Reviews:
A CARTLOAD OF SCROLLS:
100 Poems in the Manner of T'ang Dynasty Poet Han-Shan
Reviewed by By Diane Kidman, Carp(e) Libris Reviews, 9 March 2008
"...my thanks goes out to James P. Lenfestey, who has put me to poetry rights once again. I was immediately drawn to his collection of 100 poems and knew I had to review it. Maybe it was the premise of the book - Lenfestey’s love for Han-Shan’s 1,200-year-old work, driving him to write over 30 years’ of poems in response. Or maybe it’s the everyday, relatable, and often humorous tone of these short gems, but I relished each one. With titles like “Yelling at Birds” and “To the Gnat Drowned in my Wine at Lunch,” how can I not help picking the book back up just to reread a favorite? Yes, this is friendly, accessible poetry that manages to convey everything from humor to beauty in just a few lines. This is poetry for everyone."
Reviewed by Elizabeth McKim from POEISIS, 2008 (Toronto)
"The poems breathe with tiny experienced particulars and long soul-views of a life lived with domestic bravery, wild humor, and warm tenderness, poems moving beyond their initial bounce and unfolding image into sensed silence and thoughtfulness. I also learned about a practice of poetry I hadn't carefully considered: RESPONSE, in this instance, to an ancient poetry friend from 1000 years ago so that each of Lenfestey’s poems draws in and is inspired by the words of Poet Han-shan , his loving friend and co-respondant from the familiar territory and the faraway country. This book is a jewel!"
Dave Wood, Dave Wood's Book Report, December 27, 2007.
"These poems are like popcorn: Once you start eating, it's hard to stop."
Reviewed by Bart Sutter, Poet Laureate of Duluth,
author of FAREWELL TO STARLIGHT IN WHISKEY
"I love the spirit of this book. You really seem at home in this form and voice. Congratulations in a good book!"
Reviewed by Perie Longo, Santa Barbara Independent - Poetry Matters, January 31, 2008, “James Lenfestey, featured poet at Santa Barbara Poetry Series”
The second Santa Barbara Poetry Series of the season welcomes Minneapolis poet James Lenfestey, cofounder of the Ojai Poetry Festival, as he makes his way around southern California to promote his latest book, A Cartload of Scrolls: 100 Poems in the Manner of T'ang Dynasty Poet Han-shan (Holy Cow Press, 2007) on Saturday Feb. 2, 7 pm. at the Contemporary Arts Forum, along with local poets Christine Kravetz and Beth Taylor-Schott.
As the story goes, in 1974 when Lenfestey was running an alternative school in Minneapolis, he discovered a book of Han-Shan's poetry translated by Burton Watson, and “it cured his warts.” He laughed out loud, yet also became enthralled with the meditative tone of this hermit Buddhist monk's poems written in the ancient Chinese poetic form, the lü-shih that reached its peak during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.) The “regulated verse lyric” is an eight line structure based on an opening line or couplet that establishes the scene, followed by images that elaborate in simple parallel sentences, and a final couplet that “takes us out” with a surprise or humor. He began writing poems back to the author to find his “missing” voice and thirty-two years later, in 2006, traveled to Tokyo to not only meet Watson, whose translations he praises, but to “pay homage to Han-shan at his hermit cave.”
Lenfestey has a wonderful time, following “in the manner of” his hero, yet being completely his whimsical, wise, American self. Many of his poems are about coping with modern life's stressors, such as “Paying Taxes” and “Mortgages,” but also about the joys and wisdom found in nature, writing poetry, and seeing his world of children and grandchildren with fresh eyes cast from an ancient light.
#41
THE MONK LOCKS HIS CELL BEHIND HIM
Going out, I lock the door.
What if someone stole my laptop!
Your lap is attached to you,
said the quilter, sewing her smile shut.
My grandchildren agree, fussing on it like a lumpy chair.
I have so far to go to leave my sharp-edged keys behind,
leave the door of my life entirely open,
leave whatever is inside orderly and forgotten.
What keeps you reading these poems is how Lenfestey captures your own secrets and worries, then sends them off to be one with the natural order of things. When my mourning ends for what I might have been,/I will be someone else. My wings will shine./Nothing will know how to stop me except flowers. He delights in the lü -shih form as a “wonderful rhetorical structure” which gives space to say more than the haiku or tanka. The past eight years he has embraced his “lifelong devotion to the concentrated magic of poems,” having abandoned his careers of academia, advertising, and journalism.
Reviewed by Carol Connolly, Special to the Star Tribune, November 9th, 2007
In his fourth book of poems, Lenfestey, curator of the Literary Witness poetry series at Plymouth Congregational Church, enters into a 33-year correspondence with Han-Shan, a 1,200-year-old Chinese hermit and poet, who, it turns out, "is the cure for warts." These short, elegant poems, written in the manner of Han-Shan, are clear as a crystal bell. They ring with gratitude and take care of things -- unload the dishwasher at dawn, love wife, children and grandchildren. They also cherish the syllables that "buzz around my ears like flies/ I reach out with my pen and snatch them" -- even as dad phones in to remind him of his "potential with The Company." Lenfestey loses his calendar and feels his "... insides rearranged./ When my mourning ends for what I might have been/ I will be someone else. My wings will shine." And in this book, they do indeed shine.
story online | PDF
Reviewed in Minnesota Literature, November 2007
Lenfestey's latest book of poetry successfully performs our great national experiement--the process of taking old-world elements and coming up with something wholly American. Han-shan seems to have been a mysterious, possibly mythical poet of whom all that is known, Lenfestey says, is that he "once lived in a city, rode a white horse and had a wife and a son." 300 poems are attributed to Han-shan, who with other poets brought the lu-shi, or eight-line poem, to its zenith. Lenfestey does not try to replicate the style exactly -- he confesses that many of the poems have more or less than eight lines, and might not strictly adhere to the 5 or 7-syllable metere of Han-shan's poetry. He strives instead to get a sense of Han-shan; his mindfulness in the face of seemingly mundane concerns, his elevation of the homely and famliar, and the bang-zoom appeal of his concluding couplets. Wang Ping writes: "Each poem is a river,a mountain with secret paths for the faithful. James Lenfestey knows the true sound of Han-shan: without poetry, what is life?"
Reviewed by Rhena Tantisunthorn, City Pages, A list, 14 Nov, 2007
To set out to write 100 poems in the style of Han-shan, a Chinese poet from the T'ang Dynasty, might seem like an overly arcane, indulgent and boring ambition. At the tip of James Lenfestey's pen, however, the project is more like a romp. Humorous and concise in its observations, Lenfestey's poetry is accessible even to the biggest poetry haters, without losing any intensity of language. He describes grandparents anticipating the arrival of visiting grandchildren as "steadying the web of the world, feeling again its tremble." The content is fresh and contemporary, in spite of being modeled after a long dead scribe. Lenfestey even commiserates with naysayers: "I read so many poems eager not to like them/and so many make it easy." Like those of his role model, Lenfestey's poems are short. A line from "Often I wonder" can apply to either master or protege: "Now I hand out his poems like aspirin. Take two, I say, they're small."
URBAN COYOTE:
Howlings on Family, Community and the Search for Peace and Quiet
Reviewed by Patricia Hampl, author of I Could Tell You Stories, Virgin Time and A Romantic Education.
Jim Lenfestey has found the voice of the neighborhood, which is to say the voice of our times and our place. His immensely appealing alter-ego, the Urban Coyote, joins Garrison Keillor's invented Midwestern characters as a beloved and very real seeker and striver. He surveys and stumbles his way from the comic and mundane to the big-deal and cosmic. There isn't a cynical bone in the body of this casually courageous book. But the sentiment here is hard-won, just as the humor is ever-buoyant.
Best of all, Lenfestey writes wonderfully well. The Urban Coyote may have started as newspaper columns, but taken together, these short chapters form a virtual novel I found impossible to put down as I followed the progress of this captivating voice. The Urban Coyote refuses to think of himself as a hero. But don't be fooled: he is. A magical book.
Reviewed by Eric Utne, founder, Utne Reader.
Jim Lenfestey makes me hoot with laughter and flush with tears. His wise, tender anecdotes about "the ceremonies of children, the rituals of work and community, the rites of old age" pulse with character, drama and abundance. His book embodies what Zorba the Greek zestfully called "the full catastrophe" of life.
Reviewed by Nancy Roberts, Professor, School of
Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota.
The "Urban Coyote" is a captivating collection that shows the vigor of the community press. Jim Lenfestey moves effortlessly from the everyday to the ultimate as he gives a thoughtful perspective on everything from raising kids--and cats--to community politics to planning his own funeral. I have used several of these pieces in my literary journalism classes as models of effective storytelling. This is fresh, original writing that tries to be true to fact while aiming at larger truths.
THE TOOTHED AND CLEVER WORLD.
Reviewed by Suzanne Lummis, founding director of
the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and the author of "In Danger"
I believe it was the estimable Theodore Roethke who said "By long staring I have come to be".Small wonder the phrase kept circling in my memory as I read these spare and lovely poems that hold up before our eyesnature and its creatures in all their shifting particularity (and in the case of the poet's sly footed animal alter-ego, Coyote, both shifting and shifty). Around the woodsy areas of his homesteads in Eastern Michigan and Ojai, California, conversations are taking place -- love poems to the living world.
Reviewed by Robert Hedin, translator, editor and author of
The Old Liberators: New and Selected Poems and Translations.
James P. Lenfestey's THE TOOTHED AND CLEVER WORLD is an absolute joy. In these finely crafted poems, he takes us to a deeper circuitry and reminds us again that the world is strung with embraces.
Reviewed by StarTribune, newspaper of the Twin Cities, June 25th, 2006
Skillful nature poems that chart a pleasantly meandering course from Michigan to California
Reviewed by Thomas R. Smith, author of Keeping the Star,
Horse of Earth, and The Dark Indigo Current.
This is a book with fur, claws, teeth, tail and paws. More importantly, it's a book large with appetite for life and the heart to live it fully.
The four sections of The Toothed and Clever World track a pathway of desire that James P. Lenfestey has followed over the past few years, from upper Michigan's Jim Harrison country, one of the places Lenfestey makes his home, to coyote-rich Ojai, California, his adopted home in the West. Human beings like to have it both ways, and that is just what Lenfestey achieves in this book, setting up the two geographic poles of his longing and letting a whole vibrant creation sing between them.
Lenfestey is a carnal, not a spiritual poet. Which is not to say that his poems lack spirit. To the contrary, they're imbued with an exuberant sympathy for life itself, in all its toothed, furred, and wing'ed intensity. His poems are almost without exception celebrations of life in nature and in the body. He's an unapologetic poet of healthy animal appetite, and he doesn't shy from the more "lowdown" bodily functions, either. In this, he takes a cue from the earthy trickster Coyote stories of Native American myth, of which he has made a passionate lifelong study. He pays lavish honor to his totem in the high-spirited "Coyote Chorus" of section three of this book.
Perhaps it's his animal vitality that gives his poems their remarkably youthful flavor. They are influenced by the Beats (particularly Gary Snyder) and the ancient Chinese poets (particularly Han Shan), but they don't really resemble them. Lenfestey likewise draws inspiration from poets as diverse as Robert Bly, Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, yet his poems don't resemble them either. The scruffy humor of his coyote anecdotes and the lyric delicacy of his love poems are unified by an overarching impulse to praise. Jim Lenfestey's material is as ancient as the cliff walls Han Shan scratched his poems on and as current as this spring's elm leaves. He is his own poet absolutely. He is sixty and doing his best work.
SAYING GRACE:
Reviewed by Charles P. Ries:
I never got lost while reading James Lenfestey's recent collection of poems, "Saying Grace." There is a great, clear, calm steady presence in each of the 27 poems that comprise this, his eleventh and most expansive collection. Lenfestey's mastery of word and phase blended well with a Wisconsin landscape that he makes throb with metaphor and meaning... If only all of us could slow down long enough to look and see with the eyes of Jim Lenfestey.
TURNING 40 PRODUCTIONS
126 N. Third St. Suite 201
Minneapolis, MN 55401
phone: 612-339-5236
e-mail: jimfest@aol.com
