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ashley073's review against another edition
4.0
Incredibly unique, but it flows really well and all feels quite natural. Josh Bell makes me proud to be from Indiana :)
dan1066's review against another edition
4.0
In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins suggests students “waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore” or “walk inside a poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.” In the end, he laments,
…all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
In no planets strike, Josh Bell is acutely aware of the layers and layers of poetic sediment he rests upon—and upon the tendencies of readers to wield pens and high-lighters like scalpels. After paraphrasing Whitman for three lines in ”Zombie Sunday (The Dear Reader Version),” he writes:
I saw you reaching for your high-lighter
like a samurai. Like a samurai
I’ve got something for you
to explicate. What further strings
must I pull to force you
to blast me from the local ether?
Allow me to reach for my hose and commence the beating: You see T.S. Eliot in here, don’t you? Maybe it’s just college brainwashed me, but I see Eliot in the term “ether” as used in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table…
Bell’s narrator wants to be extricated from the poetic tradition—poets have been talking to God and going out for evening strolls forever—and Bell struggles with finding his own voice while simultaneously breathing the same air as all the poetic giants of yore. Bell may find it amusing or alarming I sensed Eliot in these lines—“Can’t a poet use the term “ether” without invoking Eliot?”
In “Zombie Sunday,” Bell creates an image used widely in this poem collection:
…or hear that sharp
vulnerable intake of breath before singing,
the breath which gathers up the shapeless air
and drags it down the throat and back,
different now, beautiful, a clean sound
like a clear piece of tile which perfectly fits
the space the lungs pulled it from,
then fades back into nothing, and the same air
can be breathed over and over
and sung again, different voices or the same,
your dirty wedding song or hateful lullaby…
We’re talking “inspiration” here, aren’t we? The “intake” of “breath.” Like the components of the poetic tradition, air is recycled over and over and the songs continue. In “Meditation on Insomnia,” Bell notes the following:
…If I had a straw
I’d suck wax into my mouth, let it pool,
take shape. As tired as I am, who knows
when they’d find me, sleeping with a replica
of empty space on my tongue.
When the poet finishes shaping inspiration into song, the result is an artifact for others to find, to hear. Is it only “empty space?”
Bell’s poetry is rich and layered. Bell dresses his verse in quirky outfits and imbues them with odd accents, but he is aware of how he fits within the poetic tradition. In “Sleeping with J.A.,” Bell’s narrator notes he keeps a copy of John Ashbery under his pillow and compares the poetry of Ashbery to himself: “They are a semi with soft brakes and a Honda in front of it, who is me.” The poem then turns towards the relationship between the narrator and the poet, a relationship which, in our distracting world, is typical between the reader and poetry:
You have hamstrung
my unusually strong will to better myself,
which is why I love your book! It is and not
your fault. Better people than me tell me about
how you’re a genius. I eat lunch gladly
with them, and hear serious things. I believe.
And yet at night with the ridiculous clock
I slide your book beneath my pillows
and turn toward the television, supreme
in my knowledge that what I don’t know
won’t hurt me…
Enough—I’ll put my hose away, because I haven’t revealed anything in this review indicating whether this collection of poems is worthy of your time. I believe the poems are worth your time, but you need to be aware Josh Bell is obviously well-read. The difficulty of the allusions and references, unraveling his complex knitting of disparate ideas, can weary a reader. I could only read a couple of poems in a sitting because I had to read each poem three or four times. He’s funny, but he’s deep. And if you wish to experience the depth, you’ll have to chip and dirty your fingernails on the surface of each poem.
Consider the poem “First, Second, Twenty-Fifth, and Thirty-Ninth Lines Courtesy of Thomas Campion.” Thomas Campion was a lyrical poet at the end of the 1500s, writing poems for the lute and experimenting with verse forms not based on accented syllables. Anyhow, the joke is the four lines noted so pedantically in the title are the same banal line: “There is a garden in her face.” And, Bell admits, this is a damn funny line. So if there’s a garden in her face and we shake her, fruit may tumble out of her mouth. He brings up migrant workers, sharecropping, a mobile garden which can come inside and get water when it is thirsty. And all these zingers are funny—and I hear rim-shots after some lines. Then he notes she has “witchy photosynthesis,” and I’m thinking about the movement of air again, the recurring imagery permeating so many poems in this collection. Photosynthesis? With the energy supplied by the sun, components of the air and water (carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) are transformed, carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen (and vice-versa, my biologically inclined friends). Plants are the product of the movement of air, like the wax model of the air inside the narrator’s mouth in a previous poem. What does this have to do with Thomas Campion? Is Bell just showing how silly Campion’s line was? Doubtful. Bell is recycling poetic imagery—breathing and recycling the same air and transforming it.
The surface of much of Bell’s verse is witty and, at times, irreverent, but I don’t think many readers would find the surface satisfying enough to sustain them through the entire work. Bell examines religion, life, art in his own idiosyncratic way. Often, the seeming throw-away gags are more important in the deep structure than is obvious on a cursory reading. Trust me—the surface must be penetrated (to borrow one of Bell’s images, like bacteria through a cell-membrane) in order to appreciate what Bell is truly wrestling with in these verses. I’m sorry, Mr. Collins—and Mr. Bell—but while I would love to just water ski over these verses, I wouldn’t have anything meaningful to take home to think about. No. These poems are insouciant and require a good spanking with a hose.
…all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
In no planets strike, Josh Bell is acutely aware of the layers and layers of poetic sediment he rests upon—and upon the tendencies of readers to wield pens and high-lighters like scalpels. After paraphrasing Whitman for three lines in ”Zombie Sunday (The Dear Reader Version),” he writes:
I saw you reaching for your high-lighter
like a samurai. Like a samurai
I’ve got something for you
to explicate. What further strings
must I pull to force you
to blast me from the local ether?
Allow me to reach for my hose and commence the beating: You see T.S. Eliot in here, don’t you? Maybe it’s just college brainwashed me, but I see Eliot in the term “ether” as used in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table…
Bell’s narrator wants to be extricated from the poetic tradition—poets have been talking to God and going out for evening strolls forever—and Bell struggles with finding his own voice while simultaneously breathing the same air as all the poetic giants of yore. Bell may find it amusing or alarming I sensed Eliot in these lines—“Can’t a poet use the term “ether” without invoking Eliot?”
In “Zombie Sunday,” Bell creates an image used widely in this poem collection:
…or hear that sharp
vulnerable intake of breath before singing,
the breath which gathers up the shapeless air
and drags it down the throat and back,
different now, beautiful, a clean sound
like a clear piece of tile which perfectly fits
the space the lungs pulled it from,
then fades back into nothing, and the same air
can be breathed over and over
and sung again, different voices or the same,
your dirty wedding song or hateful lullaby…
We’re talking “inspiration” here, aren’t we? The “intake” of “breath.” Like the components of the poetic tradition, air is recycled over and over and the songs continue. In “Meditation on Insomnia,” Bell notes the following:
…If I had a straw
I’d suck wax into my mouth, let it pool,
take shape. As tired as I am, who knows
when they’d find me, sleeping with a replica
of empty space on my tongue.
When the poet finishes shaping inspiration into song, the result is an artifact for others to find, to hear. Is it only “empty space?”
Bell’s poetry is rich and layered. Bell dresses his verse in quirky outfits and imbues them with odd accents, but he is aware of how he fits within the poetic tradition. In “Sleeping with J.A.,” Bell’s narrator notes he keeps a copy of John Ashbery under his pillow and compares the poetry of Ashbery to himself: “They are a semi with soft brakes and a Honda in front of it, who is me.” The poem then turns towards the relationship between the narrator and the poet, a relationship which, in our distracting world, is typical between the reader and poetry:
You have hamstrung
my unusually strong will to better myself,
which is why I love your book! It is and not
your fault. Better people than me tell me about
how you’re a genius. I eat lunch gladly
with them, and hear serious things. I believe.
And yet at night with the ridiculous clock
I slide your book beneath my pillows
and turn toward the television, supreme
in my knowledge that what I don’t know
won’t hurt me…
Enough—I’ll put my hose away, because I haven’t revealed anything in this review indicating whether this collection of poems is worthy of your time. I believe the poems are worth your time, but you need to be aware Josh Bell is obviously well-read. The difficulty of the allusions and references, unraveling his complex knitting of disparate ideas, can weary a reader. I could only read a couple of poems in a sitting because I had to read each poem three or four times. He’s funny, but he’s deep. And if you wish to experience the depth, you’ll have to chip and dirty your fingernails on the surface of each poem.
Consider the poem “First, Second, Twenty-Fifth, and Thirty-Ninth Lines Courtesy of Thomas Campion.” Thomas Campion was a lyrical poet at the end of the 1500s, writing poems for the lute and experimenting with verse forms not based on accented syllables. Anyhow, the joke is the four lines noted so pedantically in the title are the same banal line: “There is a garden in her face.” And, Bell admits, this is a damn funny line. So if there’s a garden in her face and we shake her, fruit may tumble out of her mouth. He brings up migrant workers, sharecropping, a mobile garden which can come inside and get water when it is thirsty. And all these zingers are funny—and I hear rim-shots after some lines. Then he notes she has “witchy photosynthesis,” and I’m thinking about the movement of air again, the recurring imagery permeating so many poems in this collection. Photosynthesis? With the energy supplied by the sun, components of the air and water (carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) are transformed, carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen (and vice-versa, my biologically inclined friends). Plants are the product of the movement of air, like the wax model of the air inside the narrator’s mouth in a previous poem. What does this have to do with Thomas Campion? Is Bell just showing how silly Campion’s line was? Doubtful. Bell is recycling poetic imagery—breathing and recycling the same air and transforming it.
The surface of much of Bell’s verse is witty and, at times, irreverent, but I don’t think many readers would find the surface satisfying enough to sustain them through the entire work. Bell examines religion, life, art in his own idiosyncratic way. Often, the seeming throw-away gags are more important in the deep structure than is obvious on a cursory reading. Trust me—the surface must be penetrated (to borrow one of Bell’s images, like bacteria through a cell-membrane) in order to appreciate what Bell is truly wrestling with in these verses. I’m sorry, Mr. Collins—and Mr. Bell—but while I would love to just water ski over these verses, I wouldn’t have anything meaningful to take home to think about. No. These poems are insouciant and require a good spanking with a hose.
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