“a heat-slick valentine”

Whereas Marilyn Taylor’s Going Wrong is a traditional library press edition, the second chapbook I want to bring to your attention is one that forges ahead into the frontiers of publication. It is Pamela Johnson Parker’s A Walk Through the Memory Palace, winner of qarrtsiluni‘s first chapbook contest, judged by Dinty Moore.

In establishing their small press arm, editors Beth Adams and Dave Bonta want to continue the work they’re doing with qarrtsiluni itself, that is, exploring methods of publication that exploit the full potential of the internet. To that end, A Walk Through the Memory Palace is available as a nicely designed, highly readable online text. It is also available as a half-hour podcast, or as a print edition.

In an interview at readwritepoem, Beth Adams explains qarrtsiluni‘s publishing philosophy:

Three things seem evident: 1. Distribution and marketing and a lot of publishing are going to happen via the web; 2. The future of indie book publishing (of paper editions) lies in print-on-demand; and 3. The former competitive model has to give way to innovative collaborative efforts, where artists and writers and publishers help each other rather than competing for a shrinking number of book contracts, awards and recognition. Dave and I are both motivated by that third reality — wanting to find new ways to encourage writers, get their work out there, and preserve some of it for posterity in print — because we continue to believe that people want to hold books in their hands.

The online edition is Creative Commons licensed, in line with Dave Bonta’s philosophy:

Poetry was never about money for me. It’s like water. It’s supposed to be free.

It is designed, I think, with WordPress software, to exploit the navigation advantages of blog design. Though, I’m quick to add, the online chapbook does not look like a blog.

The print edition is published in collaboration with Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal, a print-on-demand press. It is 28 pages, perfect bound, with a full-color, glossy cover, cover art by Carrie Ann Baade. The list price is $5.95.

Pamela Johnson Parker’s poems are imagistic and erotic. Parker’s free verse line is short and she likes to float it away from the left margin, give it plenty of white space. These ten poems range in subject from listening to old 78s on a Western Kentucky front porch to Greek mythology, from those whose tattoos are body art (“Tattoos”) to those whose tattoos are marks of holocaust (“Some Yellow Tulips”). For me, it is strongest when it is most straightforward, as in these lines from “Tattoos”

Clean Rooms by the Hour — neon
blues, reds, blurring past

our window, through blinds
that won’t quite shut (one slat slants
diagonal) printing
its ladder of light
all the way down your back. Here
with you, I don’t care

about tawdry or
geography; I want you
so much it hurts to
breathe . . .

We are very much in the senses here and in that motel room with that body tattooed with ink, with the shadows of the blind slats, the “tattoo / of skin against skin.” We are reading “a heat-slick valentine.”

Parker is fond of lists and uses them to advantage, as in the beginning of this same long poem, “Tattoos.” “Tattoos” is a poem in two parts. The lines quoted above are from the second part, “Canvas,” which is to say, the body. These lines are from the first part, “Ink:”

Cardamom, ginger,
pomegranate bark. Bamboo
shoots, asparagus,

damp smouldering leaves —
mugwort mordant in votives.
Wicker baskets, rows

and rows of trays, jars
decanting tarragon, dried
dandelions, black

mushrooms, bear bladders.

It’s informative to listen to Parker read these poems. With her Kentucky accent, a word like “still” travels over its diphthongs at a leisurely pace and the poems become like the spoken version of a Lucinda Williams song, an effect that adds texture to poems dealing with Greek myth:

ARCHAIC FRAGMENTS

NARCISSUS: NARKE

Water takes you in.
For days the gods talk
Of nothing but your

Spine in the dark, white
Coral, of how fish
School into your dead

Calm. And still water
Gives you back: thirsting,
Already bent to drink.

“Archaic Fragments,” like many of the poems in this chapbook is a long multi-part work. These offerings wrap poems into poems, so that you do get your full 28-pages of value.

In another of life’s totally meaningless coincidences, Parker is a graduate of Murray State University’s MFA program in creative writing and my son, who did some work in that program, is acquainted with her.

We also have in common our work as medical editors. That training is evident “Breasts,” a six-part, five-page contemplation cancer that mixes technical and sensual language set up like figure legends for a medical paper:

Figure C.   Recent radical mastectomy showing markings for
radiation. Incisions placed so that they will not show
when wearing evening dress or bathing suit.

Two devices don’t work well for Parker in this first chapbook venture. One is the poem “for two voices.” This may be a problem of my personal taste. In general, I don’t tend to like poems that entertwine two strands of meaning. I usually wind up picking the threads apart so that reading the poem becomes sort of like untying a knot. It’s difficult, I think, to do a poem like “Engendering: For Two Voices” in such a way that the two parts strengthen and build on one another. Although “Engendering” is, in many ways, a fine poem, I don’t think Parker quite pulls it off. The “Ulysses:Uxoria” section of “Archaic Fragments” works better because its use of two voices is simpler, less intrusive.

The other poem that doesn’t work for me is “Some Yellow Tulips,” a portrait of a holocaust survivor in rhymed couplets. Such subjects can be done in formal poetry. As an example, see Marilyn Taylor’s “In Other News.” But the poet has to be very careful to make sure the form serves the poem. As one who works a bit in form, I know that it’s easy to let it get away from you, to let the poem serve the form. Especially if you’re trying to bend the form to serve a narrative. I appreciate Parker’s effort in this poem. It contains some startling and moving images, especially the last line where the blowing yellow tulips “ravelled to a six-pointed star.” But the meter and rhyme are too regular, sometimes a bit forced.

Small flaws, born of personal preference, in a chapbook that is otherwise excellent.
A Walk Through the Memory Palace is Pamela Johnson Taylor’s first booklength publication. She is off to a fine start.

Let me remind you again that the price for the print edition of this book is $5.95, plus shipping. It would make a great stocking stuffer.