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The Banyan & The Alder, Martina Newberry and Bam Dev Sharma - A Review by Djelloul Marbrook
The Banyan & The Alder, Martina Newberry and Bam Dev Sharma,
Arabesques Editions, 2006, 85pp.
Literary and technical blogs buzz and blather these days with
speculation about the nature of the book. Can the book as we know it
survive the advent of such technologies as the Internet? Can the
continued killing of trees to make books and newspapers and magazines
be justified?
At the same time, the radical commercialization of almost everything,
including human life, raises the question of whether literature itself
can survive. Will there be any more great novels? Will there be any
more great, extended poems like "The Wasteland" and "The Bridge"?
Back and forth the speculative blog posts flash before our eyes. It
would have sickened Gustave Flaubert who complained bitterly that
instead of examining the facts people preferred to pontificate. He
might have been talking about our time. Well, he was a visionary, so he
was talking about our time.
Yet few people seem to focus on the relationship between poetry and
the Internet. How odd this is, because in so many ways the poem is
ideally suited to be transmitted to the remotest crannies and aeries of
the world with breathless speed.
A case in point. Bam Dev Sharma is a poet and department head at The
Campus of International Languages in Katmandu. He had seen a poem by
the California poet, Martina Newberry, in an anthology. So he wrote to
her by e-mail. A correspondence ensued, and from this Internet
correspondence, The Banyan & The Alder emerged. It's a conversation in
poetry between two poets from across the world. One wonders if any Shia
and Sunni poets are e-mailing each other in Iraq.
Like everything about the Internet, any consideration of its role in
poetry must be tempered by the knowledge that the technology is
evolving and remains in a somewhat primitive, if rapidly improving,
state.
For example, the structural characteristics of these poets' work
lend themselves to the Internet. E-mail will readily hold left-handed
margins and simple stanzaic patterning, for instance. But if the poems
were as sculptural as, say, Daniel Pendergrass's 23 Karabitsi
Istanbul, also published by Arabesques, it would be an entirely different and
less rewarding matter, because e-mail would almost certainly manhandle
the shape of the poems.
But the vehicle of their correspondence isn't all that commends these
poets to readers.
Newberry is not unlike John Clare in her directitude.
"I read a book about a man who killed women
then took their skins to wear like a
costume"
she begins a poem called "Consolations". She observes a world
familiar to us, not a strangeling world sprung from someone's head.
In the poem, "Vacations", Newberry invites the reader to think and feel along
with her, refraining from telling the reader anything, or singing to
the reader, or lecturing.
"I am here, stirring around in
my papers, shifting around,
while the visions, precise
and horrible, wrap themselves
around my throat as heart worm
grabs a dog's heart.
In "The Spinning Wheel Song," Newberry writes,
"If you are being kissed, stay still."
So, being kissed by the poetry, you take her advice. And
then midway in the poem, she says,
"If you feel yourself drowning, it's too bad."
So, you say to yourself, I have to get into the spirit of this
poet's humors. No need to worry, you already have. She's
high-spirited.
Sharma is quieter, more reflective, and his poems are often like a
brook running through snow or a mountain freshet. Not surprising,
considering where he lives. In a haiku he writes,
"Sprouting shoots
snow's grappling loose
under sunny marks"
He seems to share his correspondent's celebration of the ordinary, but he's at
once comfortable with abstraction and reminiscent of Sufi poets searching for an elixir among ordinary things.
Here we have a book that reminds us that our world, with all its
horrific headlines and sound bites, is nonetheless a world in which
poets are sending each other poems instantaneously, over borders, over
wars, over the heads of grasping politicians. This isn't an accident.
And if it's a paradox, surely it's one that is somehow reshaping
the world. Can a planet around which poems whoosh in the atmosphere moment
after moment remain the same? If global warming is inexorably changing
us, then surely this incredible exchange of the best we can say will
also change us.
Djelloul (Del) Marbrook was born in Algiers, grew up in Manhattan, and worked as a soda jerk,
newspaper hawker, messenger, theater and nightclub concessionaire and as a merchant and Navy seaman.
He was a reporter for The Providence Journal and an editor for The Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette,
The Baltimore Sun, The Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel, The Washington Star and Media News
newspapers in Ohio and New Jersey. His poems and short stories have appeared in a number of journals.
His unpublished work includes three novels, Divers' Angels, Crowds of One and Zij, two novellas,
The Pain of Wearing Our Faces and
Artemisia's Wolf, and a collection of short stories, Later For You. A collection of his poems,
Nail Me to This Moment, will be published in 2006 by Three Conditions Press in Baltimore.
He is contributing editor of Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review, a tri-lingual online journal.
Email: Djelloul (Del) Marbrook
Martina Newberry Site
Email Bam Dev Sharma
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