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Schizophrenia may be characterized by a surfeit of language, a refurbishment of our used up words with musical connections every day speech and sense cannot provide. These riffs are “clangings,” and Cramer imagines them into a poetic narrative that exults in both aural richness and words’ power to evoke an interior landscape whose strangeness is intimate, unsteady, and stirring.
I hear the dinner plates gossip
Mom collected to a hundred.
My friends say get on board,
but I'm not bored. Dad's a nap
lying by the fire. That's why
when radios broadcast news,
news broadcast from radios
gives air to my kinship, Dickey,
who says he'd go dead if ever
I discovered him to them.
I took care, then, the last time
bedrooms banged, to tape over
the outlets, swipe the prints
off DVDs, weep up the tea
stains where once was coffee.
Not one seep from him since.
Price: $14.95
Pages: 80
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Imprint: Sarabande Books
Publication Date:
23 October 2012
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781936747467
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
"Poet Cramer addressed loss in Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), polyvocal sensuality in Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997), elegiac nostalgia in The World Book (1992), and internal contradictions in The Eye That Desires to Look Upward (1987). In his fifth collection, he considers the cognitive disorder called “clanging” via a narrator who associates words through rhyme and wordplay rather than meaningful content. This attempt to represent lyrically a serious psychiatric condition presents peculiar challenges, especially since poets, by their very vocation, use wordplay and rhyme as artistic tools. Cramer complicates his project in a positive way through strict adherence to formal conventions: each page contains five quatrains of multivalent verse. This produces moments of odd disembodiment and strange dislocation, such as when the speaker’s body weeps through his shirt or when he recalls a time the “sky cried into seawater.” In the same vein, Cramer’s artistic liberties allow concrete images to emerge from the potential cacophony: “A blue forehead vine earmarks those people / to other people whose skin is made of marble.”
—Booklist
“‘Clangings' are specialized modes of speech schizophrenics and manics use to express themselves, and identify themselves, and communicate, so desperately and wittily and forlornly and with such resourceful energy. That's wonderfully registered here. But one gets to feel, reading it, that these diagnostically defined ways of using language are only extreme cases of how we all use language. Steven Cramer handles and contends with and profits from that extremely difficult, intensely compressed, stanzaic form, over and over, inventive all the way, hilarious a lot of the time, and scared, scary, distanced and objective, and very moving. Clangings is a wild ride.”
—David Ferry
Humane from its aching heart to its flummoxed nether regions, whipsmart, formally acute but unfussy, and entertaining as all hell—Steven Cramer's new book shreds our airwaves with an inventiveness that is rare. Rare, as in once-in-a-lifetime-if-you're-lucky rare. It balances perfectly on the knife-edge of improvisation and necessity. Clangings is magnificent.
—David Rivard
Steven Cramer’s Clangings is a poetry not of madness, nor even the merely unspeakable, but instead irresistibly musical musings that reveal a command of language only achievable through fierce intelligence and the most piercing wit. A brilliant revision of the clinical term that describes speech that sacrifices sense to sound, here one finds that sound itself—“Two rhymes snagged between rhymes,/ spun puns, all my blinds up in flames./ The voices in noise are getting wise,” as Cramer writes, indelibly—is indeed sense. Poetry is healing here, the astonishing process itself laid out on these pages in all its utterly humane glory.
—Rafael Campo, MD
Harvard Medical School, author of The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry
—Booklist
“‘Clangings' are specialized modes of speech schizophrenics and manics use to express themselves, and identify themselves, and communicate, so desperately and wittily and forlornly and with such resourceful energy. That's wonderfully registered here. But one gets to feel, reading it, that these diagnostically defined ways of using language are only extreme cases of how we all use language. Steven Cramer handles and contends with and profits from that extremely difficult, intensely compressed, stanzaic form, over and over, inventive all the way, hilarious a lot of the time, and scared, scary, distanced and objective, and very moving. Clangings is a wild ride.”
—David Ferry
Humane from its aching heart to its flummoxed nether regions, whipsmart, formally acute but unfussy, and entertaining as all hell—Steven Cramer's new book shreds our airwaves with an inventiveness that is rare. Rare, as in once-in-a-lifetime-if-you're-lucky rare. It balances perfectly on the knife-edge of improvisation and necessity. Clangings is magnificent.
—David Rivard
Steven Cramer’s Clangings is a poetry not of madness, nor even the merely unspeakable, but instead irresistibly musical musings that reveal a command of language only achievable through fierce intelligence and the most piercing wit. A brilliant revision of the clinical term that describes speech that sacrifices sense to sound, here one finds that sound itself—“Two rhymes snagged between rhymes,/ spun puns, all my blinds up in flames./ The voices in noise are getting wise,” as Cramer writes, indelibly—is indeed sense. Poetry is healing here, the astonishing process itself laid out on these pages in all its utterly humane glory.
—Rafael Campo, MD
Harvard Medical School, author of The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry
Steven Cramer is the author of four previous poetry collections: The Eye that Desires to Look Upward, The World Book, Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand, and Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande Books, 2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and was a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. His poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly, FIELD, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry , and Triquarterly ; as well as in the first and second edition of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry; Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression ; and The POETRY Anthology, 1912- 2002. Recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently directs the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, which was named by Poets & Writers as one of the top ten low-residency MFA programs in the country.
I hear the dinner plates gossip
A page writes me (my words blue
Stashed my secret name in its haven
If I think in yellow, I can remember
My notion of heaven? Um, plumb garden
The circulars blued under my eyes
It’s not that I don’t believe in God
Tsk tsk, go my wits, like a grandfather
Sweat no longer creeps me out
I feel as male as I feel female
My tongue-print’s on your butter
Flirting from pokeweed, Dickey
I cut back on coffee. And air. And sky
~
I was twin pencils. A fit in one sex
I’m speaking with my mother’s voice
Dad. He plays dead, and his leash
Okay, here’s what we did. Dad was a quark
Sieg Heil, Father, for the dammerang
Dickey said it’s the “perineum”
Mother said you count your friends on one hand
Black cats ring bells. I’m your son
From the time he opened his mouth his talk was off
Mom and Dad made livings in Heaven
Parents are the nations that thrust you
~
Dickey’s death feels all over me
“He’s gone,” Mother Teresa told me
First I denied the no-seeums speckling
If the raw world left in me’s red
I hear, in my phone, vocabulary where
Dear eyes, my ears keep paired for you
A finch in my chest flinches to get
Iris of the one-eyed Satan—see it?
I shake my head, my right brain’s
Back on my wings, wings became me
Don’t have to swim straight, dark says
~
So I left my apartment, got down where
Damned if my thumbs-up, deadpan
When I saw her, her face was a marinade
I moved inside a movie about women
Noise-canceling paws at my ears
. . . nobody’s safe inside the airtight zones
The Trimínos rent free in my head
They’ll rant what’s left of you
You say I’m in one of my highs
Your head meds serve my serfdom
Words next-to-last-next-to-last-next-to
Dickey my door, I’m seeing. Yesterday
I feel well, but keep hoping to get well
A page writes me (my words blue
Stashed my secret name in its haven
If I think in yellow, I can remember
My notion of heaven? Um, plumb garden
The circulars blued under my eyes
It’s not that I don’t believe in God
Tsk tsk, go my wits, like a grandfather
Sweat no longer creeps me out
I feel as male as I feel female
My tongue-print’s on your butter
Flirting from pokeweed, Dickey
I cut back on coffee. And air. And sky
~
I was twin pencils. A fit in one sex
I’m speaking with my mother’s voice
Dad. He plays dead, and his leash
Okay, here’s what we did. Dad was a quark
Sieg Heil, Father, for the dammerang
Dickey said it’s the “perineum”
Mother said you count your friends on one hand
Black cats ring bells. I’m your son
From the time he opened his mouth his talk was off
Mom and Dad made livings in Heaven
Parents are the nations that thrust you
~
Dickey’s death feels all over me
“He’s gone,” Mother Teresa told me
First I denied the no-seeums speckling
If the raw world left in me’s red
I hear, in my phone, vocabulary where
Dear eyes, my ears keep paired for you
A finch in my chest flinches to get
Iris of the one-eyed Satan—see it?
I shake my head, my right brain’s
Back on my wings, wings became me
Don’t have to swim straight, dark says
~
So I left my apartment, got down where
Damned if my thumbs-up, deadpan
When I saw her, her face was a marinade
I moved inside a movie about women
Noise-canceling paws at my ears
. . . nobody’s safe inside the airtight zones
The Trimínos rent free in my head
They’ll rant what’s left of you
You say I’m in one of my highs
Your head meds serve my serfdom
Words next-to-last-next-to-last-next-to
Dickey my door, I’m seeing. Yesterday
I feel well, but keep hoping to get well