jubilat #14

There's something about jubilat's squat little shape that I like and there's always something in an issue that challenges the vertically-minded. In this issue, one needs to do the Big Switcharoo in order to read Amy Jean Porter's "[i]from[/i] The Check-List of the Mammals of Nicaragua," for example.

I never respond well to "theme" issues, but I do like to see an issue in which the poems have some kind of conversation with one another. Some journals do this very obviously, as in Golden Handcuffs propensity for call-and-response, but others do so softly, in the margins, with loose weaving. This issue of jubilat features, among other thematic elements, a searching for connection between the perceptions of the body and mind, embodied well, I think, in the opening from Lisa Olstein's "From This Vantage Point Your View Will Be Clear." She writes, "Any shift in philosophy introduces the need for new habits of body." And, indeed, several other poems speak poignantly to this need for movement/translation in the body's response to the mind, soul, to outside phenomena. Sometimes this involves the inability to achieve recognition--to see one's self, to recognize one's self. In "The News," Arda Collins writes, "I try to get my mind around the sight of myself," and a perfect arc seems to build itself between the two poems. Mathias Svalina's "Distant Nearness or Hostage Being," also approaches the same, although here it's not just the physical body that is treated as foreign, that must be analyzed and experienced as if it were a foreign entity, but perception itself, reality itself that must be scolded and investigated. Here, newspapers print photos of their own pages and "white boxes where photographs would have been, but they retain the captions for the stories." Experientally, our world is suspect, our reality is suspect because of, one imagines, our inability to see ourselves for what we are, to truly see others, to empathize or understand something apart from ourselves.

Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo's startling, spare "Somatic Loss Poem to Bird," is both a poem of extra-personal loss (separation from a loved one) and also something more. The very Buddhist "You are the boat. From a boat/You are the shore of infinite loss," can be drawn up into the internal, as well as the external struggle to comprehend and accept mortality and finite space. The poem turns, lathelike, on line after line of understated loveliness, coupling the abstract and divine to the utterly physical presence, to the concrete image, as in "...the sky is the recycled grey/of urgency, emergency."

Moving through the issue, Bob Brown's handprinted/drawn pages are a novelty, but might have been just as effectively produced/condensed in one or two selections. The page with the "eyes/eyes/my godt/what eyes!"

There's something really self-knowledgeable about Jubilat's printing of Porter's poems, given their extreme penchant for list poems, and other poems that feature, more than any other salient trait, disparate images whose connection [b]is[/b], forcefully, only their presence in the same poem. O'Hara-like catalogs of imagery beckon from page after page, issue after issue, and there can be something repetitive and tiresome in the litany, without his eternal questioning and reaching out for [i]significance[/i]. But Porter's poems seem a kind of self-defense, a clear-spoken delight in the meaning that is created always-already by proximity.