Otherwise Elsewhere

by David Rivard

The expansive, energetic new poetry book by David Rivard, author of Sugartown and Wise Poison

You pay as you go. Mornings
at this point are either like spread sails or (more likely)
spread-sheets—they fill fast. Mornings are fortunes,
but as suspect as a wristwatch running in reverse.
—from "Vigorish"
David Rivard's new collection Otherwise Elsewhere describes the many powers—psychological and historical—that flow through people's lives in acts of faith, greed, pleasure, celebrity, gossip, and consolation. A teenage boy looking at a weathered gravestone wonders how many times he'll sign his name in his life; the forest on the move in Macbeth intersects with a blind man cured by Christ; a man coming out of a terrible dream of being lost is saved by touching his wife's hair. "For those of us who need it," one poem asserts, "instruction is everywhere."

Rivard's poetry is full of unsettling humor and the careening movement of memory and imagination.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 21, 2010

About the author

David Rivard is the author of Bewitched Playground, Wise Poison, which won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and Torque. He teaches at Tufts University and in the M.F.A. Writing Program at Vermont College. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "

Reviews

[jess sanford · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I am tempted very much to say that I admire the complexity and depth of Rivard's poetry, I can only do so while giving even greater recognition to the deftness with which he constructs these pieces, the way the layers are laid out line after line with a subtlety that is its own kind of wit. What is enviable is that this wit is a finely-honed wit but Rivard leaves no trace of his labor, gives no impression of laborious 'craftwork' endured to reach this particular landscape.

That is all to say the kind of rich, detailed kind of attention fueling the imaginative effort throughout these poems seems quite effortless despite the often brilliant turns his lines take, his metaphors often surprising not with an element of juxtapositions that seem to form the strangest of neighbors and only that, but that the strangeness is never all that strange. We wonder if they haven't been neighbors all along and most importantly, why didn't we see them before Rivard revealed them to us, as if he had been given a special tour of this landscape?

This kind of curation is often best exemplified in Rivard's use of listing in his poems; here's one my favorite examples:

"and having come home once more
for a little while longer
we will be able to go on helping ourselves then
to the Frenched rack of lamb
or an uninhibited pit bull
encrypted lap top'
or pen knife--
an accidental & systemic form of self-inventing life--
and the container ships will go on mutating across sea lanes
carrying cartons
of bath towels hardwoods & pixels"

and here is another:

"and at the muffler shop
the crawl line reminded viewers repeatedly

that the dead researches had taken as their clan tag
the name True China Gamers,

and then there were jests
and serious sad agreements to kill for love

inside the dimly-lit school hall then
the 6th graders dashed in & out of 'Twelfth Night'"

Rivard's wit also exerts itself in the more direct notion of the word, often producing a conversational quality that is both humorous and genuinely sad, stemming many times out of a reflecting nostalgia still trying to suss out some kind of wisdom of the world for both the speaker and perhaps for others, for an unsentimental kind of wisdom that one might be able to pass on somehow to someone else, a striving for that mode of kindness even if it feels mostly impossible, something intangible that for all our wants is perhaps best to remain out of reach for anyone's articulation:

"And soon enough there was rain
over all the Elizabeths. And a skiff embarked across the bay.
But no student at exam time in any school anywhere
would claim this has a storyline or plot. Only now & again
did it make sense."

So the struggle over the ephemeral must continue, as it always has, whether the answers sought are of realms political, religious, of the intellect or of the heart. Rivard seems to imply to me that of course it's not the destination but really the journey is often without rewards as well, but still the work goes on, and he does so in this book that finds itself doing its work among the ranges and expanses, not only physically but in manners of class, race, and any other kind, really. There are gestures here towards a kind of acknowledged, failed universality, which is absolutely not to say that Rivard doesn't manage to get beyond himself; these poems never stay close to home, are inherently of a broader and more wild breed, are somehow always, as the book's title offers, other places, other times, elsewhere from whatever this place might be.

[Nicola · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems in David Rivard’s collection "otherwise elsewhere" are as restless as its title. They navigate what at first appears as the extremes of “lightning and gossip,” the hope for transcendence and the everyday humdrum, human realities and banalities, which squash this hope. But Rivard’s world is not binary and, ultimately, he shows the interconnection of this seeking in the everyday.

I especially loved the title poem, which expands the everyday to include the everyone. In this overpopulated and cramped poem, Rivard includes 32 (I think!) “lives and destinations” in one long, fast sentence, hammered and hemmed in by dashes and the unstable, hinge words: “or,” “otherwise” and “elsewise.” The people are described so minutely and idiosyncratically—“the Moroccan boy / with his lunch of hardboiled eggs”—that it is hard to leap from one description to the next. He creates a crowd full of individuals. I couldn’t assimilate this crowd until towards the end, when we learn that the speaker is pondering the possibilities of his existence: “all those lives and destinations that might have been mine, but weren’t.” If he had ended the poem with this line, we would have felt the limitations of existence. But Rivard chooses to end with a different “distance,” a more complicated connect and disconnect: a pull “towards” and “away.” Though the poem does not end on transcendence, that is, a higher connection between all these people or, conversely, the speaker pulling away from this crowd, achieving a kind of transcendent cutting of the cord, there is a presence, an attention to detail and humanity here that feels subtly transcendent to me. What at first feels restless and disturbed, the problems of a speaker with ADD, has attention in it, and has an important, inclusive expansiveness.

This is a wonderful book on a kind of almost transcendence, which feels very American. This is an American being honest about a failed attempt at Buddhism, and the collection could be quite moralizing and dour, but has an American sense of humor and resiliency to counter this.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

First off, I love receiving books in the mail as part of the first-reads program.. brilliant!
I don't usually comment on the covers of books, but I *loved* this one as it is full of old-timey eyeball photographs; very cool. I also haven't picked up a book of contemporary poetry in a while. That being said...

It seems quite a few of the poems are based on ironies mixed in with the Buddhist faith.. a good example of this would be the very first poem "Otherwise Elsewhere", which is of course also the title. This goes on for quite some time, it seems, until the poems take on a tone of observation and self-contemplation.
These I seemed to enjoy more, not because they are written better than the rest, but because I could relate much more with them.
I particularly enjoyed "Note to Myself", "Crush", "Nostalgia", "Camus" and "Coffee House, Eastern Standard Time."

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Optimistic poems that earn it; complex consciousness. What I found valuable was the utter unpredictability and the strange jumps. Poems that are "difficult" because they know you can do it, reader. Some poems I had to admit I couldn't access but most were rewarding.

[Kevin Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Rivard's poetry is unique and a style I have never seen read before. His beautiful and unique diction and metaphor is just amazing. I recommend this book to anyone who wants a different read than other poetry books, or a whole new perspective in poetry.

[Sara Habein · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Rivard’s poems often deal with dreams, people lost and remembered, and nostalgia. He is both floating above the scenes he describes and intimately involved. His mind wanders, but in a nice way. I know “nice” isn’t too terribly specific, but it feels apt. It feels like the wandering mind of a person who, yes, writes poetry for a living — a real, live poet navigating the world.

Otherwise Elsewhere is a slim volume and certainly not impenetrable to one not acquainted with poetry in general. I’m glad I read it, and I’m glad that it has contributed to my self-inflicted poetry education.

(My full review can be found on Glorified Love Letters.)

[Steve Rauscher · Rating 3 out of 5]

While my knowledge of poetry rarely treads outside of TS Eliot and Bukowski, I enjoy sitting down with the work of someone I've never read before from time to time. Rivard has an excellent way with his words, painting beautiful verbal images from page to page, but his themes leave me wanting a little more beyond emotional episodes from his personal life over the years. The opening poem that shares the title of the collected works, however, immediately stood out to me as excellent and is something I will revisit in the future.

[Marzi Margo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd originally typed out a much longer review of this collection, but Goodreads lost it, so here is what the gist of it was: David Rivard is a skilled and successful poet, but the poems contained within Otherwise Elsewhere are ultimately forgettable despite how impressive they may be.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems seemed kind of abstract and it was hard to understand what exactly they were describing, but I really liked it because it made me think and use my imagination a lot more than if things were spelled out for me.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice!