Clangings

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 gossipA page writes me (my words blueStashed my secret name in its havenIf I think in yellow, I can rememberMy notion of heaven? Um, plumb gardenThe circulars blued under my eyesIt’s not that I don’t believe in GodTsk tsk, go my wits, like a grandfatherSweat no longer creeps me outI feel as male as I feel femaleMy tongue-print’s on your butterFlirting from pokeweed, DickeyI cut back on coffee. And air. And sky~I was twin pencils. A fit in one sexI’m speaking with my mother’s voiceDad. He plays dead, and his leashOkay, here’s what we did. Dad was a quarkSieg Heil, Father, for the dammerangDickey said it’s the “perineum”Mother said you count your friends on one handBlack cats ring bells. I’m your sonFrom the time he opened his mouth his talk was off Mom and Dad made livings in HeavenParents are the nations that thrust you~Dickey’s death feels all over me“He’s gone,” Mother Teresa told meFirst I denied the no-seeums specklingIf the raw world left in me’s red I hear, in my phone, vocabulary whereDear eyes, my ears keep paired for youA finch in my chest flinches to getIris of the one-eyed Satan—see it? I shake my head, my right brain’sBack on my wings, wings became meDon’t have to swim straight, dark says~So I left my apartment, got down whereDamned if my thumbs-up, deadpanWhen I saw her, her face was a marinadeI moved inside a movie about womenNoise-canceling paws at my ears. . . nobody’s safe inside the airtight zonesThe Trimínos rent free in my headThey’ll rant what’s left of youYou say I’m in one of my highs Your head meds serve my serfdomWords next-to-last-next-to-last-next-toDickey my door, I’m seeing. YesterdayI feel well, but keep hoping to get well

"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 FerryHumane 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 RivardSteven 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, MDHarvard Medical School, author of The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry