Glistening With Blood: A Review of A Bellyful of Anarchy
by Todd Moore
Some books are written in ink. Some books are still banged out on the typewriter, a glass of beer pushed off to the side, the floor swimming with old papers and books. It really doesn’t matter how you get the words down, if they don’t have the taste of blood smeared on them they’re not going to matter.
A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY by Rob Plath, Epic Rites Press, $25, is a book written, painted, and glistening with blood. I had heard about Plath’s book for months before I actually received a copy. The buzz on ANARCHY was everywhere and the more I heard about it, the more I wanted to read it since anarchy is one of my all time favorite words. Since chaos is both my nightmare and my reality.
The whole concept of anarchy seems as though it would be perfectly suited for a former student of Allen Ginsberg. The kind of existential and social anarchy found in HOWL, the kind of personal and political chaos found in KADDISH. However, there really isn’t a trace of Ginsberg’s influence anywhere in these poems. But there are the nuances and sounds of other poets’ voices.
god’s jumpstarted heart
i have to admit that more than
the desire for the end of my own
self
i wish for the finish of everything
apocalyptic day dreamer
i fantasize about those moments
when everything quits itself
when the cowardice of movement
is crushed by the bravery
of stationary-hood
& a silence never heard
arrives
thick & deafening
god’s jumpstarted heart
—from A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY
In his dedication, Rob Plath singles out Nietzsche and Baudelaire for special attention. And, there certainly is a feel of Zarathustra and his moment in ANARCHY. “There cometh the tarantula willingly: Welcome, tarantula! Black on thy back is thy triangle and symbol; and I know also what is in thy soul.”—from an old Modern Library Edition of THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, translated by Thomas Common.
Plath’s “god’s jumpstarted heart” is most definitely one of Nietzsche’s children, a cherry bomb aimed at the void. And, no doubt, there is Charles Baudelaire’s voice going subliminally in this poem. Especially the Baudelaire of FLEURS DU MAL. But, if you listen closely you can also catch those blunt, toxic cadences of Ted Hughes’ CROW. The crow of CROW is one of the major metaphors for anarchy in twentieth century British poetry. And, the power of that sequence and the strength of that archetypal character is still being felt everywhere.
So, it is obvious that Plath has done his homework and then some as a poet. However, anyone who knows anything at all about the small press will understand that these kinds of influences are not uncommon to any writer who has suffered through the angst and the pressure of writing in the american small press. Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Hughes represent powerful voices and examples of what it means to write, essentially, to tear the old dead culture that we’ve been brought up with, out by the roots and to burn it and try to begin again.
Plath’s A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY is a book that explodes sui generis onto the scene. And, I am sure that there were little hints, small fascinating clues that Plath dropped along the way in his seven previous chapbooks. But, there are few discerning critics in the small press. Most small press critics are more often than not book reviewers as well as poets. They really don’t have the time to track another poet’s psychic origins or destinations because they also write poetry as well. However, that doesn’t mean that interesting and even important books don’t get published in the small press. They do but more often than not they get overlooked or simply neglected.
A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY is one of those seminal books. Though, I doubt it will be one to drop between the cracks. And, I think it’s fair to start out by saying it could easily be placed next to ZARATHUSTRA or FLEURS DU MAL on the discrete reader’s book shelf. Or, choose two other important books that carry their kind of power. Whatever, it’s the kind of book that kicks its way through the doors of culture and announces itself as a separate and necessary phenomenon. And, there is no doubt that this book is a phenomenon. First, ANARCHY is definitely an ambitious book, the same way that say Crane;s THE BRIDGE or Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND were intended to be important books. Second, a three hundred page book of poetry appearing in either the mainstream press or the small press is, by nature of its length, an ambitious book. Not all three hundred page books of poetry are important, but when you come across one that is, you instantly know it. These are the kinds of books that can easily burn you alive.
verbal demolition
i wanna write books no one ever sells back
even when starving
& stole in the first place to possess
i wanna write books that make people hide
from homo sapiens or get drunk
& spit in their faces
i wanna write books that people carry in their
glove compartments
w/ a flask & a pack of cigarettes,
true pamphlets of chaos
i wanna write books that if used in classrooms
would get the teacher fired
& beat up by the parents
i wanna write books that are verbal
documentaries of demolitions
i wanna write books that make people realize
grammar is poetry’s bitch
to slap around & kick out if desired
i wanna write books that make people use pages
of the bible
to wipe their car’s oil dipstick
i wanna write books that make other poets never
read me again
blacklisted by my own kind &/or not my own
kind
i wanna write books whose pages are paper cuts
across the eyeball
i wanna write books that make readers discover
& /or rediscover their middle finger
i wanna write books that make people feel
pussified for using polysyllabic words
i wanna write books that make people take a shit
on a thesaurus
i wanna write books that make people want to
call in sick more often
& care less about brain & kidney cells
i wanna write books that replace suicide hotlines
i wanna write books that make people skip the wake
& head straight to the pub
i wanna write books that make people stop
shooting up hypodermic needles full of
seriousness & stop snorting perfection
i want to write books that make people laugh at
lapels & trample on neckties & get dressed off
the floor
i wanna write books that make people fart while the
pope is speaking
i wanna write books that euthanize euphemisms
once & for all
i wanna write books that make people see that
most people are cardboard cut-outs & to kick
them over
i wanna write books that make people fine
w/ their ribcage cradling their organs
& rocking them in their bony arms
i wanna write books that make people ignite
my pages, smear the ashes beneath their eyes
like war-paint & go out to scalp
the false wig from society’s vain skull
—from A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY
Even if you don’t read all of ANARCHY, it is one of those few compelling books of poetry I have read cover to cover in years. Reading “verbal demolition” really tips you off as to where Plath has been and maybe even where he is headed. The lines quoted below are part of Rob Plath’s history. In fact, they are part of your collective history if you are a poet writing in the twenty first century.
Throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc., overboard from the Ship of Modernity.
Excerpted from the manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, cowritten by D. Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Victory Khlebnikov, from NIGHT WRAPS THE SKY, Writings by and about Vladimir Mayakovsky, edited by Michael Almereyda, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008.
The manifesto was published as part of the Russian Futurist movement in 1912. Which suggests that the tradition of attacking all the old cultural ideas and icons is at least a hundred years old if not more. However, Plath’s poem “verbal demolition,” and movements such as The New Brutalist Poetry and The Outlaw Poetry Generation, as well as well as a whole body of essays I have written strongly hint that we have reached a dead end in the arts and it is indeed time for some kind of arts revolution. Which is the subject for more frontal assaults against the wreckage that we call poetry. But, that is the subject for another essay.
The poems in ANARCHY arc back and forth among three poles which are the whole idea of writing poetry at all: Plath’s personal take on the human condition, Plath’s life as it relates to his poetry, and Plath’s father. That last subject is intimately connected to the way that he feels about his perception of order, the family, and the establishment at large. The reason I have this feeling about Plath’s father is that I understand this revolt on a personal level. You cannot become the god of your own poetry unless you kill that other god or demon impersonating a god who has at one time or another controlled you. The father. And, if ANARCHY is anything it is poetry as parricide. Essentially, it has to be if you as a poet are going to function and create at all.
father’s day
my father was
too controlling
too gestapo-natured
to over drink
but i still
fantasize
about him
suffering
a bad case
of whiskey dick
on that night
in may 1969
& those
ugly
microscopic
tadpoles
never making
it out of his
limp member
& me maybe
being
lost in
a hangover
jerk off
the morning
after
shot into
the toilet
& sent
swimming thru
the dark pipes
beneath the
brooklyn streets
unborn at last
—from A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY
Because Plath’s poetry takes no prisoners and suffers no fools, he will and probably already has offended those poets who still hold family, some semblance of religion, hope, love, and the whole mythic superstructure of the possibility of an after life at least semi sacred. Plath openly does not and he is brave to do that. In fact, ANARCHY is not just an attack on those values. It is also an attack on death itself. Which puts it directly in that tradition where poets deliberately seem to challenge the potency of death as though death has somehow morphed into a psychic super personality which must be challenged the same way that a corrupt artistic establishment must also be challenged.
playing simon says w/death
one day you’ll play a game
of ‘simon says’
w/ death
death will be a bully
of course & be simon
death will begin
w/ easy demands
“simon says breathe in
& out…”
“simon says walk
across the floor…”
etc…
but he’ll gain speed
& you’ll finally get confused
& fuck up
& then you’ll step out
of that strange suit of skin
& you’ll let go of
yr organs like you let
a sack of apples & oranges
fall to the floor
& roll in many directions
& you’ll stand w/ the other
losers
a crowd of shapes stripped
down to the bones
but no worries
nobody ever wins
—from A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY
That last line is a common and very constant thread that winds through the entire collection of ANARCHY. In a large sense, this book is a secular american book of the dead. Only the bardo here is located somewhere in this life rather than the after life. The bardo here is where death enters life to test those who are daily beginning to drop whatever semblances of skin they have left. Death is the boogey man coming to get you. Naturally, you think you can escape him at high speed.
accelerate like a motherfucker
yesterday
when i
was on
the highway
a hearse
passed me
then a pick-up
w/ two upright
porta-potty’s
in the back
then a large
flatbed truck
hauling 6 cesspools
strapped
to its back
all these
receptacles
of waste & death
flying by me
under the cloudless
blue summer sky
then i saw my face
in the rear view
unshaven, pale
a skull wrapped
in pasty, stubbly skin
& i accelerated
like a motherfucker
—from A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY
But you really can’t escape. When I said Plath takes no prisoners, I meant it. He doesn’t even exempt himself and maybe this is what I like about Plath’s ANARCHY most of all. He is demonically merciless about the way that he appears in his poetry. And, yes, we could argue that Plath’s depiction of himself becomes a fictional representation, an I that only exists for the poem. However, I think I am right when I say that for that to happen there has to be an actual I to start with.
There is so much more that could be written about A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY, but there are plenty of future critics out there who probably will take advantage of that opportunity. Needless to say, Rob Plath has undoubtedly written a masterpiece, a book that is not like any other book I know of in the last thirty or forty years. At least in the mainstream press. We may have to go back to THE DREAM SONGS and ARIEL, books that blew the windows out and the doors open toward another new way of looking at things.
One last word. Plath is a merciless poet. He is not afraid of drawing blood, even his own. He will blow psychic holes in your being. He will leave you wounded. Unless you were wounded from a long time before.
—Todd Moore
A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY by Rob Plath, Epic Rites Press, $25, is a book written, painted, and glistening with blood. I had heard about Plath’s book for months before I actually received a copy. The buzz on ANARCHY was everywhere and the more I heard about it, the more I wanted to read it since anarchy is one of my all time favorite words. Since chaos is both my nightmare and my reality.
The whole concept of anarchy seems as though it would be perfectly suited for a former student of Allen Ginsberg. The kind of existential and social anarchy found in HOWL, the kind of personal and political chaos found in KADDISH. However, there really isn’t a trace of Ginsberg’s influence anywhere in these poems. But there are the nuances and sounds of other poets’ voices.
god’s jumpstarted heart
i have to admit that more than
the desire for the end of my own
self
i wish for the finish of everything
apocalyptic day dreamer
i fantasize about those moments
when everything quits itself
when the cowardice of movement
is crushed by the bravery
of stationary-hood
& a silence never heard
arrives
thick & deafening
god’s jumpstarted heart
—from A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY
In his dedication, Rob Plath singles out Nietzsche and Baudelaire for special attention. And, there certainly is a feel of Zarathustra and his moment in ANARCHY. “There cometh the tarantula willingly: Welcome, tarantula! Black on thy back is thy triangle and symbol; and I know also what is in thy soul.”—from an old Modern Library Edition of THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, translated by Thomas Common.
Plath’s “god’s jumpstarted heart” is most definitely one of Nietzsche’s children, a cherry bomb aimed at the void. And, no doubt, there is Charles Baudelaire’s voice going subliminally in this poem. Especially the Baudelaire of FLEURS DU MAL. But, if you listen closely you can also catch those blunt, toxic cadences of Ted Hughes’ CROW. The crow of CROW is one of the major metaphors for anarchy in twentieth century British poetry. And, the power of that sequence and the strength of that archetypal character is still being felt everywhere.
So, it is obvious that Plath has done his homework and then some as a poet. However, anyone who knows anything at all about the small press will understand that these kinds of influences are not uncommon to any writer who has suffered through the angst and the pressure of writing in the american small press. Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Hughes represent powerful voices and examples of what it means to write, essentially, to tear the old dead culture that we’ve been brought up with, out by the roots and to burn it and try to begin again.
Plath’s A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY is a book that explodes sui generis onto the scene. And, I am sure that there were little hints, small fascinating clues that Plath dropped along the way in his seven previous chapbooks. But, there are few discerning critics in the small press. Most small press critics are more often than not book reviewers as well as poets. They really don’t have the time to track another poet’s psychic origins or destinations because they also write poetry as well. However, that doesn’t mean that interesting and even important books don’t get published in the small press. They do but more often than not they get overlooked or simply neglected.
A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY is one of those seminal books. Though, I doubt it will be one to drop between the cracks. And, I think it’s fair to start out by saying it could easily be placed next to ZARATHUSTRA or FLEURS DU MAL on the discrete reader’s book shelf. Or, choose two other important books that carry their kind of power. Whatever, it’s the kind of book that kicks its way through the doors of culture and announces itself as a separate and necessary phenomenon. And, there is no doubt that this book is a phenomenon. First, ANARCHY is definitely an ambitious book, the same way that say Crane;s THE BRIDGE or Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND were intended to be important books. Second, a three hundred page book of poetry appearing in either the mainstream press or the small press is, by nature of its length, an ambitious book. Not all three hundred page books of poetry are important, but when you come across one that is, you instantly know it. These are the kinds of books that can easily burn you alive.
verbal demolition
i wanna write books no one ever sells back
even when starving
& stole in the first place to possess
i wanna write books that make people hide
from homo sapiens or get drunk
& spit in their faces
i wanna write books that people carry in their
glove compartments
w/ a flask & a pack of cigarettes,
true pamphlets of chaos
i wanna write books that if used in classrooms
would get the teacher fired
& beat up by the parents
i wanna write books that are verbal
documentaries of demolitions
i wanna write books that make people realize
grammar is poetry’s bitch
to slap around & kick out if desired
i wanna write books that make people use pages
of the bible
to wipe their car’s oil dipstick
i wanna write books that make other poets never
read me again
blacklisted by my own kind &/or not my own
kind
i wanna write books whose pages are paper cuts
across the eyeball
i wanna write books that make readers discover
& /or rediscover their middle finger
i wanna write books that make people feel
pussified for using polysyllabic words
i wanna write books that make people take a shit
on a thesaurus
i wanna write books that make people want to
call in sick more often
& care less about brain & kidney cells
i wanna write books that replace suicide hotlines
i wanna write books that make people skip the wake
& head straight to the pub
i wanna write books that make people stop
shooting up hypodermic needles full of
seriousness & stop snorting perfection
i want to write books that make people laugh at
lapels & trample on neckties & get dressed off
the floor
i wanna write books that make people fart while the
pope is speaking
i wanna write books that euthanize euphemisms
once & for all
i wanna write books that make people see that
most people are cardboard cut-outs & to kick
them over
i wanna write books that make people fine
w/ their ribcage cradling their organs
& rocking them in their bony arms
i wanna write books that make people ignite
my pages, smear the ashes beneath their eyes
like war-paint & go out to scalp
the false wig from society’s vain skull
—from A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY
Even if you don’t read all of ANARCHY, it is one of those few compelling books of poetry I have read cover to cover in years. Reading “verbal demolition” really tips you off as to where Plath has been and maybe even where he is headed. The lines quoted below are part of Rob Plath’s history. In fact, they are part of your collective history if you are a poet writing in the twenty first century.
Throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc., overboard from the Ship of Modernity.
Excerpted from the manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, cowritten by D. Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Victory Khlebnikov, from NIGHT WRAPS THE SKY, Writings by and about Vladimir Mayakovsky, edited by Michael Almereyda, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008.
The manifesto was published as part of the Russian Futurist movement in 1912. Which suggests that the tradition of attacking all the old cultural ideas and icons is at least a hundred years old if not more. However, Plath’s poem “verbal demolition,” and movements such as The New Brutalist Poetry and The Outlaw Poetry Generation, as well as well as a whole body of essays I have written strongly hint that we have reached a dead end in the arts and it is indeed time for some kind of arts revolution. Which is the subject for more frontal assaults against the wreckage that we call poetry. But, that is the subject for another essay.
The poems in ANARCHY arc back and forth among three poles which are the whole idea of writing poetry at all: Plath’s personal take on the human condition, Plath’s life as it relates to his poetry, and Plath’s father. That last subject is intimately connected to the way that he feels about his perception of order, the family, and the establishment at large. The reason I have this feeling about Plath’s father is that I understand this revolt on a personal level. You cannot become the god of your own poetry unless you kill that other god or demon impersonating a god who has at one time or another controlled you. The father. And, if ANARCHY is anything it is poetry as parricide. Essentially, it has to be if you as a poet are going to function and create at all.
father’s day
my father was
too controlling
too gestapo-natured
to over drink
but i still
fantasize
about him
suffering
a bad case
of whiskey dick
on that night
in may 1969
& those
ugly
microscopic
tadpoles
never making
it out of his
limp member
& me maybe
being
lost in
a hangover
jerk off
the morning
after
shot into
the toilet
& sent
swimming thru
the dark pipes
beneath the
brooklyn streets
unborn at last
—from A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY
Because Plath’s poetry takes no prisoners and suffers no fools, he will and probably already has offended those poets who still hold family, some semblance of religion, hope, love, and the whole mythic superstructure of the possibility of an after life at least semi sacred. Plath openly does not and he is brave to do that. In fact, ANARCHY is not just an attack on those values. It is also an attack on death itself. Which puts it directly in that tradition where poets deliberately seem to challenge the potency of death as though death has somehow morphed into a psychic super personality which must be challenged the same way that a corrupt artistic establishment must also be challenged.
playing simon says w/death
one day you’ll play a game
of ‘simon says’
w/ death
death will be a bully
of course & be simon
death will begin
w/ easy demands
“simon says breathe in
& out…”
“simon says walk
across the floor…”
etc…
but he’ll gain speed
& you’ll finally get confused
& fuck up
& then you’ll step out
of that strange suit of skin
& you’ll let go of
yr organs like you let
a sack of apples & oranges
fall to the floor
& roll in many directions
& you’ll stand w/ the other
losers
a crowd of shapes stripped
down to the bones
but no worries
nobody ever wins
—from A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY
That last line is a common and very constant thread that winds through the entire collection of ANARCHY. In a large sense, this book is a secular american book of the dead. Only the bardo here is located somewhere in this life rather than the after life. The bardo here is where death enters life to test those who are daily beginning to drop whatever semblances of skin they have left. Death is the boogey man coming to get you. Naturally, you think you can escape him at high speed.
accelerate like a motherfucker
yesterday
when i
was on
the highway
a hearse
passed me
then a pick-up
w/ two upright
porta-potty’s
in the back
then a large
flatbed truck
hauling 6 cesspools
strapped
to its back
all these
receptacles
of waste & death
flying by me
under the cloudless
blue summer sky
then i saw my face
in the rear view
unshaven, pale
a skull wrapped
in pasty, stubbly skin
& i accelerated
like a motherfucker
—from A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY
But you really can’t escape. When I said Plath takes no prisoners, I meant it. He doesn’t even exempt himself and maybe this is what I like about Plath’s ANARCHY most of all. He is demonically merciless about the way that he appears in his poetry. And, yes, we could argue that Plath’s depiction of himself becomes a fictional representation, an I that only exists for the poem. However, I think I am right when I say that for that to happen there has to be an actual I to start with.
There is so much more that could be written about A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY, but there are plenty of future critics out there who probably will take advantage of that opportunity. Needless to say, Rob Plath has undoubtedly written a masterpiece, a book that is not like any other book I know of in the last thirty or forty years. At least in the mainstream press. We may have to go back to THE DREAM SONGS and ARIEL, books that blew the windows out and the doors open toward another new way of looking at things.
One last word. Plath is a merciless poet. He is not afraid of drawing blood, even his own. He will blow psychic holes in your being. He will leave you wounded. Unless you were wounded from a long time before.
—Todd Moore
