Ambit Magazine

twilight of the male ego
klipschutz (Tsunami Inc. Walla Walla, Washington $12.00)
Review by Herbert Lomas in Ambit 173

There’s a sense of desperation in these sassy poems. They appear to be written by one of those sane people that normal America, with its parody of sanity, has driven into a parody of overt insanity. Clichés become twisted: ‘My Sediments Exactly’; ‘A Mouth in the Country’; ‘I’m Wearing My Heart on Your Sleeve’; “some disenchanted evening”; “you can rest unassured”.

Kurt Lipschutz is evidently into Sufism, as he has written several Ghazals. The first begins “She married a prick for her green card” – not what you’d expect from Rumi. There’s a sense of whistling in the light.

Sadness pours over us
like syrup at midnight.
The sweet tooth surrenders
to seconds, to thirds.

The male ego switches on the telly and hears “Freeze!” “A woman’s voice./ Two of them, in uniform, feet planted, guns trained/ on his topmost chest hair.” There’s more than twilight of the male ego here: a sense of defeat before the triumph of the rogue air-conditioned fast-food nightmare with weapons of mass destruction. In ‘Little Knell’ “the left is dead/ im dead too/ its on your head …” There’s nothing left but low-grade survival and snook-cocking semi-surrealistic satire about everything, including Pound, Stevens and other prominent American poets, who are parodied. Klipschutz co-writes commercial songs and is part-time scrivener for a criminal defence lawyer: hence so many dead office hours in the poems. The life around him is a sad noise. This is not a bang but a derisive streetwise whistle at the end of a failed civilisation.

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