review of mamaist: a different sort of light KYOTO JOURNAL

Kyoto Journal 95 Spring 2020

Reviews

Mamaist Heartbeat Otherwise: A Poetry Roundup


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       Alan Botsford avoids the two traps that often ensnare poets.The first trap is for a poet to become so smitten with a style that he or she starts to write all his or her poems in that style.The second trap occurs when poets write poems that leave one, after the last line is read, with nothing: nothing to think about, nothing memorable, not a belly laugh, a giggle, or a grimace. Botsford, in his most recent "mamaist" tome, writes in a variety of styles He calls some of his mamaist work "generic poems," by which he means poems that use "generic" language--everyday words and phrases--that he twists in a way that revivifies it. It's the creativity and wit in some of these poems that will stay with readers the longest. In a time when too much of what is offered as poetry is, in fact, chopped prose, it is a delight to find, in a poem called "a mamaist earth of heart":


Yes, you amigo of imago (no scold of clods)--
sing out your amens of names
with booms of bosom borne of boner,
and mania of anima under a cloud of could!
Armed of dream, takes your moods of dooms,
your swords  of words and befriend the devil of lived!


Language is central to what poems are. This is so obvious that one feels silly writing it, especially when one has just been reminded of what a poem can be by language play as lively as Botsford's. One is happy to be so reminded, and also to experience in books such as these the vibrancy and vigor of the English-language poetry scene in Japan.

- David Cozy

mamaist a different sort of light

dark woods press, Kamakura, Japan, 2019
ISBN: 9784991041808


Available at Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/mamaist-different-light-Alan-Botsford/dp/4991041805/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

  

A review of mamaist: a different sort of light

http://www.decompmagazine.com/mamaist.htm

A Review of mamaist: a different sort of light
by Alan Botsford

Spencer Dew

“After all, doesn’t milk sound like a miracle?” Not dada, then, but something more nourishing, nudging the unfurl of a seed, “fern-like, out from under / every moment, a tongue, a feather, a flame lifting into the air,” a smell like fresh-baked bread and rich, tilled soil.

While there’s mention here of the notorious nobodaddies—“Uncle-Sam-I-Am” up in the sky—of patriarchal pasts and presents, the gift of this collection is to focus us elsewhere than the phallocentric “I.” Indeed, here, that “I” is surrendered to the wind of words, “a mamaist Daedalus” falling, equipped “with traits of artist and . . . rawness of answers” who nonetheless is confronted in due course with “the coming of gnomic as the cosmic of comics.”

From the hum and crackle of electrotherapy to the notion of light as love, a warm enveloping—from the dark that crows speak of, each to each, to dream horses that may be metaphors for everything but are also just precisely what they are in any given, shifting, moment—such sources are mined via a generous generative. One poem, for instance, is collaged out of titles of City Lights books. Others ask questions such as What if Dante had gotten distracted on his walk? and What if all true writing “is a translation from somewhere” unknown?

The mamaist stance or sensibility, then, is to submit to this, to open oneself, surrendering the self bit, and then

to be taking lessons from the cosmos, in pain and in joy . . . to learn how to walk the dizzying edge between two worlds—how, for instance, to enter a house shoeless like a ghost, how, whenever you read, to read from finish to start; how to eat words—still wriggling and writhing in your mouth—raw, and with a nod of your head to look for the next sentence to be complete...

Official Alan Botsford Web Site

A different sort of light

We are, it seems, all under some guy

Way up there in the vast sky.

It's a man's world from above,

It's true, one we can't afford not to love.

But what motions from below

Is what I root for, just so you know.

It's a thrill to be on site

Of a different sort of light.

But whose dream, then, are we in,

You'd ask: happy ending, or ruin?

Faithful to prophets of Uncle-Sam-I-Am,

Iriff on the endurance of time.

Botsford, Alan. mamaist: a different sort of light . Kamakura, Japan, dark woods press, 2019.