lots and lots of neat

recommended: rae gouirand

I think one of the reasons I'm recommending Gouirand is that her poems were such a contrast to the other poems in the Fall 2008 issue of Forklift, OH. Don't get me wrong, the predominant style in the magazine is exciting. I like the kinetic imaginative rush many of these poets present. But often I don't feel there's much of a commitment to crafting a poem in these types of poems. They feel like a race to someplace, and the poet doesn't really care where that place is, so long as it's just fast, fast, fast!

But Gouirard's poems have a felt thoughtfulness to them. I'm especially fond of "Plurals," where formal elements and sincere sentiment and real idea come together for a poem that makes me invested in the speaker. "What is there to weep for:" the poem starts, which could easily be guilty of too much sentiment. In fact, I think I would be wary of most poems starting with a line like this, except in this case Gouirand punctuates with a colon instead of a question mark. It defuses, even mutes, the moment by pulling away from the question, and I think making this sentiment more a state of mind, which can be thought through.

But not thought through clinically, or without feeling. She still has moments where the poem touches on the speaker's feelings: "more is not more but still // it moves me: like the moving / through of mouth on mouth". Hopefully in this quote you can see the evident feeling that is occasion for the poem, while the careful language that pushes that feeling into further thought.

Related Links:
Forklift, OH (worldcat search for Forklift, OH)

recommended: mary szybist

I have to admit, I am always crazy for Mary Szybist's poems. Crazy meaning interested, impressed, indulged, any way that you would want to say you experienced a poem, and feeling as though you have found that place because the poet has led you to it with kindness and insight. What I mean by that is that Szybist's poems tend to a transparency and accessibility because they are so graceful with their intelligence.

For instance, in the poem from the 2009 issue of Witness, "Conversion Figure," the speaker is falling into a woman. Who is it? I don't know. I've read through the poems a few times, and I switch between the speaker as Satan, or the Holy Spirit, or Christ (could this be a poem about the Annunciation?), but I really can't be certain which of these it is. "Out of God's mouth I fell," says the speaker, which is provocative enough to make me think of the extreme character types, but still not enough to make me certain which character it is.

Add to this the ambiguous feminine figure being fallen into, and the poem takes even greater pleasures. Should a line like "Stop licking cake from your fingers" make me look at her in a sarcastic light? an overly wholesome one? I just read Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, and I would say these multiple possibilities are exactly what make this poem so strong. Of course, I think what else makes this ambiguity so strong is the sharpened description of the figures populating the poem--Szybist gives a lot, inviting the reader to imagine their own ideas about how the spaces could be filled.

Related Links:
Witness
Granted

recommended: carolyn hembree

Um, what? That's what I want to say to Carolyn Hembree. What? Because I'm thinking, where is this speaker getting all this from? I've never met anyone named Eyecandy. Or Cleb, but I suspect if I waited around long enough, maybe at some dive bar, and I got to be friends with the bartender I might meet someone like that.

But of course I'm not going to. I like meeting the Cleb in Hembree's poems, though. She manages that feat fiction writers do all the time: introduce dispicable characters a reader would discreetly avoid in real life, but in writing, takes a nice long leer. I like leering here. Because Cleb is pretty funny. And the whole poem is spoken pretty funny, like the speaker wishes he were as drunk as Cleb and Eyecandy (at least I think they're drunk). And in the end, what the poem mainly comments on is attitudes and the bizarre attitudes people have, and what it makes them do.

I'd say it's mainly fiction, but it's told in a poetic voice. How do you like that? And even the open poetic form fits here.

Related Link:
Witness

recommended: forrest gander

I'm not at all interested in the occasion for this poem. The action described here, of "touching" someone with new-minty breath, is fashioned into something much more precious than it really is. I'm not sure I can imagine any poem that could take that gesture (a woman who has just smeared toothpaste on her upper and lower teeth), tie it to evaporation (the poem is titled "Evaporation 2"), and then claim that the speaker is "touched" in any way.

However, I am still recommending this poem, published in the May/June 2009 issue of Boston Review. The parenthetical asides, and their constant rhythm shifts, invigorates this poem. "the meanings (in increments) lie / bare (she says) (Oh, to her friend) // who is watching" That moment, "Oh to her friend" is where I feel the poem invents a new grammatical relationship (she says, "Oh to her friend") or the speaker says "Oh" in response to the meanings), and, at the same time, changes up the pacing of a reading. Mr. Gander continues to make these parenthetical comments, and they may be straightforward descriptive additions, or they may have this element of ambiguity, adding a graceful density to the poem's possible meanings.

Related Links:
Boston Review (read poem online here)
Eye Against Eye

recommended: jynne dilling martin

On the whole, a good group of "Discovery"/Boston Review Contest winners in the May/June 2009 issue. But I have to say that Ms. Martin's poem, "Reprucussions of the Current Import/Export Ratio," stands out as my favorite of the group. I like it when the theme of a poem is tied to the action of multiple images in a poem. For this poem what this means is that within the first two stanzas, the idea of "personal mystery" and "invisibility" are made central to the poem. They go together. Of course, they go together, but the art Martin uses in stating invisibility makes me feel a depth to the concept, partially because of the skipped rock sinking, which for me evokes a physical sensation that doesn't seem to have an end, or a bottom to the whatever this body of water is, only sinking.

But this depth is also created by the simplicity and specificity of the images. Turnip seeds sewn into coats and skipping stones sinking out of sight. They have such an easy coincidence, and that ease is what I think lends the poem authority. So that when Martin extends the image, I trust her, and I keep trusting her enough so that when it lands on these turnips sprouting out of gravesites, and a donkey (which had appeared earlier drawing mathematics in the dirt) who has its leg poised for more problems, and I'm not sure I can put in words who "you" are at the end, I'm willing to accept the speaker's need to pose a question without my knowing what all the parts of the question are about. Because this poem is more about the sentiment that drove her to ask a donkey anything.

Related Links:
Boston Review (or read the poem online)

recommended: sara michas-martin

The Spring 2009 issue FIELD is all poetry! And enter Sara Michas-Martin in her first appearance in the magazine! Next, enter as many colors for the brain as you can imagine: twilight, pink, bowling ball, the color of your head under a hat. The brain is flexible. It thinks! And one of my favorite parts of this poem is the way it creates a dialogue between "what the speaker has to say" and "why the speaker would be making such claims." It's kind of like that subtle point where you see a brain, physically see it, and then try to understand that all your thoughts actually happen in that cauliflower looking thing.

In the case of this poem, though, I am more interested because of the way the poem slyly complicates itself, starting with this exotic image of a brain in a jar, and then speculating about what that looks like (a government that's lost its country?), and then, through implication, trying to understand how this thing could be responsible for the decisions people make for themselves. It's not a huge step, then, for the speaker to wonder how her brain might be responsible for herself, and, if the poem isn't already complicated enough for you, that's where Michas-Martin takes you to school. All these different ways a brain could be working: memories, biases, imaginations. They're all there.

And while this is happening, she keeps admiring the brain, just for being a brain! "I ask if I can touch the brain, / maybe hold it, and when I do its weight / tests the give of both hands. I think of bowling / and watermelons floating in a pool" I think those watermelons floating in the pool are my favorite!

Related Links:
FIELD (worldcat search for FIELD)
Goddard Faculty page (she has a statement about brains there!)

recommended: taije silverman

What I'm struck by in this poem is the honest confrontation with helplessness. It seems a likely subject for a poem whose occasion is the mother's sickness, and the radiation therapy she is undergoing, and the months of diagnosis the family has been put through.

And maybe it's the speaker's confrontation and then acceptance that brings on her joy. I'm not completely sure. I sense it, but I think the true merit of this poem "On Joy," in the Spring 2009 issue of Ploughshares, is the vague, but powerful source of the speaker's emotion. It comes from some place outside her, outside her purview. "Past these fields are others no one sees, / and past them oak and poplar trees." For me, this unknown place hovering just past sight, and the speaker's knowledge that this place exists even if she can't see it, makes me believe this "unaccountable" joy that rises in her. At least this is what she calls it, despite every reason she has for not feeling joy. And when I read this poem, I want to call it joy too.

I find it touching that a poem can make this earnest consideration of a serious situation still full of wonder. Why joy? Thankfully joy.

Related Links:
Ploughshares (worldcat search for Ploughshares)
Houses Are Fields

recommended: gretchen mattox

Another poet from the Winter 2009 Laurel Review. Perhaps what I like most about this particular issue is the range of poets that have been offered. A great big thank you to David Dodd Lee and John Gallaher for the excellent poets in the issue.

The two poems from Ms. Mattox, in particular "mount Washington, butterflies," remind me of Cezanne paintings, or at least the description I remember reading about them in some undergraduate class I took. The landscapes that he flattened onto the canvas, trying to remind the viewer that the canvas is only two dimensions, and there could be a new perspective if this new perspective were given to you.

However, what comes with this new perspective is a warping of the emotions which are at stake here. With "mount Washington, butterflies," the speaker is actively trying to stay away from someone else who flits in and out of the poem. "you want me back?" she interjects at one moment. Or "I don't need you for my subject-- / objectively--the loss unfolds" This resistance combined with her lush description of Byzantine hills, and houses like pillboxes, sets up a tension in the poem, one that most accurately mimics the strain in the speaker, which keeps on getting revealed.

Related Links:
Laurel Review
Buddha Box

recommended: arthur vogelsang

This all poetry, Winter 2009 issue of Laurel Review is really quite something. I've still got a few more poets left to talk about from this issue, including Mr. Vogelsang.

What I find so rewarding about these poems is their rhetorical stance. It appears to me the speaker in these poems has a real attitude about his subject, and how he plays that attitude out, in his language is what makes some of the more extreme images more credible. In "Arthur Rimbaud," Reason, which, earlier, was placed on a see-saw opposite its unnamed nemesis, has found itself falling in love with that nemesis. In return, the nemesis slams Reason to the ground, which "injures / Its vertebrae." I like the violence here, and I like the conceptual point that Reason would have a backbone, and falling in love would put that backbone in peril.

But I feel the violence can only work because of the attitude of the speaker. The conceptual framework in the poem could easily take over the pleasure that comes with reading it, or at least focus that pleasure on the intellectual alone. But the speaker here has this attitude toward Reason. As though he is saying, "Yeah, we rely on Reason, and then it goes and gets itself in trouble."

Related Links:
Laurel Review
Left Wing of a Bird

recommended: louise mathias

I guess it's all about implication. Or the consequence of saying one thing leads to the need to say another thing. The new poems Mathias has in the Winter 2009 issue of the Laurel Review have this movement that I recognize, and I admire. What is this movement? It's hard to describe without sounding as though I'm just explaining the way any poem works. The poems layer lineation and the information that can be conveyed in a sentence. Yes, yes, it seems like all poems work this way.

But Mathias' poems pull the distance between sentences a little further apart. For instance, "You giving in // is a kind of willed amnesia, / the color of a rabbit's under-fur. // To speak of a word like bait." The movement I'm talking about is this image of a "rabbit's under-fur" leading to "a word like bait." It fits. But why? Because you would think that a rabbit is bait? I think that's part of it. Because the under-fur would be even more vulnerable? Because a "willed amnesia" has implications that might lead you to speak of bait? Because that could lead you to an impression that feels like the color of under-fur? The questions are more voluminous than the poem. But they manage to remain within certain bounds that make me feel that they are all relevant. And of interest. Or maybe more than interest, they keep me involved with the poem.

It leads me to say these poems aren't nearly as spare as they look on the page. They cover a lot of ground. A LOT!

Related Links:
The Laurel Review
Louise Mathias
Lark Apprentice