Bill Cushing, The Beast Inside

 Bill Cushing, The Beast Inside (Southern Arizona Press)

The poetry diaspora is a loose, often unconnected thing. While the superstar names for the most part know each other to some extent, the local writing groups, magazines and communities might have only tenuous links with each other if any at all. How I came to have any contact from the south coast of England with Bill Cushing who lives near Los Angeles is an unlikely story that was not through poetry. It's a story that will have to wait for another time but meanwhile it's a great thing to be able to keep up with his work.

The Beast Inside gets off to a sure-footed start with At Mrs. Gannett's, a portrait of an old lady,

In a tidy house cluttered with kindness,
surrounded by her late husband’s bric-a-brac, 

and not long after in the first section is the comparable, At the Stationer's, with the proprietor's somewhat less sympathetic attitude to children. There might not be a prohibitive language divide between American poetry and English but there might be one of idiom and attitude and I'd be interested to know if American readers find a certain swagger in such poems or if the tone sounds perfectly natural to them. It's more clear cut in August Kleinzahler's work who is more obviously putting on a laconic show.

In three parts, this first part of the book is entitled The Reminiscent Self. With a Foreword and an Introduction, the book comes with its own explanations or interpretation which, while useful, could also seem a bit limiting as if there is a right answer to poetry. Some might prefer less help and be allowed to find their own themes and sub texts because poems have different effects on different readers, occasionally with contrasting readings or even mis-readings, which can make them all the more interesting.

Crescendo was another that made an immediate impression in the first section, a powerful artist's impression of Beethoven on his death bed. I'm sure there will be poems where a better appreciation comes later. The thought that some of the pieces are heavier on ideas than the music of their words persists and lines such as,

Every moment in time

we need to see the moment in time
in which we exist and are present

and contextualize it to where we exist
in the history and the moment as it relates

not only to the past but to the future. 

look more to me like an idea for a poem than 'poetry' itself but Bill's not in such bad company there because that's what I think about some passages in Eliot's Four Quartets, too.

The second section is The Formal Self and is a wide-ranging collection of pieces in thirteen different formal disciplines. A sestina would have been impressive but we are given a successful villanelle, a form which is much more difficult to write than it looks, coming together in its four line final stanza here,

Spirit has died; there’s no more drive,
and true liberty lost all allies.
Welcome to the collective hive
where being numb means being alive. 

It's tempting to read the poem as commentary on a specific time and place but it's not obvious one should do that and it is applicable to any number of them and looks forward to recurrent themes in the the final section. 

The specific word count of 42 words proves enough to make poems whereas I've never thought that 17 syllables had the capacity to get anywhere in English in a haiku but trust that it does in Japanese.

'Concrete' poetry meant a few different things in the 1960's. Bill's The State of Florida goes back further to at least George Herbert in making the lines into the shape of its subject, the significance of it being called the 'state of' and not just 'Florida' being the point.

“If you ain’t from Dixie,
   You ain’t shit,” raising
  the question: If I am from
   Dixie, does that make me
   shit?

That being just above halfway on the map and Tampa being on the left side immediately below it. Bill's never far from being socio-political and I take it that Florida, once thought glamorous, is in decline.

The Dream-State Self  is the third section that maybe the book develops towards. It's a survey of a culture become dystopian now organized by AI and algorithms where human life has become degraded. It's 'protest' poetry in a way but has more in common with Larkin's Going, Going that fears a new, uglier world replacing one that had more to like about it,

Shopping malls are
caricatures of our way of life;
what one learns in these places about
our true nature will keep anthropologists
in stitches for hours. 

(in Let’s All Get Down and Do the Lowest Common
Denominator)

and,

The world is mannequin-clown scary. 

(When “Yes” Isn’t Enough).

As the book demonstrates, Bill Cushing is a few different poets in one, or a versatile one ready to take on a range of approaches but one personality comes through. The polemical work is easy to sympathize with but not always as accomplished as the lyricist or humourist. In nearly 90 pages of poems there are highlights to take with us, most notably in The Reminiscent Self, in poems like RE:Joyce, a gentle love poem, more solid and figurative than abstract, that preserves one of the things that makes it all worthwhile,

giving me the ability
to ignore life’s pallor
and bathed me,
if only for that year,
with nothing less than joy.

Bill Cushing - ...this just in ...

 Bill Cushing, ...this just in... (cyberwit)

Poets sometimes explain themselves at readings when filling in between poems. It can be useful. Bill Cushing does so here in an introduction. His last collection, A Former Life, reviewed here 5/8/2019, had a foreword that was more biographical note and thanks but his introduction here goes further. One might think of some poets who would benefit from doing likewise but perhaps it would ruin the mystique.

By disciplining themselves to use language as efficiently, almost as miserly as possible, poets learn how to extract as much meaning from as few words as possible, Bill says and I like the 'miserly' in there. I'm less enamoured of the definition,

poems are “the history of the human soul,”

which reminds me of Carol Ann Duffy's 'poetry is the music of being human'. I'd say less than that, that poetry is the language poems are written in and a poem is a poem if its author says it is. I'd prefer not to claim too much for it.

 

In this new book Bill has war poems, several that sympathize with outsiders and a number that are ekphrastic - based on pictures that are provided alongside- and range from rhymed and metrical to unrhymed free verse and varying line lengths. For me the most successful is the 10 lines of Dispatches, with the double meaning of its title about the passing of his parents and, 

                             my 

mother’s saboteur 

steeped her in dementia 

making death more like a cure.

 

Without wanting to make it a definition of poetry, it's at its best when the language achieves more than its constituent parts.

Also, in The Nature of Snow,

it becomes difficult to tell 

whether it floats down 

or the world

rises.

Bill's enquiry into the phenomenon is slow-paced and mystical, using line-breaks to enhance its careful thought process.

The pictures chosen as source material are as various as the poems, most memorably Women in Black by Marianne von Werefkin, 1910, which for all the world could have been by Marc Chagall. Ekphrastic poems need to add to their picture rather than equate to them which Bill successfully does in Disappeared Dreams with,

Stealing people’s dreams along the blue avenue, 

these shadow babushkas 

grip full sacks in their left hand, 

holding our reveries like bales of cotton. 

 

War to End batters insistently on only two rhymes in its 13 lines, three of which are 'blood'; Hazardous Material wonders whether import restrictions include such dangerous books as Ovid, Vonnegut and Solzhenitsyn which, of course, at times, they have. Right on Time is possibly the most successful of the poems recognizing the disregarded classes as a subject for reportage. The theme that draws the collection together is this concern for humanity which arrives at an appropriate time as America recovers from the horrors of the Trump presidency and the damage has to be repaired. There wasn't much poetry to be had in his agenda but we can hope that it is being restored now.

Bill Cushing - A Former Life

Bill Cushing, A Former Life (Finishing Line Press)

It's not often one acquires a new poetry book from a day at the races. Our host from Corals at Eclipse Day said he had a book for me and would send it on. One doesn't expect too much from such a chance acquisition because there is far more bad poetry published than good but, what do you know, when it arrived a few days ago, we landed the odds. Bill Cushing's poems are entirely worthwhile.
The title poem with which the book begins is possibly the best although that might only be the effect of not knowing what one is going to find and being gently impressed. Obviously I usually choose what to read and expect to like it.
The 18 short lines of A Former Life are understated, with tangential musical effects - maybe a half-rhyme here or subtle enough alliteration elsewhere- and relates a disarmingly simple but vivid anecdote that stands a number of re-readings. And that is where the 'poetry' is, in the extra bit achieved beyond the sum of the constituent words. 
The book is organized into three sections - People, Places and Things. If associations with the scent of honeysuckle are denied in the first poem, the sense of smell recurs in the first section, the 'acrid smoking steel' in Planking the Tango, the 'rich smell of dung' in Clarence and 'an aroma of mangoes' in Morning. The 'People' section moves from a childhood memory, through work to illness and death before ending with a restorative love poem.
But it's not all olfactory, pertaining to smell. Bill produces some effective visual metaphors in the new-born baby,

a twisted pretzel of
a person,

in Gabriel's Coming, and the mountains in Cusquenos,

curl like sleeping dragons,

but the poems in 'Places' are about people, too. Bill Cushing's places are inhabited by people, experienced by people or created by people and don't exist in the abstract beyond that. Dividing the book into such chapters is not a problem as such but might not have been necessary.
I had a good, long look at,

the finisher chips
discretely on the rough work

on page 30.
I was once told that you listen to the brass to find out if an orchestra are any good, presumably because that's the hardest thing to get right. I think one can look at poets using difficult words to see if they know what they are doing. There are 'discrete' and 'discreet' that are different things and can trip up the unwary writer. I should never have doubted Bill.

The things in 'Things' are nature, music and the environment before the poems move into religious themes. The music is Charlie Parker, a generous tribute to Miles Davis, a 'flagship for messages/ of the heart' and Modest Mussorgsky.
Some of these poems use 'the space on the page' and set the lines out for the eye, like Robert Duncan, or was it Gary Snyder, did in the 1970's. It was a fashion once and maybe still is in some circles in California but I'm never sure if it does the words any favours. There again, I'm English and by now think avant-garde is old-fashioned. And not everybody will relish the explicit Christianity expressed as the tone becomes more coruscating approaching its climax but, if the book began so beguilingly and quietly, it ends powerfully with Final Flight, 9/11 and the twin towers, and the decision to jump 'the quarter-mile journey back to earth' rather than burn alive.
That's not an easy subject to do justice to. Michael Stipe made a good job of it on Leaving New York, at a slight angle. Bill's poems don't flinch from taking any such subject head on. They are not 'literary', not ironic but are sincere and true and there's plenty worse things to be than that. He has produced a genuine and genuinely rewarding book.