Tendril

by Bin Ramke

In his ninth poetry collection, Mr. Ramke exposes the myriad tendrils that bind together to become experience. Both intensely intimate and profoundly objective, his lyrically elegant, vibrantly elastic sentences allow a reader to follow the personal, cultural, literary, philosophic, artistic threads that intertwine to create our conscious understandings. Mr. Ramke examines not only the impact of family, culture, class, gender, historical moment, landscape, but also the ways that the language we use becomes for us the skein of our reality. From inch worm moths to Gregg shorthand, from trash-fishing on the bayou to the horrors of world war, from the healing powers of teatime and the impact of great art and literature to the profound devastation of the floods upon our southern landscape and the people who struggle to live on there, Bin Ramke shows us how the tendrils of meaning running through them all are made of words, which weave together to form the fabric of our lives.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

Reviews

[Simone · Rating 2 out of 5]

sorry aimee, i really wanted to like this one, but i couldn’t. while both ramke and i clearly uphold a poetics of language, i had to sort through a catastrophic quantity of homonyms and homophones and alliteration in direct proximity, which was a quirk of voice that quickly began to grate.

the worst offender was the introductory ars poetica, which contains the lines: “someone said: aye, but buy, eat. Beauty / is as beauty used. Does its duty. Did. Used to: / be a duty. If to anagrams you add a letter, / a dull entry into the eager ledger, ‘beautiful’ / becomes a full form of future, of could if / you would have it.”

you can add as many letters to anagrams as you would like, but it doesn’t automatically imbue the language with the music of stein. which brings me to a broader critique of the collection (which of course is almost certainly a failing on my part); i could not find the inner spirit or music of these poems. they’re all quite clever, but to me personally, as a reader, they ring somewhat hollow.

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bin Ramke pushes musicality (alliteration, internal rhyme, sliding of word to similar sounding word) to a point I almost find unbearable. Words as particles, flickering into existence for an instant and then poof!, disintegrating to energy only, then re-emerging as a different word: word sparks word here; combustion; alchemy of element to element, yet carrying the trace of each prior (or simultaneous) word with it, into it: “tension, tender, tendril, attend:” (106) Somehow, Ramke manages to hold me delightfully and instructively on the brink. At the same time, he gets a lot said: this is erudite poetry, infused with reading, with source material. For all his focus on musicality, Ramke does not abandon ideas. These are not just tone poems. Rather, deliciousness of language is fused with thought and story. There is much here about boyhood in a particular world, or if nor boyhood, then a particular boy. A boy who has a sister, always a double. And a madhouse established in 1796 that had the following rule: “When a patient could properly behave at tea, he was released.” A question comes to my mind from Richard Power’s novel The Goldbug Variations: “How many places are there?” However many there are, Ramke's poetry proves that there are more than we can count. Niches are, for all practical purposes, infinite.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ramke's lines are often heavily enjambed and full of puns and wordplay, tumbling, turning in on themselves until you forget which way he is going. Often meditating on change, his poetics embody this concern. And while employs a lot of word play, his tone is not irreverent; it is also, usually, not overly self serious. Especially considering his interst in entymology, if I were Ezra Pound I just might classify large swathes of this book as logopoeia. The middle sections, in their concerns with awareness and composition, seem largely devoid of anything close to an image. Exmpl:

I don't know where this conviction arose,
mine, that beauty is chiral, left or right
handed a spiral of aspiration engaged...
-Performing Art (44)

Oh, and as you can see here, his diction is mostly on the elevated side of things.

Okay--that's what kind of book it is. As for what I think of it: the final sequence "Tendril," "An Esthetic (Ars Poetica," and "The Last Days of Godel" are all worth multiple reads. "The last days..." strategically reigns in his often long, sinous lines to devastating effect and injects quotes into the poem (another of Ramke's compositional strategies) without ejecting the reader from the poem. The poem is also succesful, I think, because it has a firm context--a dying thinker.
Here's a quote with some of that mid-poem quote texture.

...A little life
was not enough, still he will not move
but feels a light
particular caress.

Further more, when his wife returned from his funeral,
a burglar had broken in and jewelry and other goods
had been stolen. I felt then
resentment against modern
times as well as American society --Gaisi Takeuti

Consider a hand on your back:
his best hand takes your right hand and
both feel the day descend piece by piece

...

The middling poems here lose out from this lack of context--not because poems need context, but because some of the poems where he throws in the kitchen sink--epic, convoluted lines, a more organic structure, etymology, quotations--aren't long enough to convinicingly hold together all this STUFF. Tendril is long enough to hold all these things, and it's a great poem.

Read this becaue I'm interested in authors who import other texts into their poems. Also trying for a better sense of what Omnidawn Press does. Though from what I can remember In the Archives is very different...

Put this one on the book shelf between Pound's Personae and John Sakkis' Gary Gygax.

[Lightsey]

I gave this the once-through. . . it was a discussion book for my poetry group. I don't feel as if I've read it, though, more like sleep-walked through it (which is possible, given my habit of reading in bed). I like it. . . some things about it. . . Ramke's unrepentant meandering is heartening, and I like how he deals with source material (a mix of clear quotation and unexplained borrowing, with a source list at the end). This one I need to read again, but not right away.
Related point--I've realized I don't read too many male poets, particularly not contemporary ones. Interesting.