
of New Mexico Press, 2001) and Nickel and Dime (2000). He
also wrote the memoir Living Up the Street (1985), numerous
young adult and children's books; and edited three anthologies:
Pieces of Heart (1993), California Childhood (1988), and
Entrance: Four Latino Poets (1976). He lives in Berkeley, CA.
So Cal poets, please email
me your reviews of a recently
published poetry book or chapbook. See guidelines below.
Guidelines:
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Paste the review in the
body of your e-mail. No attachments.
-
250-300 word limit. (If
you have strong grammar skills and know how to write a review,
this limit is flexible. Contact liz for info.)
-
Include a two-sentence
bio for the book author: City in which s/he lives and
publication credits. (Include your one-sentence bio: Publication
credits.)
-
Use quotation marks for
poem titles and excerpts of poems only.
-
PROOFREAD PLEASE!
-
Refer to the other
reviews for format and to use as a model.
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