Little Songs & Lyrics to Genji
Poems by Adam Penna
127pp
978-0-9798707-1-2  

About
Little Songs & Lyrics to Genji are two sequences of poems where, in the author’s words, he was attempting daily to “right” himself.

The poems of Little Songs take an unrhymed sonnet form that looks back to the religious work of Donne and Hopkins, and the autobiographical element in Dante’s New Life, to weave a spiritual meditation on the natural world and the sacred minutiae of everyday living. In each poem we are shown suburban streets, homes, and front-yards, and the trees and animals and human inhabitants that fill those spaces, all presented through the mind of the quietly-seeing poet. What we emerge with is a evocation of a world akin to Wallace Stevens’s vision of New Haven, alive with eternity.

The poems in Lyrics to Genji are filled with the same subjects, but approach them more playfully. Addressed to an invisible friend named Genji (a name which means “treasure”), the poet begs answers to the universal and mundane questions of his day (“Genji, do you have a brother?”, “Who could bear a full life, Genji?”), and ruminates over recurring dreams, childhood memories, questions of ethical responsibility as well as home repair, and the frequent, mischievous presence of Genji’s wife. Whereas Little Songs approaches something like direct prayer, Lyrics to Genji come closer to Zen meditations, or koans.

The overall vision of this unique collection is one of abiding mystery and gratitude for the natural and invisible worlds, and for a state of quiet contemplation that brings such awareness about. As the poet says to his friend: “I’m grateful, Genji./How do I know?/I sing.”

 

Reviews
Midwest Book Review

A poem can be a self-induced therapy. Little Songs & Lyrics to Genji is in a way, two volumes of poetry, as Adam Penna presents two trains of thought on his works of poetry. The Little Songs half focuses on the spiritual side of the world, while Lyrics to Genji focuses on friendship and memories, among other subjects. Little Songs & Lyrics to Genji is a unique team of poetry, highly recommended.
 

From the Author

Originally posted here
Next month, S4N Books releases my first full-length collection of poems, Little Songs & Lyrics to Genji.  Actually, the book contains not one full-length collection, but two long sequences. The first, “Little Songs,” is a series of sonnet-like poems presented in the order in which they were written.  The second, “Lyrics to Genji,” addresses an imaginary friend named Genji. These, too, are presented in the order in which they were written, and try to explore the same material “Little Songs” do, but from another, more playful perspective.  ”Lyrics to Genji” is a response to a rejection letter I received after submitting some of the “Little Songs” to a magazine where I had always had luck publishing.  The editor of the magazine wrote me a handwritten note suggesting, for his tastes, my little songs were too sad.

When I began to write the little songs, the aim was merely to right myself each day.  These poems served as daily meditations, and so if they take a more spiritual or even devotional tone this is one of the reasons.  If you read the rest of the blog, you’ll see that, indeed, the poet’s attitude toward the spirit and the divine is a preoccupation of mine.  Further, I have suggested it ought to be a central concern for all poets and readers of poetry.  I can’t imagine an entirely secular poetry worth reading.  Every poet, and this ought to be especially true of American poets, I think, is a religious poet.  I mean religious, of course, in the widest possible sense of the word, and mean it to include those affiliated with a certain brand of religion and those who have found what suffices elsewhere.

It may be fair to say that this book, beginning with the little songs and ending with the lyrics, are the narrative of my spiritual attitudes as they developed over the course of more than a year.  My spirit has been and continues to be restless and curious.  And I find the more I search the more certain I am there is something to be found, and the more certain I am that almost all of my previous notions have been just as misguided as they have been earnest.  In fact, while it is safe to say that these poems accurately catalogue a desire for truth, they are also a chronicle of failures.  They  must be, because even the best poems must fail.  However close they come, that which a poem seeks to define always lies just beyond its power to say. It is because of this that Whitman calls for strong readers.  Strong readers are ones that read keeping in mind that these are only outlines.

I have written a lot about what the uses of poetry are.  It many ways the poems in this book are the proving ground for those ideas.  Maybe it is more accurate to say that the entries here are extensions of notions, which were first discovered in these sequences.  I have followed the line of thinking, which I first read in Emerson, that says a man might put his faith in the fact that his work will cohere because there is something coherent in being.  This, then, isn’t only a literary or poetic faith, but a faith I have found to be true of my actions in the world.  These things we do mean something, and it is the job of faith to find what they mean with a full heart, a broken heart, or a heart on the mend.  Who could or would avoid such a charge would avoid all of life.  Or all of life worth living.

I have said that a poet, because he is a poet, may not be a better person but, because he writes poetry, is a better person than he would otherwise be.  I understand that this argument is an especially romantic one, but I mean it with all humility.  I didn’t write these poems, neither have I ever put pen to paper, because I thought that what I had to say was worth much to anyone else.  The writing of these poems, and all poems, is as selfish an art as one might endeavor to perfect.  And yet I can’t help but think that, at its best, poetry makes it possible, if nothing else, for the self, the weary, the silly and self-seeking atom, to escape those traps and blind alleys and find, in the end, the paradise it wanted to find.  I have not come to that walled-garden yet, but already I smell the fragrance of joy.  Perhaps it is just beyond.  Perhaps it is all around.


About the Author
Adam Penna lives in East Moriches, New York, with his wife, and teaches at Suffolk County Community College. He is the author of The Love of a Sleeper (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and his poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Cider Press Review, The Basilica Review and Verse Daily. His blog is at adampenna.wordpress.com.

Press
Article from Southampton Press

The Lit World: Poems from History
by Tim Miller
64pp
0-9798707-1-2  

About the Book
The Lit World begins with God's voice just before creation, and ends with the destruction of Europe and the last days in Hitler's bunker. The poems between follow these two, either in their focus on atrocity and violence—a Roman consul's mistaken campaigns in the Middle East, a Byzantine Emperor's blinding of thousands of prisoners of war, the drowning and execution of citizens and clergy during the French Revolution, and the many wars against Native Americans in the West; or in looking to a more contemplative and peaceful life, with monologues from Siberian and Australian shamans, Catholic saints, and a Hindu priest who easily dismisses Alexander the Great's invitation to take him on his campaigns.

There are also voices between these, from Walt Whitman looking back on his years away from New York before the Civil War, to Hart Crane's highest moment atop a Catholic church in Mexico, celebrating an Aztec festival; from the Roman Cato of Utica, a suicide, surprised to find himself at the base of Dante's Mount Purgatory, to a sequence of poems from prehistory, imagining the world's first artists and priests painting in the caves of France and Spain amid music and ritual.


Reviews
Midwest Book Review
The entirety of human existence is filled with plenty of inspiration, and Tim Miller has taken it. "The Lit World" is a collection of poems based on times throughout known human history from Genesis to the end of the tyrannical time of Adolf Hitler. The verse offers new ways of looking at these vital events, making "The Lit World" a unique compendium of poetry.


Poet Michael S. Begnal
Tim Miller’s poetry collection The Lit World (S4N Books, 2008) is a compact little book (52 pages), concise and honed. Subtitled “Poems from History,” it intends to inhabit the minds of numerous personages throughout time, and succeeds nicely. Beginning with the Hebrew creation myth, and including other Biblical tales (thus making “Poems from History” something of a misnomer, perhaps), Miller’s accomplished prose-poetry ranges across vast swathes of time.

An intriguing early poem here is “Beginning to Paint,” which references the date 18,000-11,000 BC. The ritualistic nature of early cave painting is explored: “as my fingers move, more of him appears: hooves: horns: full body & dark nose—& all smelling of juniper & sweating walls & unforgettable song.” Miller also mentions flutes, the subject of “On Making Flutes (40,000-28,000 BC)” (appropriately enough), thus creating a nice intertextual symmetry.

To my mind, one of the best pieces of the collection is “Those in the Jebel Sahaba Cemetery (10,000 BC),” which is also printed on the book’s back cover. It describes the victims of a 12,000-year-old battle, and insightfully intuits the mindset of those people who buried their dead “in pits with slabs overtop to protect them.” Miller continues, “& you find us all on our left sides: our heads facing south: our hands in front of our faces—you find us all arranged, arrayed, observed.” The slant rhyme of “arranged, arrayed” lends a musical quality to the conclusion, which seems to accord somehow with the reverence imparted to the ancient people with whom the poem engages.

“Trajan’s Bridge (c. 105)” is interesting on a couple of different levels. For one, it is actually written from the point of view of the bridge itself, an inanimate object. Also it addresses the reader, creating a kind of sudden postmodern awareness of this book as book: “I am only two stadiums long yet my length extends to your reading eyes.” The tone is accusatory, indicting the putative reader as shallow, concerned with commerce and transitory pleasures. It ends, “Even the Dacians knew of more than their senses. Consider them, or yourselves—you who are more submerged than me.” The reader of course is invited to see him- or herself here to one degree or another, or may also decline said invitation altogether.

Many of the poems in The Lit World are a comment on genocide and oppression, as for example “The Bulgarian Town of Batak (April, 1876)” deals with one of the various genocides committed but denied by the Turks. “Tecumseh (1811)” delineates a particular response to the genocide committed by the American government against American Indians, while, conversely, “William Tecumseh Sherman (October, 1868)” seeks to explore the viewpoint of a perpetrator. The collection ends with a sequence set in Hitler’s bunker, 1945. So, though Miller’s assessment of human history is ultimately a bleak and at times off-putting one, his poetry itself is absorbingly well-wrought, stripped and direct.


Teppichfresser Press
I’ve never personally met Tim Miller so I can’t make any wise cracks about his personal habits. All I can do is review this very excellent book The Lit World. [...] The chronological arrangement of the poems coupled with the range of topics, from Creation to WWII, threaded together with scenes of violence and death, demonstrate an attention to craft as well as human nature. Some personal favorites in the book are “Hart Crane”, “The Death of Marcus Licinius Crassus” and “Tecumseh”. The first deals, not with the death of poor Hart, but with one of his last real nights alive banging a drum on the roof of a Cathedral. The second reveals just how superficially humans can live and die and how it is really nothing new at all. The last reports a vow of righteous hatred and intended conflict. Each poem amounts to more than a profile and the add up in the telling directing the reader all the way to the climax in Hitler’s Bunker, which is examined in five separate parts.

The language is engaging and the prose style pays off. Were these pieces presented differently they would probably not be as good and the reader would get stuck on the intended delivery of a particular syllable and miss out on the content. [...]


ZYX
The dead speak, and sometimes inanimate objects like Hitler's bunker, giving testimony to the meanings of history and to what we can derive from mankind's short presence on the planet. [...] And so we see the cavalcade of human cruelty and folly, from legions of blinded Bulgarians after the Battle of Kleidon (1014), to the noyades (mass drownings) of Jean Baptiste Carrier in 1793. We have fetching moments in the human experience from pre-history through those times in the predictable periphery of the Mediterranean where God saw fit to reveal himself through acts, miracles and extraordinary symbolisms to an astonished world. I would suspect that Mr. Miller has had a solid Catholic education. God is always included in his musings. Of course it is possible that the deity is not involved in any of the insanity of history. It might be all random behavior on the part of the mordant anthropoids that inhabit the earth. Be that as it may, The Lit World is an interesting exercise on a fascinating subject. Miller deserves credit for tackling it but he has no more answers than anyone else.

 

About the Author

Tim Miller lives with his wife in Brooklyn. He is currently at work on a long narrative poem, To the House of the Sun.