Irreantum review of Curses for Your Sake

From “The Ambiguities of Belief” by Sarah E. Jenkins
Irreantum Volume 8, Number 2 (2006), pg. 189-90

At the edge of the pool at Bethesda, the poet holds vigil with the blind and the lame, waiting for an angel to disturb the water. As they watch for the slightest change in the water, he wonders,

And how much does the angel notice?
He has his work:
stir the surface, ascend.

We don’t doubt he knows the purpose--
some relieved, others afflicted.
And we don’t deny

there is security in suffering,
always knowing what and where,
waiting for the troubling of the water.

The story of Bethesda--the waiting, the angel, the suffering, the hope--becomes the master narrative for Javen Tanner’s collection Curses for Your Sake. He details not only those currently waiting by the pool, but also the man Jesus healed, blending the image of the rising man with that of “thighs stung by urine, / flies coating a smear / of pus and blood on stone.” There is at once healing and pain, accompanied by the satisfaction of understanding one’s pain, if nothing else. And there is the hovering question of what new pain the healing will bring.

At first glance, the subjects of Tanner’s poems seem familiar, from the biblical Bethesda and Eden to literary Yorick and Chekhov to contemporary San Diego and Manhattan, but familiarity is quickly set aside in favor of the unfamiliar and unexpected. The lines spoken by Eve in Tanner’s “Eden,” for example, are immediately reinterpreted:

She said, “Meet me in the garden.”
I took this to mean,

Come with me
and we will be buried in water,
fire, nomenclature, earth.

The impulse to delve deeper into Eve’s words, to expand them, gives the reader access to the voice and mind of the speaker--someone who, like Tanner, won’t settle for what is on the surface. This demanding curiosity proves necessary when Tanner employs strong, straightforward statements such as “Doom is easy for us” in “Manhattan” or when his imagery becomes the flame of “burning / Rembrandts and Caravaggios, / or peeling back the skins of Rothkos // to touch the smoldering matter” in “San Diego.” Both statement and image could easily be left hanging, but Tanner’s readers can trust he will continue to delve, to create connections not immediately seen. The end result may not be comfortable, but it is satisfying, as in “I Imagine My Parents as Characters in Chekhov”: “They should kiss our wounds. / They should fend off the darkness / with lullabies too heavy for the tongue.” Here it is the parents claiming the children’s attentions, an effective role reversal, particularly in Tanner’s world where words are ever evolving, until, in the final lines of the final poem, “Sudden Music,” the reader is directed to “Listen to the muffled voices above. / They sing, ‘Please, please,’ but from here it sounds like ‘peace.’”

Meridian Interview, Part the Second

Here is part 2 of my interview with Meridian Magazine:

http://www.ldsmag.com/poetry/080222interview.html

Curses and Meridian

Doug Talley, the poetry editor of Meridian Magazine, wrote a kind review of my chapbook Curses for Your Sake. You can read it here:http://www.meridianmagazine.com/poetry/061206drama.html

Also, we recently did an interview, the first part of which was published today: http://www.ldsmag.com/poetry/071227interview.html

Part two is soon to follow.

You can buy a copy of Curses for Your Sake here: http://www.amazon.com/Curses-Your-Sake-Javen-Tanner

Howdy Folks

Howdy Folks. We are the Tanners. About a year ago we moved from New York City to Salt Lake City. We decided to create this blog as an easy means to keeping in touch with friends and family.

This summer we drove back east to Vermont and New York. Tara worked on her Masters Degree at Breadloaf--which, this summer, included writing a new play; writing research on the confluence of Pound, Yeats, Noh Drama, and the Irish Theatre; and developing a new curriculum for Drama in the Classroom. I directed a neutral mask workshop for Handcart Ensemble in the city, pretended to write some new poems, and found out I won best actor at the New York Independent Film Festival. Smashing, isn't it?

We got our copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at midnight. We read it as a family, and enjoyed it very much. River and Rain spent the summer reading, swinging in the hammock, swimming in the river, investigating eighteenth and nineteenth century cemeteries, climbing the weeping willow, etc.

We hit seventeen states driving there and back again, and...well, we're back.

Without Wax,

Javen Tanner


Wall Drug, South Dakota

Badlands

Johnny Cash Bus. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Lake Erie

Our back yard in Vermont

Weeping Willow

Gazebo Flowers and Rain Flower

Back Yard 2

Munger Street Swimming Hole, New Haven, VT

Toad

John Tanner Home, Bolton Landing, NY

Grooving in Palmyra

Sacred Grove

Niagra Falls

Kirtland Temple

Remembrance Rock. Carl Sandburg Grave. Galesburg, IL

Trail of Hope. Nauvoo, IL

River learns the ropes. Nauvoo

Spun Gold. Nauvoo

Exhausted in Nauvoo

Adam-ondi-Ahman