Ben Mazer reads "The King" in July 2012

As recorded at the launch of a new issue of Spirited at the Fourth Wall Project gallery, July 29, 2012. In that issue can be found a version of Mazer's long poem "The King" appears, accompanied by illustrations by Vanessa Barnard. Video via YouTube, courtesy Allison Vanouse.

The text also appears in the first issue of The Battersea Review. Diana Jones-Ellis on Ben's reading in the video: "Brilliant! ... The dimensionality in the work and the reading is absolutely riveting." Below, a leaf from the illustrated stanzas of "The King" as it appears in Spirited.

Amazing new poem by Ben Mazer in Eyewear

From "Monsieur Barbary Brecht" by Ben Mazer (author of, most recently, POEMS), as appears at the Eyewear blog edited by Todd Swift:

In the hall the rich children glare and they stare

at the poor little visitor who enters there,

his musical prodigy greater than theirs

sends them scuttling in snide little groups up the stairs.

But the hostess is compassionate and hands him a score,

but he just doesn’t feel up to play any more,

and wonders what lies behind the magnificent door

where the children all vanished, and his vision is flecked

by the shadowy mustache of Monsieur Barbary Brecht!

A Review of a Review

Philip Nikolayev on Henry Gould on Ben Mazer's Poetry

What follows is Philip Nikolayev's comment on Henry Gould's January 2012 review of Ben Mazer's collections POEMS (among other texts) for The Critical Flame. on Friday, January 27, 2012. Nikolayev has given his permission for this reposting of his thoughts. -- ZWB

At long last, a thoughtful, sustained endeavor -- the first of its kind and scope, and by no less a person than Henry Gould, himself a poet whom I hold in high esteem -- to figure out and come to terms with the poetry of Ben Mazer, who in my biased and partial view is one of our times' very finest poets.

Gould, by dint of his particular sensitivity, taste and learning, is better equipped than most poets today to review this work, and the limitations of his honest effort, which I feel succeeds only partially, highlight the peculiar challenges of the task. The essay wins my applause in spite of these limitations.

I find much in this review to be off the mark, e.g. the overemphasis on Ashbery (who -- did I spell him right? I am not American! -- will yet serve for some decades as the catchall digestive pill to process anything that is perceived as opaque in current American verse; that said, Mazer himself alludes to Ashbery) and on John Beer (whom I have not read, but the discussion here did not pique my curiosity); or the naïve remark in passing that Mazer "doesn't care for exactitude; his olympian indifference even extends to spelling and syntax" (Henry, that’s precisely exactitude, those things you mention are *exactly* as Mazer wants them, and every comma in the writing is carefully decided upon). I wish the ostensible difficulty –- the complexity -– of the verse had met with a more technical discussion than its dismissal as mere "sea-washed vagueness" (though I am strangely grateful that the N +1 "types of ambiguity" are not invoked for the school children).

Nevertheless, there are many true, nuanced reflections here, and the general take on things has many merits. There is the true admission that Mazer's poetry  is "full of beauty and pleasure," even if the essay, possibly somewhat against its own intention, paradoxically fails to reveal a genuine excitement. In spite of all this, Gould's review is groundbreaking and will certainly influence further critical analyses of Mazer's work.

*

Henry Gould left a few comments in gracious response:

Thanks, Philip. Just a couple points : "sea-washed vagueness" was not intended as a dismissal (I like sea-washed vagueness). And, 2nd, the poet's playing fast & loose sometimes with spelling and syntax certainly may have been exact & purposeful : but if so it's a purposeful indifference. Nevertheless I really don't want to over-emphasize this aspect in Mazer's POEMS: it plays a very minor role in a few poems, I think.

Ben Mazer certainly warrants a full-scale stand-alone review, where his work is front & center (as does John Beer to some extent). But what I was trying to do in this essay was map out a dynamic, a larger context, a "way of reading". I don't think this happens often enough - in the roar of chit-chat & PR we tend to lose our bearings...

EVERSON IN POETRY, MAZER ON EVERSON

Poetry's website relaunch has made the back issue contents more easily available than ever before... such contents as Landis Everson's poem from the October 2006 issue, "What's Wrong":

What you are struggling with," said
the psychologist, "is
a continuous song, something like
a telephone's tone. [...]

Not serendipitously, but sadly, I came across two poems written in memoriam for Everson while reading this  Saturday, and a third in Stephen Sturgeon's Trees of the Twentieth Century when a friend and I were paging through and talking about the collection on Sunday.

I think of a short poem by Greg Delanty:

For many are not here who were here before.

In Dark Sky Magazine last month, Ben Mazer wrote about his relationship with Landis, and how his collection January, 2008 grew out of the grief he felt when the older poet died in 2007.

MAZER IN EYEWEAR

Ben Mazer -- who was interviewed in last spring's Clarion by Liza Katz -- has a new hypnotic, brimful poem in Todd Swift's online magazine, Eyewear. A pair of lines as amuse-bouche:

The Botticelli bursts another spring.
It is of florentine silks that I shall sing.

 Mazer's recent collection from The Pen & Anvil Press, POEMS, is now on the shelf for sale at St. Mark's Bookshop in Manhattan's Bowery neighborhood. Support small press publishing, and pick up a copy or tell a friend to do the same.