Scattered Light: May 2009

Saturday, May 30, 2009

A Review of MULTIVERSE

What a lovely surprise, eh? Thank you, Grady Harp, from the Snell sisters!

Far More Than A Poetic Experiment, May 30, 2009
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

MULTIVERSE by Cheryl Snell is a short collection of poignant poems that edge the idea of a MULTIple universe replacing the concept of a simple UNIverse. But lest the reader be afraid that the scientific aspect of this premise is prevalent in this collection, it must be pointed out that despite the original 'idea' of the title, the poems in this collection are immediately accessible, very beautiful works indeed.

The flow and meaningful content of this book of poems by a seasoned writer is made even more seductive by the addition of expressionistic paintings by Janet Snell. Rarely have poems been so well 'illustrated' or at least so integrated as they are by the two Snells working in tandem. At the heart of these poems and art is a sense of home, of the sounds of and sense of night, and the radiant meanderings of on seasonal strokes. And yet Snell knows how to bring all of nature together, to include humans, in a touching manner. For example:

DYING SEASON
By the time our father bolted
from his sickbed to squeeze
the nurse's breast, we'd worked
ourselves into a frenzy of waiting.

When he fell back on the pillow,
He's sleeping, we whispered.
He can't hear our words' mad buzz.

Outside, a dragonfly, transparent
wings on a blue-tinged stick,
hovered above a broken cricket
dragging though the backyard thatch.

It rose up, sudden as a mind changing,
and the room sagged with breath
held against the last thing we wanted to see:
a pair of wings escaping, the world left out of reach.

This is a collection of poems to be lingered over, like reminders of first views or experiences we usually keep to ourselves for fear that speaking of them will make them lost to us. Snell has captured these moments and we can only hope she will continue to write such tender thoughts as well as in MULTIVERSE.
-Grady Harp, May 09

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

The Twitter Edition is live!

Open publication - Free publishing - More mipoesias

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

...in which the sisters are beside themselves

The author's copies of Prisoner's Dilemma came today. The BOX was heavy, the scissors were sticky, there was way too much tape! It went like this---

Fireworks threatened to take the top off.
Wet palms twitched under eruptions of happiness.

Judgments collected under the awning like rain,
hummed against the shell of her ear. Her skull
slammed in her head. Payroll hands weighed the options
like so much gold.

Runaway shoes piled up, laces tangled
like tongues caught in a lie. Checkmark wings
on canvas heels had been tools toward anonymity,
erasing footprints where they fell, driving zigzag dogs crazy
as they nipped at nothing.

Each day had been a map of dark topographies.
Turning into a skid would only postpone
whatever came next.

Every step along a lucky streak
uncovers a foreign place tricked out
with new lies and silences. Rising up
to meet the path of great good fortune,
she could have done more, if you want to know.

Monday, May 18, 2009

A Wall You Can't See Over

This is the story of how our new book, Prisoner's Dilemma, came to be:
It's 2005, and Janet unscrolls a stack of new drawings in pen and ink, charcoal, lithocrayon, chalk and pencil. What’s the subject? Cheryl wonders out loud. Heads, Janet says. That is, the semi-abstract human head in various states of mind, its psychology graphically shown and connected to the abstract background by its particular vulnerabilities. Those are depicted and distorted through the artist's vocabulary, anchoring it to the background and making the metaphor succinct.

One drawing in this set came about when one of Janet’s friends showed her the brace on his broken hand. It looks like something Helmut Newton would photograph on a skinny Vogue model, Janet told Cheryl at the time. But where would Helmut place it on the model’s body? He never puts anything in the expected place. Hmm, Janet said and began to think in images, because Cheryl never heard another word about it until she saw the drawing called Split.

I think in images, Janet says. I work like an expressionist, with the figure in the style of the German expressionists, and the space, abstract expressionist. To present images in a more definite space, I improvise in a spontaneous vein. I’m led around by the brush in an automatic way that allows for sensitivity. Subsequent decisions are then made from practice and experience. Executed premeditated meaning makes lifeless art—--no improvisation, no process.

The touch of brush or charcoal to canvas or paper leads in an intuitive direction. When I'm doing a painting that I've already sketched out, the painting doesn't exactly look like the sketch--fortunately--or the process would get boring, with little room for imagination or spontaneity. The meaning in my work is the poetry between image and space—implied rather than overt. Landscape is abstract and can be felt. The figurative elements are the elements I often start with, with the space improvised.

In my drawings, I make figures in a space suited to them. Using the figurative head in an abstract space focuses the relationship between the figurative and abstract elements and lets the viewer experience the psychology of the human figure. To connect the head to its surroundings, I add various elements to establish the psychological relationship between head and space. I am especially interested in what happens when the space becomes an image.

The Prisoner's Dilemma series was done all at once. The poems followed slowly, with much back-and-forth and revision. False starts and paper cuts. Theme emerged, and fought for a toehold.The big connector between the sisters' work is their shared sense of melancholy. Janet's characters are always trying to see, or to connect, and Cheryl puts a narrative to the image and uses it as a springboard for her own. That's probably the biggest difference, within all the similarities.

Lopside Press

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Which one do you like better?

PSA

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link

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Happy Mother's Day

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Snakeskin

Check out the May Snakeskin. The editor, George Simmers, graciously accepted two of Cheryl's poems for it. Thanks, George!

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Cheryl on the radio

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer will read Cheryl's poem Closing Mother Down on her radio program Accents this Friday, May 8, at 2pm. Turn your dial to 88.1, FM, Lexington, or stream live from http://wrfl.fm. That's what we're going to do.

Finishing Line Press publishers Leah Maines and Kevin Maines will be the guests on this week's edition. Leah was the editor for Cheryl's first book of poetry, Flower Half Blown.

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Update on PD

Here is the updated cover for the new poetry/art book, Prisoner's Dilemma. It's at the printers now! If you'd like a preview, or to order a copy,CLICK THIS. If you'd like an autographed copy, send your postal address to prisonersdilemma2@gmail.com

Friday, May 01, 2009

Free E-Books

Rick Lupert, who runs Poetry Super Highway, is hosting his annual Great Poetry Free- For- All today. Download any or all 65 books at until midnight
We've got a little sumsum listed. Check out Left Brain Love Song while you're there.

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What They Say

The Blend of Visual and Written Art

THAT FEEL is one of the finest collaborative books published by the sisters Snell. Cheryl Snell is a fine poet and her sister Janet Snell is a fine expressionist artist. In their previous books there was often the question of whether Janet was illustrating Cheryl's poetry or if perhaps each artist made her art and then combined it in the most suitable manner.

Now it is obvious that the art that spreads across both sides of an open book is unified and equally involved in the nidus of expression. The poems and art of THAT FEEL seem to be more visceral than those that came before them - these are poems from the gut, art about alienation and longing and rapturous moments that fade too quickly (or were they even there?). For example in the combined expression of the following, the painting accompanying the poem is that of two faces distorted by reflection in glass or mirror or memory:

REFLECTIONS IN CRACKED GLASS

Each brush stroke had been its own allegory

and could not reconcile the break. I felt for

connection in blind corridors, whispering

Who's there? from within the room's glass

eye.

Maybe I was dreaming. The facts were hard

to parse and sometimes lied. I did, too,

confused by what my reflection showed. The

glass distorted it and the fissure widened from

a thin red line. It splintered our embrace and

again I was alone.

The book may be brief but it is a powerful one. The only criticism about this latest opus is the somewhat disjointed feeling of the varying fonts or typefaces the artists used. Those wide variations of print diminish the tone of the poetry/art like unwanted audience distracters. But that is a minor complaint in a book that further substantiates the excellent collaborative efforts of the sisters Snell. --Grady Harp

Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review)
by Matthew Biberman

Any one who frequents the fiction section of a good independent bookstore knows that there is something of a cottage industry of writers currently churning out fiction invested in capturing the lived experience of ex‐pat Indians who have moved to America. One of the more distinctive elements of this sub‐genre is its investment in detailing life in India as well as in America, most often in ways that include, often in great detail, the back stories of the
characters before their decision to move away from their home land.
A recent addition to this stack of books is Cheryl Snell’s first novel, Shiva’s Arms. I know and admire Cheryl first and foremost as a poet, a fact that inevitably colored my reading of this book. Indeed I would encourage anyone who begins Shiva’s Arms to keep this fact in mind because I believe it influences the writing of this novel all the way down to its essence. Cheryl’s poetic eye is not just visible in the felicitous phrase, though the book is filled with such moments. A conversation in an Indian cab takes place in a dialect that sounds “like gravel in their mouths.” When a character unravels, we see that her eyes are “blue puddles in her slack face.” Food gets sopped up “in a baseball mitt” of bread. But to read Shiva’s Arms for its precise, poetic imagery is to skate along an iced over lake without any thought to the depths below.
The true challenge of Shiva’s Arms is to recognize that it is a very ambitious—indeed, innovative piece of writing. It is an experiment in what I would call a transversal novel. Shiva’s Arms takes shape somewhere between the sonnet craze that swept Shakespeare’s England four centuries ago and the cinematic techniques often identified as producing the Rashomon effect in twentieth century avant garde film.
First we must think about that now largely obsolete form—the sonnet sequence. Generally understood to have been popularized by Petrarch with his love poems to Laura, the sonnet sequence flourished in the late sixteenth century in London. Shakespeare’s effort is a very late example, and perhaps for that reason, breaks new ground. For the first time, the poet is repeatedly identified with the speaker of the poems (think of all those puns on Will) and the beloved is not simply idealized (famously, her eyes are nothing like the sun) but also unfaithful. Nor is the narrative clear. When you read Shakespeare’s poems it is as if you are reading a novel in snap shots, but with this twist: as you read it dawns on you that somehow the poems are no longer in chronological order
While keeping that experience in mind, let us flash forward to the art house movie. Famously, Kurosawa made a film‐‐Rashomon (1950) that retells a crime from four different perspectives, a device that highlights the complex and dynamic nature of reality. What the Rashomon effect
highlights is the truth that though reality is intersubjective (that is, reality is a collective formation), this “collective hallucination” (to use Freud’s term) is inevitably being made by individuals who are experiencing what is happening in ways that are always at once congruent and divergent.
What Cheryl has done in Shiva’s Arms is to present the story of an extended family in a novel that combines both of these techniques. The result can be described as a novel where each chapter operates as a kind of intense short poem, that is‐‐ as a sonnet. The chapters do not,however, anchor the reader to one character. Rather, the reader is passed from character to character. We begin tied to the American Alice, but then pass on to her husband Ram, and then their child Sam. This primary pattern is however interrupted with detours into Ram’s mother Amma, and ‐‐ with increasing frequency as the book builds to its conclusion ‐‐ the shunned sister Nela. With each shift, a different perspective is showcased. In strategy, the result is reminiscent of some of our most celebrated modernist novels, books such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come immediately to mind. But in those works, the effect encourages the reader to separate out the characters so that the readers gains a satisfying sense that people are unique, yet isolated, grounded but limited to their bodies.
The effect that Snell produces in Shiva’s Arms is striking because it works in reverse. People in families get caught up in each other so that the configurations shift and change. Suddenly the notion that we are limited to our physical bodies falls away. We meld in our struggles, mix and combine in ways that defeat the macro laws of physics both in terms of space and even time. In this, Snell’s work is reminiscent of Djuna Barnes cult masterpiece Nightwood, though the overall mood is far more evocative of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.
For me the high points of Shiva’s Arms come when Snell renders the rapid blooming of a state of existential dread. The effect is positively unsettling in its intensity, most especially early in the novel after Alice’s marriage precipitates a psychological crisis. The concluding confrontation between Amma and Alice is even more impressive, coming as it does so effectively after the dramatic resolution of the dinner immediately preceding it. Fights in Shiva Arms do not end with characters walling themselves off. Everything drives toward mixture, a fact highlighted by Ram when he observes that “we are all just chemistry labs.” This theme is made overt via the role food plays in this novel complete with Recipes, a crowning touch.
According to western cliché, cooking and food illustrate how each of us enjoys a unique and colorful heritage of goodness. True to its radical nature, Shiva’s Arms upends that idea and puts in place the notion that each of us is but an ingredient, a blend that makes up the bigger whole.
Shiva’s Arms is a satisfying novel that demands much from its reader. Its strengths are many but if I had to pick one on which to end I will stress that this is a book that provocatively challenges many of the most cherished presumptions propping up many well known examples of Indian – American fiction, or indeed of multicultural literature generally speaking. Despite paying lip service to the idea that western notions of subjectivity are not universal, most writers working in the genre of the English novel continue to present nonwestern forms of consciousness via free standing western characters. In stark contrast, Shiva’s Arms invites you to imagine characters that are interconnected parts of a larger whole. Such a radical insight can only come from a novelist of great talent and skillful execution. With luck, future novels from Cheryl Snell will deepen this exploration. As a reader I certainly look forward to the adventure.

Prisoner's Dilemma:...The diction here, precise and yet off-hand, coupled with the unexpected coupling of ideas (beauty – rivers – the girl who knows all the boys desire her) places Snell on intimate relations with the main currents of twentieth century American poetry, a landscape marked by masters such as John Ashberry, Mark Strand, Louise Bogan and Louise Gluck, to name but a few poets associated with the style Alan Williamson (himself a fine poet) dubbed the new American surrealism. And yet Snell—or rather the Snells—for the book I am reviewing, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, is a collection that alternates between Cheryl’s short lyric poems and Janet’s pencil drawings -- stands apart.

The difference is hard to explain, so lets be blunt: in the best of Cheryl’s work, the style regains its vigor, enlivened by the poet’s deep sense of what it means to be caught up in life. A digression on Freud may help here because we are on the subject of digressions. Freud could never stop being fascinated by the notion that it is life that is the interruption. Not death. The immortal is the natural state. But somehow we find ourselves shunted and routed out of the immortal and into the detour of the mortal for a brief go round before flowing back into the immortal, back into death, and the beyond of death. Cheryl Snell’s poetry, and Janet’s art, together illuminate this insight: that the detour into life is a circular whirlpool. --Matthew Biberman

It could be the case that those human heads are floating in a paradoxical space: yes, obviously human (and all that that signals to us) but also pure moments of form. Cephalic shapes to circumscribe color-vacuums, lending force to the other “objects.”Another impression jumps into my own head, beyond what I said above about...well, whatever it was I said. For me, I feel like I'm looking at a negative-image of consciousness. The subconscious? Maybe. And what's weird and cool is that those heads, drained of color and feature detail, seem to express more human soulfulness and depth than even a portrait by Rembrandt!...Tim Buck

There is something of Keats's “negative capability” revealed in this poignant story: it is a mystery to me how a female author can so perfectly inhabit the hurting corners of a middle-aged man's soul. And her striking turns of phrase bring delight to the reader, even as he squirms and winces in sympathy with Roger...Tim Buck

The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope...Rosy Cole

...This is a collection of poems to be lingered over, like reminders of first views or experiences we usually keep to ourselves for fear that speaking of them will make them lost to us. Snell has captured these moments and we can only hope she will continue to write such tender thoughts as well as in MULTIVERSE. ---Grady Harp

Marilyn Kallet, on Multiverse:
"Cheryl Snell's poems are rich, integrative, witty, and beautifully composed."

This is not poetry merely to beguile the imagination; it is experience by vital proxy, full of pulse and texture and radiance. Memento Mori is a tour de force. (R.Cole)

"... Both Snells' (author and painter) works soar in this lovely book. It was interesting to watch the movement of fear between the poems...A nervous and wonderful collection of art fused with poetry."--Andrew Demcak, on Multiverse

Dorothy Shin, Akron Beacon Journal--
"Her work is dark,mysterious, seemingly drawn from the subconscious...Foreboding, regret, entrapment, longing and enigma vie for prominence while gestural, expressive brushwork gives the forms a supernormal tension and energy..."

Bob Grumman, Taproot--"Macabre, comic, mysterious, and subtly erotic, these fascinating drawings constantly flirt with disgust -- a perfect example of graphic black humor. "

"A series of charcoal drawings that go darkly anywhere via an expressionism that reminds me of Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon. Snell provides poems for her illustrations that generally extend rather than just rephrase them-- ."

... varied and beautifully imaged lyric narratives...Again, she stuns us with her imagery.---Comstock Review