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
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