lots and lots of neat

recommended: joanna klink

Especially since her second book Circadian, I have thought of Joanna Klink as a poet of intense earnestness. I feel that she is writing out of this sentimental knot--a knot she only wishes she could untie as she begins writing this particular poem. And that may be what I mean by earnestness. Her poems aren't reveling in their pain, they are methodically plotting their resolution, though they are guaranteed to find nothing of the sort.

How is someone supposed to untie a knot? In my experience, it's usually a tricky occasion where I might tighten the knot, or I might loosen it. I can never tell which direction I'm going. That's what it feels is happening in "The Radiant," Klink's poem in the Winter 2009 issue of the Chicago Review. The nature of this knot, I don't think I could come close to unraveling, except I see it is dealing with love, dense night, accumulation, and some dark origin nature operates out of. I have been a fan of Jane Mead's work for a long time, and it seems to me that if Mead's poems (especially from House of Poured Out Waters) speak quietly out of this dark space, Klink's "The Radiant" turns the volume up. The poem grabs at anything within arm's reach, and sometimes even reaches beyond reality to explore the properties and truths about this particular knot.

And this exploration, this earnest desire Klink shows to know more about why this occasion had to happen, and is happening as she writes the poem--for me, it's the impelling energy, and it draws me in. It can be something falling out of the sky. It can be the two people sleeping on a box spring. The poem is present for me.

Related Links:
Chicago Review
Circadian

recommended: john tipton

I think it's hard to write a poem that has any idea of Americana, or pronounces itself as the middle of America. There are the James Wright poems from The Branch Will Not Break. And I guess that example helps to distinguish poems that, to my mind, use Americana in some fanciful way, as a box of trinkets or novelties that can be pulled out and shown off to the reader.

John Tipton's poems in the Winter 2009 issue of Chicago Review have seated themselves in the middle of America, which is a good place for a God-fearing Christian to appear and add some perspective. Not that these are in the voice of the devout, mind you. I'm not really sure whose voice these poems are in. Whoever it is, he reserves a mix of skepticism and belief in Titus, an attendant in a Kansas church in flames on the day of "Pentecost," and then in "Luck," the Rev. Thomas Bayes. 

And I suppose it's the speaker's faith in the plausibility of these two men that makes me compare Tipton's poems to Wright. They may not be drenched in that same nostalgic and defeatist tone Wright maintains, but they are located in a definite place--America. And if they don't completely believe in that place, they accept enough of it at face value so that the reader must accept it in order to understand the poem on its terms.

Of course, there are other points of this poem that recommend it. Tipton's style makes up for its lack of grammar by making formal elements (like the line, or the stanza) hint at a complete grammar, while still keeping it open-ended enough so that most sentences don't really feel complete. At least until the stanzas that then pose a question. What to do then?

Related Links:
Chicago Review
Surfaces

recommended: gregory pardlo

Maybe I'm unrelentingly naive, but there are some colloquial voice poems that just fucking kill me. Provided the poet can make it say something. It's interesting to me that in this particular issue of American Poetry Review (July/August 2009), Tony Hoagland goes on about the impersonators of Dean Young, and how their can be a poetry that is all about manner or voice, yet remain vacuous in content. I guess I wonder what poetry can't be guilty of that accusation. Sure, the Dean Young poets might be fooling a particular audience into thinking that their poetry is intelligent, when really it's just kinetic, or tricky, but poets have been pulling the wool over an audience's eyes for many years impersonating a style of voice, while not reallly having anything to say.

It's why the poems by Gregory Pardlo, especially "All God's Chillun," are so interesting to me. Having just come from reading through jubilat 16, where Shane Book's poems pushed hard at the colloquial voice, I was a bit acclimated to the style. Or, I was little skeptical of what Pardlo might do with it. Book's poems were impressive, but they didn't floor me, primarily because they seemed more about dazzle (or should I say flagellation) and less about content. 

But Pardlo's "All God's Chillun" is actually not so colloquial as the rhythms in the poem, and the title to the poem, might make one believe. In fact, all three of the poems in this issue inhabit this hybrid between high diction and African American speaker. But this style is hardly the feature of the poem. Pardlo is dealing with a subject whose politics are as complicated and innate to the human experience as the politics Auden wrote about during World War II. Pardlo comes to an argument, but not a conclusion, and it's that limbo that seems to require this particular diction of his. These are serious poems that warrant and reward a serious reading.

Related Links:
American Poetry Review
Totem

recommended: timothy donnelly

But I feel like I need to be specific about which poem I prefer in jubilat 16. There's two. One of them wants to talk about what the speaker thinks of mysteries, and the other one indolence. I really like the indolence one. The mysteries one, not so much.

I've been trying to figure out why that is. They both use a very similar argumentative style. They claim an incomplete knowledge of their respective abstract concept, but quickly qualify this incomplete knowledge by explaining that there is some vaguely concrete situation that may help to shed some light on that abstract concept. With the poem that starts by talking about indolence ("Team of Fake Deities Arranged on an Orange Plate"), the fact is one could look inward and contrast what one see there to the things in the room around him, and that could make it possible to find peace. It's a refined and complex argument, and, like the poem here states, "I like it."

What's not to like about a frank bias for introspection over indolence. And what's not to like about a speaker telling you all these delightful things he likes, and give him peace. Absolutely nothing! In fact, what's not to love about it!

Well, when it turns out the idea is mysteries, like it is in "The Malady That Took the Place of Thinking." I guess the concept of mysteries is too wide open, and too presumptive mysteriousness. Or maybe it's just too explicitly vague.

Related Links:
jubilat
Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit

recommended: daniel khalastchi

Um, what do you even start to say about a poem like this. This is no false dilemma. This is no rhetorical turn. I really am speechless about this poem. It disgusted me. I can say that. The imagery is more horror film than surrealism. The image of infants' heads turning around beneath the wrist of this man is not right. But the image is done well. The whole unfolding catastrophe of this man stripped naked, with an "erect penis" for the madame and something, more infants, beneath his skin, is not something I want to read.

But I keep reading it because Khalastchi has not only this man, he has him in a brothel. The occasion for this poem never gets resolved. Well, it is kind of resolved, because he gets his money back. But "what the fuck is going on," really. The reader is never to know. And it might be that point of the poem is even more of a pleasure than that image of the infants beneath his skin. Because the reaction of these three prostitutes, and their wish for him to have his money back, makes whatever is going on beneath the surface that much more revolting.

Hooray to the jubilat 16! Hooray to Daniel Khalastchi's "What's Done:"

Related Links:
jubilat
Announcement of Khalastchi's new book (just accepted!)