Plum in Mr. Blum's Pudding, The : Poems by Tosh Berman (Success and Failure) by Tosh Berman

by Tosh Berman

The Plum in Mr. Blum’s Pudding is Los Angeles native Tosh Berman’s first printed collection of poetry. In 1989, Berman left the United States behind, moving to Japan after learning his wife's (artist Lun*na Menoh) mother was ill in Kitakyushu. The Plum in Mr. Blum’s Pudding was penned while both rapt and lost by this transition. Gracefully toiling between the quirky and earnest, these poems describe the liminal space of the foreigner caught between the strange and the familiar. The result is surreal and unclassifiable, a book of love poems overshadowed by isolation and underscored with curiosity and lust. Originally published in 1990 by “Cole Swift & Sons” (Japan) as a small hardcover edition of two hundred copies, this new edition acts to preserve this work and features an introduction by art critic and curator Kristine McKenna, an afterward by Tosh Berman, and additional content by Ruth Bernstein.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

I'm the publisher and editor of TamTam Books. I publish the works by and on Boris Vian, Guy Debord, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Mesrine and Ron Mael & Russell Mael (Sparks), and Lun*na Menoh.

My books are:

"Sparks-Tastic" (published by Rare Bird/A Barnacle Book).

"The Plum in Mr. Blum's Pudding" (published by Penny-Ante Editions)

"Tosh: Growing up in Wallace Berman's World" (City Lights Books) 2019

tosh.substack.com

Reviews

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tosh Berman's poetry collection "The Plum in Mr. Blum's Pudding" is full of unexpected associations, images, and jump-cuts. The poems are unfailingly charming, but they're also occasionally cut with poison, so that you're never certain what lurks around the next line break. The book is beautifully sequenced so each of the short pieces echoes off one another, creating a whole that's far more ineffable and mysterious than any individual verse. The writing is often masterful, but in an offhanded and understated way, refusing to call attention to its startling sleights of hand. It plays like an album of dislocated love songs, the meanings sometimes obscured, the yearning voices occasionally slipping into a foreign tongue -- but always seductive.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fifteen minutes it took me to read this book transported me to a place that lingers. So I reread it three more times to reinforce that place. And placed the book on my coffee table to place that place in the place where I live.

What kind of place? It is a heart on top of the head kind of place, with volcanoes and Glenn Gould, and the Sea of Japan making things sad and sticky and beautiful. It is a place where people die to the tune of a light pop tune. It is an innocent and a jaded place where sex skirts the edges. It is a place where pressed pants paint a poem with enviable off-handedness. A place with plenty of space and the stars above twinkling into cocktails. A place with a light touch that you know still wants to grope. So watch it!

Dromedary

Stars crashed on deck
Old wood, not as good as it used to be
The Japanese have an old saying
But I lost it back home

The World represents
A mirror
& I'll wash the smudges off

So please remember me
I have ten fingers
& they're all good for nothing

This is a work of a poet
With pressed pants


Debt

The Government forces at work
Making your dollars
Disappear in Amazon death

We suffer
If memory serves me
Don't lie to America
You're no Jack Kennedy

We kiss under beds
As if we were dead
The volcanoes are rips as bananas
"We'll get even now"
Under icy control
I lost my audience

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A review from the author - good god know! But on the other hand I will be doing an event for this book in Los Angeles at the incredible Skylight Bookstore on Vermont in Los Feliz.

Here's the info:

http://www.skylightbooks.com/event/to...

And here is the Facebook announcement for the November 21, 2014 signing and event for "The Plum in Mr. Blum's Pudding."

https://www.facebook.com/events/91179...

Dennis Cooper did a Tosh special blog with music, "Tosh Talks," and of course poetry.

http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blog...

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tosh Berman's poems have an edgy guildsmanship to them, they emerge from a kind of Venn diagram of West Coast surrealism, art world personalism, and pop classicism: "In that morbid June | I took a big gun | & with Tchaikovski's 'Sleeping Beauty' | on my mind, | I shot the stupid Milanese tailor | & his gangrenous girlfriend | Dead." These lines may simply be the poet's projection of being the subject of some useless beauty. They are whimsical but not dead. Many are no doubt found. The rest may reflect on the strangeness of one's own language amid a (Japanese) culture in which that language bears back on one a distorted self, made thus all the more solitary. Here we just work on our hard "c"s:

At one time I was the greatest curator
In the country
It was a cure-all for a horrible curfew
A curio type of girl was spotted in the Congo
She was coughing and carrying a contingency
Of contracting contortionists
The continuity at a near-by convent
Was a surprise to a certain coordinator

So, too, the marketing brochure for The Economist shows back to oneself just how serviceable such a script is. "Icy control" is no substitute for that service. As always, Berman would show us a practice, with the scraps and spoor of it that excites our return to it each morning.

[Kimley · Rating 5 out of 5]

So happy to see this coming back in print. Mr. Berman at his finest!

[Ruth B · Rating 5 out of 5]

joy