Sunday, March 31, 2019

DEATH AT SEA

In memoriam my husband, Steven Charles Werner 
(May 3, 1955 - March 26, 1985)
The heart, someone wrote once,
Couldn’t walk a straight line,
Couldn’t pass the drunk test if it tried.
Some men play the odds; their heads count cards
But their hearts bet inside straights.
They can’t bluff, ever,
Show their hand, most times,
And always give the pot away.
Steven died at sea
Holding the dead man’s hand, aces up.
A poker-faced corpse surfaces on the water:
I see
The orange safety vest
Inflated around his neck
Mocking God and me
Now, now, now, now, now ---
Too late.
I held his wake in Vegas,
Sat Shiva in casinos
Where there were no windows, no daytime, no peace.
I put him in a casket,
A greedy one-armed bandit
It still asks me for coins
For its insatiable slot.
I hate the beach
The deadsea beach
The sunblocked snorkeled oily beach
The scuba lungs
The deadgrass skirts
The blind bikinied sunglass beach
I hate the sea
The soulless sea
The sentient, malevolent swampy sea
It don’t care if you live
It won’t cry if you die
It boasts like Yaweh
It spits in your eye
The sea
The stupid sea.
But I love the albatross
That took Steven’s soul,
And I love the lighthouse and the shore,
And I love all sailors, both sober and drunk,
That won’t kill a bird no matter what,
And I love the salt and I love the storm,
And I loved Steven, beyond most doubt,
And if I knew then
What I know now
Could I have walked on water
And pulled him out?

Sunday, March 24, 2019

EXORCISM (FOUND POEM)

Adapted from “Group Dynamics,” People of the Lie─The Hope for Healing Human Evil by M. Scott Peck.
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
Consecration: On the morning of March 16, 1968
Elements of Task Force Barker
Charlie Company Task Force Barker
Moved into a small group of hamlets
In the Quang Ngai province of South Vietnam
Collectively known as My Lai
It was a routine mission
To search and destroy
A typical mission
To search and destroy
The soldiers were poorly trained and hastily assembled
They were tired, poorly trained, and hastily assembled
They had sustained casualties from booby traps and mines
They had not engaged the enemy but sustained casualties
Had had no military success for over a month
The soldiers were poorly trained
The soldiers were probably not aware of the Geneva Convention
Which states it is a war crime to kill a civilian
A punishable crime to kill a civilian
To kill a soldier or enemy who has surrendered
Who is wounded and has laid down his arms
To kill a non-combatant
They were probably not aware of the Law of Land Warfare
In the Army Field Manual, the U.S. Army Field Manual
Which specifies that orders in violation of the Geneva Convention
Any order in violation of the Geneva Convention
Is illegal and not to be obeyed
The soldiers were poorly trained
The written orders were ambiguous
The My Lai orders were ambiguous
Just waste the place, a Louie said
A Louie might have said
Though essentially all elements of Task Force Barker
Were involved in some way in the My Lai operation
The primary element of ground troop involved
Was C Company 1st Battalion of the 20th infantry
Of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade
When Charlie Company moved into the hamlets of My Lai
They found no combatants not a single combatant
Only old men and children, unarmed women, men, and children
All civilian and unarmed
The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred
The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred
The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred
Civilians on that day
The killings took a long time
The people were killed in a variety of ways
In some instances troops would simply stand at a hut
And spray it with fire or throw hand grenades
In other instances villagers including small children
Were shot as they attempted to escape
The killings took a long time
The most largescale killings occurred at My Lai 4
There the first platoon of Charlie Company
Commanded by Lieutenant Calley
Herded villagers into groups of twenty or more
Who were then shot down by rifle fire
Machine guns and hand grenades
The killings took a long time
The number of soldiers can only be estimated
Perhaps only fifty actually killed the civilians
Perhaps just two hundred watched them shoot the civilians
Only just some two hundred directly witnessed the killings
By the end of the massacre approximately 500
Knew of operation My Lai
None of them reported the crimes
A helicopter pilot in flyby to the mission
A warrant officer in air support in flyby to the mission
Could see from the air what was happening in the hamlets
He landed, tried to talk to the troops on the ground
Then went airborne and radioed headquarters from his copter
Told his superior officers what he saw at My Lai
They did not seem concerned
The soldiers were poorly trained
Lieutenant Calley was convicted
For his crimes at My Lai 4
But not his Captain Medina
His superior officer
Not Lieutenant Colonel Barker
Who Commanded Task Force Barker
Nor Lieutenant Barker’s com
Who said,
Boys let’s bring that coonskin home…
In Iowa in ’66 a boy gets into trouble
Sells some pot and gets himself caught
And he gets himself in trouble
And the judge says join the Army
Or you’re going to do some hard time
The boy signs up for Nam
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

POETIC KISS OF DEATH (humor)

If you have ever suffered through a bad poetry reading, you will no doubt be familiar with these 8 tell-tale signs of literary mildew.
1. "I wrote this poem this morning . . . ." —Translation: The poem is long, unedited, repetitious, and was written while the poet was hung over from last night's Headshrinker Bar's open mike.
2. "This poem is about betrayal and lost love." —Translation: "I caught my boyfriend and best friend doing it last night and I will not be afraid to cry a lot during this reading."
3. "Brothers and sisters, the man says . . ." —Translation: This will be a rambling poem of political outrage, although it will never be clear (a) what the issue being discussed is; (b) who the man is.
4. "This poem appeared in . . . " —Translation: Beware! The poet is about to read you her entire literary bio, starting (but showing no signs of ending) with her publication in the Eastern Secaucus-Meadowlands Stadium and Refreshment Stand Review at age fourteen.
5. "For your information, the muse of poetry is . . . " —Translation: The poet has over $100,000 in student loans, and is lacing his poem with references to prove that his MFA was worth it.
6. "It's language poetry. Just let it wash over you." —Translation: The poet couldn't write a poem with meter or meaning to save her life.
7. "I love the pluralism of voices supported by the open mike." —Translation: Poet couldn't get a feature at a decent venue.
And last but not least:
8. "I have my new full-length book and handmade chapbooks for sale . . . "—Translation: You are about to be shook down for $25 for 40 typo-ridden pages of poetry. Leave the venue before the poet leaves the stage.

Monday, March 18, 2019

My poem TERMS OF ALLEGIANCE in MATTER

TERMS OF ALLEGIANCE

(poem inspired by work as a “namer” for advertising)
My product needs you. Watch the silver surfaces, the waving waters, wonder why the woman is humiliating the man—hold that anxious thought. We have you now; pledge unconscious
allegiance to us. The words reverberate: aim, aptitude, authority; you are not sure you can measure up. Hold that feeling of self-doubt:  we will bring authenticity, balance, direction, a compass for your life. Now, buy Boson (never mind what it means, it is a solution).
We are anodyne, access to numbness and a world without doubt; we are the antidote.  Buy
Allele (the sound alone is uplifting, lulling). Buy Asana (our sharp penetrating products are as
beneficial as yoga). Watch: we offer you a bright shore, an ascendant future, halcyon nights, a
champion for your battles, a compass in the fog, clarity, concord, electric force.
In your indecisive world, you are on the cusp of a decision: leap! To buy is action, affirmation, connection; the diagram of your life is finally here! We are your doctrine and domain, your
emergent path to an elemental, firsthand, and entire existence.  We are your focus, your formula,
your fulcrum. The world is frightening and ridden with woes; you are daily subject to death by
a thousand cuts. We are your lightship, your sure haven, your journey’s landing, your way through the matrix’s maze, your locus, your hope.
STOP: Your problems, which are legion, cannot be solved outside of the mercantile world. We
control the immaterial and will share its aura if you buy. Without us, you are a zygote, small and unformed, without viability, validity, or worth. We are the membrane through which you must
pass.  Listen: you have problems you have never dreamed of which we alone can resolve. Buy
Synergy, buy Thoughtfulness, buy it all and survive.  Watch the silver surfaces, the waving water, the woman humiliating the man, and buy.

*** 

Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Her new novel is Sly Bang; her first novel is PatientWomen. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country, #specialcharacters , In Paran ,  A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence . Her poetry albums are The No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sunby Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the online anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry. Please see more about Larissa at her website  www.larissashmailo.com

Friday, March 15, 2019

PRAISE FOR LARISSA SHMAILO’S SLY BANG!

If you are looking for something to get out of your ordinary line of thinking, Larissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang ought to do the trick. The book is a psychological sci-fi filled with nonsensical gadgets, absurd dialogue, and all-out madness, a battle royale of good against evil, of womanhood against male perversion that follows William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in reverse, if we consider the gender roles of the protagonists. Lovers of Nikolai Gogol’s Madman’s Diary and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Franz Kafka’s stories will also enjoy this book, as opposed to religious and concrete minds who by all means should stay away from a book like this.
—Darryl Wawa
Generously infused throughout with humor, ebullient psychosexualism, and quasi-hypothetical political scenarios, this manic mind-trip, where alternate realities collide full-force culminating in orgasmic fits and fantastical flurries, Sly Bang is a bit like eating chocolate cake on a roller coaster. Crazy. Delicious. Chaos.
—K.R. Copeland
Sly Bang is a whirlwind. And if you are looking for a sedate involvement with linear literature, Sly Bang is not for you. This is the shock of the new in a whirlpool of the past. Just open the book and hang on. This is visceral energy in words. . . In Sly Bang, Larissa Shmailo’s technical skills pop on every page. She is in control of this insanity from the start, and to prove it she floods us with new icons created one after another like stamped plastic ducks. She creates an assembly line of literary riches.
—RW Spryszak
Larissa Shmailo's sci fi thriller Sly Bang is a twisted and compelling thrill ride of a novel that not only transcends the form of that literary genre— it blows it up. It's a novel about an attempt to destroy the universe by reverse engineering the Big Bang. It deals with taboo subjects and is raunchy. funny and brutally intense. I also like that's there's a character named Brave McQ.
—Michael W McHugh aka McQ
Astounding! Will make you recalibrate the word “risk.”
—Maggie Balistreri
Available on Amazon and Spuyten Duyvil at http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang.html

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

"I am not your insect" in NOON Anthology

Delighted that my poem "I am not your insect" will be included in Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press of Tokyo and London) edited by Philip Rowland. The text of the poem, which appears in my collection #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books 2014) follows below.
I am not your insect
Your underfoot, your exterminated, your bug. My unabashedly hairy legs, whose gymnopédies twitch like a chorus for a fatal Sharon Stone, delight in ces mouvements qui déplace les lignes, in the motion, the quiver, le mort, the catch. Mother Kali, you have made me what I am: feminine, brilliant, entirely without fear. Like my mother, I watch and pray for prey – that it be there, that it give gore, that I feel it die, that there be more.

Monday, March 11, 2019

My AWP Portland Schedule

I am so looking forward to connecting with friends at AWP 2019 in Portland. Here's where I'll be.
Offsite:
Wednesday, March 27, 3:00 -8:00 pm (I will be reading between 3:00 and 4:00 pm)
Festival of Language
Curator: Jane L Carman with Bill YarrowJonathan PentonThaddeus RutkowskiJoani Reese and a cast of thousands.
Ford Food and Drink
2505 SE 11th Avenue (at SE Division Street),
Portland, Oregon 97202
Wednesday, March 27, 8:00 pm
Unlikely Stories and Rigorous
A Celebration and Literary Reading
Larissa ShmailoJonathan Penton, Roz (Roz's Page) Spencer, Marc Vincenz, others.
Ford Food and Drink
2505 SE 11th Avenue (at SE Division Street),
Portland, Oregon 97202
Panels:
Thursday, March 28, 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
Panel R214. The Critical Creative: The Editor-Poet
Larissa Shmailo, Kwame Dawes, Michael AnaniaSam Truitt and moderator Marc Vincenz.
This panel will offer an insiders' look into poetry editorship and publication from poets who edit prominent journals and presses.
Portland Ballroom 256, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
Thursday, March 28
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panel R223. Hybrid Sex Writing: What's Your Position?. Jonathan PentonThaddeus RutkowskiCecilia Tan, (the one and only) Erica Jong, and moderator Larissa Shmailo
In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that sex was not repressed in past centuries, but codified. How does contemporary hybrid sex writing crack these codes?
B116, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
See you there!

Sunday, March 10, 2019

Larissa Shmailo Argotist Online Interview by Dean Kostos

https://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Shma...

Larissa Shmailo Interview

DK: I’m especially interested in interviewing a writer who translates. That activity gives the writer/translator a deeper understanding of the machinery of language. For example: Russian (like Greek, Romanian, German, Sanskrit, etc.) has declinations, which indicate whether the noun is an object, a subject, possessive, etc. This allows the writer and translator a degree of fluidity to the syntax that is not as accessible to the writer in English. My question is, because you are both a translator and a writer: How influenced are you by, say, Russian syntax, when writing in English? Does this familiarity with Russian suggest possibilities in English that may not appear to the writer who is not familiar with other languages?

LS: The problem with the fluid positional syntax of a cased language, as opposed to the analytical word-order-determined syntax of Chinese and English, is that as a Russian speaker, you have a tendency to tolerate inversions that are awkward in English. Look at the second tercet of my poem, “My Dead”:

My godchild told me pointedly if she were to attempt
to die that she'd succeed at once; her word she quickly kept,
and took a hundred opiates and drifted to her death.

The “her word she quickly kept” to a Russian speaker seems acceptable; but to a modern formalist, the inversion is wince worthy, indicative of everything that makes contemporary metric poetry seem outdated, unacceptably old school. So, I have to watch myself, since my English-language poetry is informed by my Russian.

The advantage of multilingualism is that you can import the music of other languages into your English poetry. I bring French into “Bloom,” Spanish into “Hunts Point Counterpoint,” German and Polish into “How My Family Survived the Camps,” Russian and German into “Lager NYC.” Even if the reader does not know these languages, they can glean meaning from context and enjoy the phonemes for sound value, much as we enjoy many of the cultural references in Pound’s Cantos when we are don’t know our Ovid.

My Russian encourages me to rhyme in English. Rhyming is easy in Russian with the cased suffixes, but also somehow seems easy to me in English, and I often use end and internal rhyme. Stresses in poetry are also different—Russian words have one primary stress, English words have secondary stresses, so translating complex Russian amphibrach phrases into English can be a challenge, and I also might hear stresses differently.

Like English-language poets, contemporary Russian experimentalists tend to use space, line breaks, hybrid forms, and the “uncolonized caesura” as the noted poet Alexandr Skidan calls it, so there is a commonality of semiotics. The movement toward true multilingual poetry is also international and gaining ground in Russia and the United States; Eugene Ostashevsky defines this form as not just quoting a foreign language, but a braiding, in the sense of Barthes’s codes, together of lingual strands.

DK: Similarly, hybridism has become central in your work. Beyond being a trend, it seems to be an approach to the written word that is in your DNA. Was reading Symbolist prose poems important in your trajectory towards the hybrid text? What other influences can you cite? Have you read The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston? Ostensibly a memoir, it becomes other genres as one turns the pages. Similarly, what is marvelous about your writing is how the sense of place keeps shifting. Nothing can be taken for granted. Assumptions are obliterated, making language, and the ideas behind them, new. Two other novels that upend preconceived ideas about narrative and language itself are Hebdomeros by Giorgio de Chirico and Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Are you familiar with these novels? (By the way, Calvino was a member of OULIPO, another aesthetic that shares a lot with your work.)

LS: You have created my reading list here, my friend; I do know and love Calvino. I grew up reading fiction and drama, and yes, French and Russian Symbolist poems, and at age 36, started writing poetry, so it is not surprising that I myself write dramatic prose poems like “Madwoman.” Also remember I am influenced by Pasternak, who engages in multiple genres in Zhivago, which I ape in my novels. I never saw a boundary between poetry and prose, and like a Broadway musical bursting from dialogue into song, my poetry breaks into fiction and my fiction into verse.

Recently, I am experimenting with nonfiction and poetry. My memoir Episodes, in progress, is “an autobio in stories, essays, and poems.” Not chronological, but thematic, in dialogue with the reader, this hybrid autobiography seems to capture and convey the traumata of my past more readily than a linear narrative. And yes, I like temporal nonlinearity in my writing, as is evidenced by my novel, Sly Bang, in which characters take over space-time to create alternate plots. Nonlinearity and chaos theory more represent, as RW Spryszak said of Sly Bang, the actual way the mind works.

DK: Can you name some of your influences? Mind you, there’s nothing derivative in your poetry, prose, or translations. When I suggest influences, I am referring solely to those writers who inspire you to such a degree, that you can’t wait to get to your computer to write. It feels like electricity running through one’s hands.

LS: Joyce with a bullet. I was liberated by Ulysses. “You are allowed to do that?!” I cried—and then set out to innovate more, bend genre more, experiment more. I erased the 18 episodes into 18 poems one afternoon when I couldn’t let go of reading the book of which Joyce said, “I have put so much into it, the professors will be busy for years.” I tried to do this with Sly Bang, put in a literary load of 21st century icons, cultural references, a multiplicity of genre.

I love Kruchenych, whom I translate, for his search for new language and for the mad violation of semantic, dramatic, prosodic forms, as well as for his creation of a new poetic alphabet. I love artistic manifestos, so I love his “Word” and all Futurist manifestos, especially “A Slap in the Face of the Public Taste.” I adore Pushkin and imitate him in poetry and prose, especially his use of epigraphs; I surmise that even failed Pushkin is a contribution. I skipped work and sleep reading Lolita. Now, I am discovering David Foster Wallace, whose suicide affects me deeply; his narrative voice reminds me of Pushkin’s—he befriends the reader with his brilliance, seduces her.

Of the Realists, Tolstoy, especially Karenina, I battle with his murder of Anna; Baudelaire, I have only translated Beauty, though; I would like to translate more; Gogol for his parallel universes and dark humor, ditto Dorothy Parker. I enjoy Rankine, Patricia Smith, Philip Nilolayev, Elaine Equi. But I know exactly what you mean by “electricity running through one’s hands.” Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” did exactly that to me—my Norton’s English Poetry flew out of my hands with a shock, and I ran to write “My First Hurricane."

DK: Unfortunately, it seems to me that many writers (poets largely) break into camps. They are “uptown” or “downtown” poets, each having little regard for each other’s aesthetics. One of the strengths of your work is that you blithely shatter those walls, as if, for you, they never existed. You write in free verse and in rhyme. You write metrically so fluently that one is unaware of your adhering to strict metrical feet. And what makes your metrical work exciting is that it is intensely modern—nothing stuffy or archaic. Part of this is because of the ease with which you write in the appropriate metrical feet, given the subject matter.

LS: I am lucky enough to belong to many cliques, neoformalists, experimentalists, spoken word artists, and yes, uptown and downtown. Nineteenth century Russian government was a bureaucracy of ranks, chin, but Chekhov called writers raschinsty, “without rank.” I have moved among the classes all my life, from the homeless to the one percent, and I see no reason not to move similarly among writers and poets today, following what is brilliant and apt.

DK: Speaking of subject matter, you are intrepid in writing frankly about a harrowing past, including coping with mental illness, suicidality, and having been committed to a mental hospital. I ask this question as someone who has fought similar struggles. For myself, I have found that focusing on the machinery of the language (metaphors, cadences, imagery) helps me to shift my focus from the disturbing, painful subject matter to something that is about language, as much as it is about the subject matter. This is not a “dressing up” or diminishing some of the horrors experienced. If anything, your attention to language and the abuses you have experienced makes the experience more vibrant for the reader.

LS: The intellectual problem of communicating the intensity and immediacy of trauma artistically is helpful in processing trauma, providing a distance from pain and a new, more dispassionate neural network for encoding it; eventually, the burned-in horrors of rape, suicide, incarceration, etc., transfer to the intellect away from emotion. It is a resolution, a healing; I recommend writing for victims who wish to move from survivor to thriver status, even though “thriver” does sound a bit like a Peter Rabbit name.

DK: Lastly, I want to know how important it is to you to be so honest, so exposed, in order to lessen the stigma that for too long has kept mental illness in the shadows. I have great respect for what you are doing. As you know, my imminent memoir, concerns suicidality, depression, and time spent in a mental hospital as an adolescent. As the publication draws nearer, I am becoming more anxious about exposing myself so much. You seem fearless in this regard. Is there advice you can give to authors who want/need to write about these narratives? Thank you.

LS: As a cross-addicted person with bipolar disorder, I feel it is my responsibility to “come out,” to empower my peers and educate the (putative) normies. I am not a role model—I still get sick, though less so because of writing and the community I now enjoy as a writer. I challenge the ableist notion that we mad people are to be shunned and ridiculed and impoverished. Persons with physical disabilities are gaining inclusion; why not the psychiatrically disabled? Mental illness gallops among poets and writers, who can act as the front lines of our full acceptance. Our illnesses are so much like “normal” human emotions, fear, elation, rage, that they are all the more threatening—we may be “catching.”

The narratives of mentally ill persons can formulate our challenges and posit potential answers, create community, forge identity; think of slave narratives, feminist writing, LGBT literature. I invite other mentally ill writers to come out, be frank about their experiences. Perhaps David Foster Wallace might be alive today if we started a vigorous literary discussion of mental illness.
Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor and critic.  Her new novel is Sly Bang (Spuyten Duyvil); her first novel is Patient Women (BlazeVOX). Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country (MadHat), #specialcharacters(Unlikely Books), In Paran (BlazeVOX), the chapbook A Cure for Suicide (Červená Barva Press) and the e-book Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks). Her poetry albums are The No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album awardtracks are available from iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and most digital distributors.

Shmailo’s work has appeared in Plume, the Brooklyn Rail, Fulcrum, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Journal of Poetics Research, Drunken Boat, Barrow Street, Gargoyle and the anthologies Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Penguin Random House), Words for the Wedding (Penguin), Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey), Resist Much/Obey Little: Poems for the Inaugural (Spuyten Duyvil) and many others. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Garage Museum of Moscow, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry (Big Bridge Press) and has been a translator on the Russian Bible for the Eugene A. Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship of the American Bible Society. Please see more about Shmailo at her website here.

Dean Kostos is a translator, anthologist, memoirist and poet. His eight books include This Is Not a Skyscraper, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, selected by Mark Doty. His anthology, Pomegranate Seeds had its debut reading at the UN. His poems, reviews and essays have appeared in more than 300 journals, including on the Harvard University Press website and Oprah Winfrey's website, Oxygen.com. Kostos's libretto was set to music by James Bassi and performed by Voices of Ascension. ‘Subway Silk', his poem, was translated into a short film. Recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation's Cultural Innovation Grant, Kostos also received a Yaddo fellowship. His memoir, The Boy Who Listened to Paintings, will be released in September 2019.

Monday, March 04, 2019

Ragazine Review of Sly Bang

Sly Bang / hybrid fiction by Larissa Shmailo


You knew this is what the world really looked like all along,

A review by RW Spryszak
ISBN-13: 978-1947980983
Spuyten Duyvil – New York 2018
198 pages

I have a problem with what is sometimes known as “experimental” writing. To my way of thinking if your writing is still an “experiment” you are saying you don’t know what’s going to happen here and have no control over anything. If doing automatic writing, that’s one thing. Hans Arp would be proud so long as you don’t sit down and edit the “genius of chance.” But unless you’re doing classic surrealism just throwing it out there to see what burns and what remains stone always fails. Always. In over forty years of this my advice is – do your experimenting in the laboratory. Don’t do it in public. Have the concept baked and ready before you release it onto the citizenry.

This is the very standard that made me fall for Sly Bang. Because that thing – a wild, idiosyncratic, frizzle-haired thing – is put before us fully formed. Guesses gone. Thing triumphant. In Sly Bang, Larissa Shmailo’s technical skills pop on every page. She is in control of this insanity from the start, and to prove it she floods us with new icons created one after another like stamped plastic ducks. She creates an assembly line of literary riches. Genres and forms bend in and out with ease.

Now hold on for one second right here. In the first place, what I’d really like to know is, how did Larissa Shmailo actually present the idea of Sly Bang to a publisher? As a writer myself, I have enough trouble fitting things into a digestible capsule meant as an explanation to a stranger who wasn’t there when all the work was going down, sweat and all. It would seem impossible to summarize this book into a typical 150-word synopsis that fits the standard query form.

What? Dear Editor, in Sly Bang Nora is conducting an investigation under the auspices of a very high-level intelligence agency heretofore unconvincingly named. Probably. You may think she’s dead by page 50 or thereabouts but not so fast. And it may sound, for a moment as if she only exists as a mutual experience shared by a wild array of characters who help her or try to stand in her way, depending. You see, once in a while Nora’s thoughts become visible holograms that drift through the room. Time warps between the now and the past to the maybe-never-happened at all for her. Nora talks with and interchanges between herself and her “alters” – alter egos that range from the insensible to the predatory.

Yeah, probably not.

I would have no clue on how to write a query for Sly Bang. All I know is I have never read anything like it, and never stopped being carried along by its peculiar madness, my head full of pictures, my ears full of voices.

“Michael regresses, or un-regresses, and becomes a danger to Nora again. Nora is too old to breed using even the most interstellar ovarian technologies…”

In looking over the book while rewriting this review I am, however, quite sure I fully understand how Sly Bang came to be. I wasn’t there when it happened but, having studied Nora’s detectivizing techniques I can trace it back.

First, Shmailo ate the world. The eating helped her soak up every aspect of the popular culture, every nuance and sham of the American Empire. Then, she chewed it all up. This is important. Because Jackson Pollock did the same thing with the visual. Check it. Pollock ate the world and spat it back out again in all kinds of wild colors and shapes. Shmailo did the same, but with words. So, if you look for details, you lose the “Bang.” If you step back, you get it. Other than this I can’t do the standard “this book is like that book.” Or “this work is similar to this author’s oeuvre.” It can’t be done.

Enough speculation. Let’s simplify. Sly Bang is a book about a detective / agent / victim / lover / investigator / spy / psychic target named Nora. How much Larissa Shmailo is one of Nora’s “alters” is a matter of conjecture. Best left to biographers, or the ponderings of those who make picklocks out of metaphors.

“She distracts Ouspensky. She praises his derivative poetry. She writes poetry to him in French and Russian. She flatters him and draws him out to learn his plans, a Scheherazade now, and keeps him from the cavern and its barbaric rituals and her children.”

It’s a simple formula, really. Nora is what a female James Bond trapped in a harsher dystopian version of Blade Runner would be, only six times as promiscuous, with a handful of different personalities who pop up from time to time at the worst times, a serial killer for a sidekick, born of a family that had to pick between Hitler and Stalin, and very susceptible to obvious persuasion when under the influence of that serum she was warned about but allowed them to give to her anyway because a little sweet talk got right through her armor just like it would for anybody else. In the meantime, we slip in and out of realities, personas, get transported from prose to poetry without the need for a bridge until what we discover is a form that has no precedent I can think of.

There will be readers wanting the linear, formulaic prose (there are always such creatures lurking about, just like those who want to destroy and deny our Nora). There will be readers who will be completely thrown off the scent. Too bad they will lose the trail, because here’s the secret;

What Larissa Shmailo is recording here is exactly how the brain works. Shards and bits of memory-pictures. Images flowing into one another like REM sleep but without ever admitting to the dream. And yet? In the heart of it – or perhaps near the spleen of it – there comes a subjective cohesion that tells a story about an agent for good with a penchant for bad in a world of sunlight, gray areas, and things that are just downright disgusting.

If you are used to writers who talk down to or dumb it down for you, you will probably hate this book. If you like writing where the author figures you are in on the same joke because you live in the same world, you’re ready.

Sly Bang is “Rollerball” on a mixture of cocaine and acid. A sex binge that eats men alive. It’s the parts of “The Matrix” they had to edit out because it was just too much to take. Once you check in you will be half way through before you realize what you’re doing. Because for all its twisted logic and refusal to adhere to any known rules, Sly Bang is a world you already know is there.

Even if you had no idea that’s what it sounded like before you started.
RW Spryszak

Friday, March 01, 2019

My review of BLUE LYRE BY JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT

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The Romantic Surrealist’s Ear —A Review of Blue Lyre by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
by Larissa Shmailo.
The second-best thing I like about Blue Lyre, Jeff Wright’s Kathy Acker Award-winning book, is that I can’t pigeonhole the voice, although a surrealist Frank O’Hara with a richer metaphoric lexicon comes to mind. Kinda. For O’Hara, the part where the everyday meets the unexpected trope. For surrealism, Wright’s way with original images and their juxtapositions. For example, these lines from Wright’s invocation of his muse:
.
I pick up some words
and toss them in the air
to see if you pay any mind.
Just to see
if your breath catches fire.
                        —“Begging for It”
.
Wright is a self-proclaimed New Romantic, and perhaps that’s what has been missing from surrealism to date: there is a yearning in these poems with their diamond glitter on the beach that complements the surrealist’s art as it jumpstarts romanticism. Unusual language meets love, and poetic devices are freed from their leashes:
.
Take me to your navel.
“Aye aye, Capitan.”
. . .
Ready for the Canon
to come on.
And by the way, your clown
costume becomes you.
“Aye aye capstan.” Let me
hoist you from the depths.
A winch I’ll be for my wench.”
—“Titania’s Tool”
.
What I like best about Wright’s work is reading it aloud. Live Mag! editor Wright is a known New York impresario of spoken word and the oral tradition, and Blue Lyre’s jazzy rhythms attest to his ear. No mushiness here: The line breaks are crisp as ice and right:
.
            Black plums from Madame X
            conspire on the sill.
. . .
            Following the choir.
            Listening to the “new” air sound.
            Looking for a “new” word order.
                                    —“Thimblerig”
 .
Like a wise Zen teacher, Wright offers his share of koans in Blue Lyre: “Now only ashes remember / how many ways we burned”; and “Always the sky / has the last say” and the brilliantly titled “(B)utterfly)”:
.
            Yeah, well,
            My heart’s a reed
this poem
blows through.
—    “(B)utterfly”
.
With its expansive minimalism, surrealistic romanticism, and page-meets-stage poetry, Blue Lyre would clearly win the approval of Jeff Wright’s muse and, most likely, yours as well.
.Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Her latest novel is Sly Bang.

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