Vulnerability of Order [Paperback]

Martine Bellen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

Wildness and disorder. Martine Bellen's third collection of poetry taps into the chaotic and irrepressible spirit which inspires artistic expression. Whether exploiting philosophical fragments from ancient Greece or penetrating the rituals of the great world religions, Bellen is in search of a model through which artists might organize the expansiveness of the human spirit.

"Bellen is a sensualist with a taste for vernacular as refined as C.D. Wright's…—Bellen's giddy, insouciant renderings of our thickly mythic polis seem fresh, and appear to create their author from the tactile fragments of the text."—Publishers Weekly

Martine Bellen's Tales of Murasaki won the 1999 National Poetry Series Award. She lives in New York.

For the Saturday Evening Girls' Pottery Club

Please, oh please, spread something sweet
Over my shredded wheat

That rests upon this yellow plate,
fired in its biscuit state.

Mystic swastika hands abound,
Fortune, luck, well-being found,

And bowls with bands of ducks
and trees, ring around the ABCs.

Hand-thrown pots incised in ink;
Still-soft clay initials sink.

Please, today, come sip some tea
with small designs, each cup's jolie,

The harmony lies not in line
But deeper in the object's rhyme.

Magic Musee for Joseph Cornell

(excerpt)

She, who's overconscious of her cage
Formed from heat, moisture, frost, concealment,

How it drips, freezes, fogs
How it forms columnar cracks gashed with glass

Toward the blue peninsula, gravity flight
The visible half of reflection

Attempting to obtain the solidity of an object

Or to remove the clothing of sound, genealogical anxiety,
Disrobing at the hotel Eden

Inventing a way in
To that which is built over concept

Pochahontas

(excerpt)

Too far away to be
seen singly, they come

Together. The coat-wearing
People. They come

On floating isles. Carry
Thunder sticks. They look

For back seas where clove
And mulberry grow. They come

From beyond the gr

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Playful, linguistically nuanced and jaggedly jazzed, the poems of Bellen's third collection come at an old philosophical problem with the very latest aesthetic tools. The various series of lyrical fragments and abstracted aphorisms here are pitched toward the capital "O" "Order" of the title, in the sense of wanting to gently blow down teleology's house of cards. As Bellen's speaker puts it in "Cuccina": "The most beautiful order is still/ A random collection/ of things insignificant in themselves." Bellen (Tales of Murasaki) revels in Stevensian riddles and red-herrings ("If every butterfly were smoke, would all perception/ Fall to smell? If every wing were paper-white, would// All perception end in sight?") and doggerel-based silliness: "Please, oh please, spread something sweet/ Over my shredded wheat// That rests upon this yellow plate,/ fired in the biscuit state." The latter mode works toward irony in some poems ("Perennials"), while falling flat in others ("For the Saturday Evenings Girls' Pottery Club"). Yet the more serious pieces contain zen-like assertions: "God rests in the odd/ Clamor." The Joyce lift ("God is a shout in the street") and pun on "odd" are just two of this line's trajectories, distracting enough to make readers forget the problem at hand.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Martine Bellen, author of two previous books of poetry, is a senior editor for Conjunctions. She has been a professor of writing at NYU, Hunter College, and others, and has worked as an editor at Carool & Graf and Henry Holt. Her awards include an American Academy of Poets Award. Her book Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems won the 1997 National Poetry Series Award.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press; 1 edition (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556591578
• ISBN-13: 978-1556591570
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,330,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Martine Bellen is the author of six collections of poetry including THE VULNERABILITY OF ORDER (Copper Canyon Press); TALES OF MURASAKI AND OTHER POEMS (Sun & Moon Press), which won the National Poetry Series Award; and GHOSTS! (Spuyten Dyvil Press). A bilingual collection of her poetry has been published in Germany by Verlag im Waldgut (translator, Hans Jürgen Balmes). She has written the libretto for OVIDIANA, an opera based on Ovid's METAMORPHOSES (composer, Matthew Greenbaum) that has been performed in New York City and Philadelphia. She has collaborated with David Rosenboom on AH! OPERA NO-OPERA, a pioneering collective work, that's been co-composed and performed by creators from around the globe. Its world premiere was in September 2009 (for more information, visit www.ah-opera.org) at REDCAT in L.A. Her novella 2X(SQUARED) has just been published by BlazeVOX [books].

Ms. Bellen's poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, including SAINTS OF HYSTERIA: A HALF CENTURY OF COLLABORATIVE POETRY (Soft Skull Press), IN OUR OWN WORDS: A GENERATION DEFINING ITSELF (MWE), THE CONVERGENCE OF BIRDS: WRITING INSPIRED BY JOSEPH CORNELL (DAP) and THIS ART (Copper Canyon Press). She has been a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Academy of Poets Award and has been awarded a residency by the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center in Italy. Bellen is a contributing editor of the literary journal CONJUNCTIONS and is on the Belladonna* Collaborative.