Hugh Behm-Steinberg - A child (“beautiful[ly] unbearable body”) emerges from the curled spinal column of an ancient reptile which itself is protruding from the green of an old growth tree. Is green always mythological? A compendium of chlorophyll-like ducts keeps us in myth. “What was unknown becomes patterned” as the pages flip

Hugh Behm-Steinberg, The Opposite of Work, Illustr. by Mary Behm-Steinberg. Jackleg Press, 2013.

Hugh Steinberg's intimate, honest poems, labor toward a personal mythology where the return to Eden is a psychic process, "erotic as a mind working," of engaging the fallen world and body with casual grace and equanimity where "[d]ivinity pervades even the slightest of acts." These poems render a taut surface in time, registering the movement of sensation as it happens in continuum Bergsonian durée, "the holiest of thoughts as you are / thinking them"—not as performative gesture but poetry's necessary work of inquiry-toward-restoration-in-making.Behm-Steinberg desires nothing less than a heaven in language.—Chad Sweeney


A review in two.
It is not really diptych (not the result of hinged oppositions) when a conductor conducts in two-two time. The baton swings back and forth but not between two of anything: instead it swivels in an ongoing overlap. For this reason the back and forth of a baton (when in two-two) is more like conducting the candors of a smear. Please excuse (enjoy) an inherent back and forth shape as you move through my engagement with this marvelously pleasure-filled book.
A child (“beautiful[ly] unbearable body”) emerges from the curled spinal column of an ancient reptile which itself is protruding from the green of an old growth tree. Is green always mythological? A compendium of chlorophyll-like ducts keeps us in myth. “What was unknown/ becomes patterned” as the pages flip.
An egg emerges and there is a face to be sought (if not seen) (“until you were named/ you filled up space”) in the egg. There is a nest that is being intuited. The child is an initially unclear (“and I get to feel my body/ stop being my body”) stanchion: though lavish, not transparent or simple. Yet, the reptilian spotted egg is becoming clear (“white roots, eating silk”). “The Opposite of Work” is relation, comparison, juxtaposition as manner of thrive.
Does the child have scales for legs? Are the scaly legs of a phantom child a parallel to a forthcoming nest? A nest and an egg (“merge apples”) are being lifted onto a growing water: a water that is blotting out the stairs. More flips and the noir deepens. Notice the smeared ball in the disappearing child’s hands.
Are we in the dark under of an inner? Is it with the addition of the growing water that we have become the phloem and xylem of this tree: a place where a feral child’s (“one day I’m going to grow/ an impossible beard,/ a gentle but/ hardworking/ beard”) memory (“memory,/ which is naming”) can run free?
There are contents (“I’m looking for/ where to put/ heaven so it’s/ more in reach and/ easier”) within the foamy egg. I can feel them. A child’s holding is in a tree’s middle and within that tree’s middle a secondary egg floats. Is the egg crowned (“as not/self/ or a cornet”)? Is it crowning (“to let the rust out”) as it contorts to turn itself into some version of a consort?
To birth a bra-less woman into image means indelibly looking upward (“how are you going/ to make yourself/ vulnerable/ when for much of your life/ you’ve been/ so fierce?”). When a bra-less women is fully revealed as an image of pleasure, the second set of hands (“a/ full grown man/ with milk on my lips,/ which is good”) are finally able to be seen within the scene.
Is this second set of hands tying ribbons around the soft body (“Stretching out your rain:/” or “Steam in the house,/ your children bathing/ their children,/ your wife saying,/ how should I/ describe this?”)? The woman who is being caressed suddenly disappears completely from the center of the egg (which now appears to be translucent but covering what within it (Tell me if/ the mouth is a cave” or “a sink you/ can drink from”)) is keeping it from being hollow.
The following comes howling from an egg: “And you’re/ the sound,” as we move along because this “love is/ an embodiment of/ place.” We are staring at the bare breasted woman again but she is reaching beyond the limits of the egg toward the materialized boy who is handing her the egg in the nest (“I keep/ a smaller house/ in my pocket”) in his hands.
Is this how and when an egg enters another egg to engender it (“against/ God or a/ stone everything is/ delicate” or “you see a tooth and it’s like when/ you see one/ thing and then/ you see everything”)?
The bare breasted angel, whose wings are now revealed reaches out, grabs the nest while also grabbing the boy. When that touch occurs the boy’s lower body becomes that of an extra-dark blackbird (“or your/ hand is/ half a/ wing, a/ scissor” or “all the/ animals talk and we know/ what they’re saying”). The nest’s previous, central egg suddenly appears there at the level of his perineum, his primary chakra.
When they kiss so gently that it could almost be read as platonic, I wonder if these two are lovers (“what to do with your body/ which in turn has no idea/ what to do with you,/ which allows you/ to make love more easily,” or “ transposing that there/ with all those/ other there’s,/ the lifting parts/ especially”) or child and mother (“so that when you/ curl up against me/ I feel like half a set/ of apostrophe marks/ around some magnificent quotation”)? When the two touch, eggs and flames gather in their enjoined body. Is this what DNA looks like in the heart of a third-eye (where images (“a part that/ shows another part”) are core articulations)?
The longer the boy stays kissing this exposed woman the more she turns from human form to dark wing to ducts of light (“circle of volition”)? Is he electrocuting her with his image, his insistence as counterpart (“we can sneak in, we can/ become elliptical and/ not resent anymore”) to her in image?
With slicked back hair and bare breasts that stare, are forms the daring coins discovered in the fossil of animals (“language with/ wolf tones”)? In morphology, a figure is capable of becoming compatible with another figure. They can share the upward ebb and they do so just as a foaming reptile reappears. When the tenuous lapping of the reptilian tongue puts pressure on them the two figures (which are now (again) crows) fly, shot into the air by the sprigs of their aphotic spring.
At the bottom of all organs, is a rabidly moving image finally able to rest? Look at the egg-heart as you ponder (“eat[ing] ice to stay warm”). The anatomy of a break in bleakness, but the anatomy of indelible and ongoing merge presents itself as a series of endings (non-endings).
A bare breasted ghost leaks dependent-perineum at the base of the original tree. - J/J Hastain



Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Shy Green Fields, No Tell Books,  2007.


Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s Shy Green Fields is in company with books by poets who wrote about glorious ordinary days in extraordinary times. In a pillowbook of a hundred seven-line poems, this life, as it is written, has the shadow of Robert Creeley’s A Day Book behind it, and the shadow of Federico Lorca in his famous, reiterated line, “Green, I love you, green, …” a specific, and pacific, emotional response in difficult political times. Behm-Steinberg’s book is, likewise, carnal, primal, and intellectual. Shy Green Fields exults in experience, “Such versions!” -  Jane Miller

“How we were loved, or what we try to.” The tenderness here is moving and exemplary. Shy Green Fields traces the space between self and other, the silences within the voice, with tenacity and precision. An impressive poetic debut.— Joseph Lease

Hugh Behm-Steinberg continues to be one of our most interesting and fearless new poets. These tone poems work with the formal compression utterly suited to his subject of marital love. The body of the poem and the body of love share their limits and joys. His work deserves wide readership and I celebrate this arrival. — Alison Hawthorne Deming


I first became familiar with Hugh Behm-Steinberg by reading his Dusie chapbook, Book of Days, and then I read more of his poems in the online journal, Eoagh. HBS poems work because of their restraint— Shy Green Fields consist roughly of one hundred untitled seven line poems, each poem consisting of 3 couplets and one end line. While HBS has room to drift within each poem, due to the structure these poems remain contained and focused which plays to the strengths of the poems. They can be coy and playful while resisting the temptation to take a pun too far, or serious without being melodramatic. The sense of brevity gives these poems an immediacy and intimacy.

I leant this book to a friend of mine and he said it felt like the poet was sitting in the room with him reading, which is an apt description.

Grasps, pushes and swings into space like
forethought, or what is truly clear. That

thing they call the hammer, I want the
reverse, I want the second time, I want

the third. We were lost in the middle but
I had no trouble sleeping. I like your scent,

the tendencies, the exactly how.

HBS is a sensualist and he brings to our senses the lushness of the exterior and interior world— the physical and emotive. This poem plays with both the binaries of space:

It’s said cranes need lots of room. How
do they exist so far apart and stay together?

I couldn’t stand it, to not be able to see
your body, to not be part of you out of

some genetic modesty. I have trouble
staying asleep without you. I belong to

another world.

This could easily be Neruda writing to Matilda or think of how it echo’s Frank O’Hara’s having a coke with you sentiment! Finally this poem is what all of our daily valentines should strive for:

I love the looking, to see over, see giraffes,
to pet the giraffe from a platform, the sexuality

of feeding them, their long black tongues.
How enviable! The old one, the oldest one,

these luscious attachments, you are the way
the sweat of your hands taste. Full of salt

knowing. You are the sugar you carry inside you.

Shy Green Fields allows you to see the quiet, sensual, world anew seven lines at a time like a slow undulation of light falling, shifting, seeping, and retreating. - Steven Karl


from Shy Green Fields


Significances. A man with his mouth open.
Me saying o. Aloes, scales and fens. The eye

it skims over these things. We used to sit.
I will never ruin this. I will have four means

to find me, and let the stories pour, from kindness
is the prayer call. You know what you can do.

Asleep in shy green fields, rolling into you.


Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Sorcery and Good Morning!, Dusie Chapbook Kollektiv.


Secretly Zoroastrian
Good Morning!
Zombie State
Everyone Will Be Free and No One Will Have to Die & Savage Love Means Staying in Your Body


4-H My son's hobby is raising nuns; he keeps them in the barn behind our house. He lets them loose in the field each day for exercise, they forage quietly and grow shiny and plump. When the 4-H Fair comes to town, he'll show them off along with all the other nuns raised by the rest of the kids in the county. The judges will be strict, as they examine each nun and make notes on their clipboards, but my son is nonplussed. He will be praised for the quality of their headaches and the curliness of their tails. That's a fine blue-ribboned nun you got there, they'll all say. Some of the nuns he'll sell, some he'll keep; the rest he sets free, where they wander among the poor, blinking rapidly as they stare up at the sky.


Fireflies

The next life has more oxygen in it and classical lines, it is set lower into the earth, and the part that is intimate has a way of glowing, or when you’re turned on and your earlobes flush tiny lights appear in all of the windows of this place. The mantlemesh glowing white in all of the lanterns. To introduce joy even when there is so little justification for doing so, nobody has to teach you how to see in this light, you become one of many drawn here, the fragrance of lavender beside the kitchen garden out back of the temple I spend time in searching for you.






Hugh Behm-Steinberg edits the journal Eleven Eleven. His libretto for a children's opera, "The Clever Wife" will debut in Houston in January 2012.