lots and lots of neat

recommended: jennifer mackenzie

I am such a sucker for poems that translate the vast expansive potential that seems to just be sitting everywhere and then fits it into a poem. It's one of the reasons I think so fondly of Tony Tost's Invisible Bride. It feels a little gamy at points, ranging a little past the realm of sense for me. But it's that pure imaginative power that he pushes into the poems that I enjoy. I read through the book and I think I could write anything, and include anything, and there never were such things as limits only my fear that what I said was going to be too much for the reader.

MacKenzie's poems in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of FENCE manage to put me there. They have this potent imagination, where a couple's joy sounds like choking, or some bearded guy is shrieking (why shouldn't he be shrieking? It's Sunday!), or the speaker has a John Wayne body. I just love these things, and I love the confidence in the speaker's voice while she says them. They make sense, partly because what is happening in the poem suits the image, and partly because the poet has the will to make it work, and so it does.

But these poems are more than just imagery. They're sex. They're this shade of the imperative that gets laced into different parts. Only a shade, because it's not always clear who the speaker is ordering around. In "You Are Not a Bird" (my favorite of the three poems), the speaker says, "Become an object, come on!--each one has / its lacy train." I don't know if she's speaking in the voice of the officer from stanza 1, if she's got a suggestion for me, if this is her trying to suggest something to the officer. I don't know what it is, but I just find the whole thing so endearing. (Come on! Just play along!) 

Related Link:
FENCE

recommended: karla kelsey

Oh Lords above, when are you going to release the next book from Karla Kelsey? I read poems by her early last year in Colorado Review, I edited her into Gulf Coast, and now you give me these poems in FENCE. Enough already. Enough! I am a patient reader, and a considerate reader. Am I asking so much? Please, the bio notes promised a new book.

And, yes, the new poems in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of FENCE don't do any good to allay my impatience. "Roughsickweek One," "...Two" and "...Three" make a morass of language, where sense kind of swims around, vague, yes, and the ambiguity might limit the meaning that any reader takes from it. Many of the stanzas push at what the lyric can uncover from language itself--a style and poetic intention that I usually find interesting (yes, I'm biased for this kind of poem when it's done well), and, in the hands of someone like Kelsey, I trust the poem is going to lead me through an experience weighted with and by language.

But what I find truly exceptional in these poems is the imaged setting that starts to make frequent appearances over the course of the three poems. There is some place, a contained landscape, where these poems occur, and with each subsequent poem, I can see it--an atrium, this wood-paneled great room attached to the reserve, the terrarium (and all the energy that gets clogged in the center of the speaker's brain). And suddenly this place appears in "Roughsickweek Three" with an antenna built onto rocks, all overlooking a sea. Here is the surreal, dislocated landscape that accords with the morass of language. To me, these two things must go together to further unravel this sentiment, this "Roughsickweek." I feel that heated uncomfortability. And I guess all I want is for these poems not to stop.

Related Links:
FENCE
Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary

recommended: victoria chang

I have lately been thinking about how a poetry moves, and hopefully surprises both the reader and the poet. Sometimes when writing a poem, it seems easy to stay locked in to what you think the poem is supposed to be about, or you relegate it to a certain logic that was formed during the first few lines, and it gets locked in place. Sometimes this can be good. You create this little system for the poem, and as the poem goes on it kind of justifies that system. Sometimes a poet can ease the poem out of that place with a few fluid gestures. The system you thought you were in has been shifted, and it feels like that natural rationale experienced in a dream.

Victoria Chang has opted for the yanking the poem right out of its place. In her two poems appearing in the summer 2009 issue of The Journal, Chang starts her poem in one direction, a fairly interesting direction. But, for me, that first impulse isn't so impressive. I don't think I would be recommending the poems if they had continued on their initial trajectories. In "Elegy as Touch," the poem starts about ants--interesting in its particular facts, but not extraordinary. The same goes for "Self-Portrait as Control." It starts with a domestic scene, upset a bit by mild syntactic inversion at the first line break, but nothing spectacular.

But then Chang yanks each poem right out of place. In "Self-Portrait" the speaker compares this first domestic scene to a baby's efforts to gain control of its bearings, and moves on to surmise that these actions only lead it to situations where it will have less control. But from that concept she leaps into a scene where the speaker has 6-inch bees in her pants, and she's walking north in an alleyway. And, well, I don't want to ruin the end. But after all these claustrophobic situations this dream speaker finds herself in, she whips the poem into this last line, and it breaks everything. Honestly, I found Circle a bit too tidy for my tastes. These poems seem considerably different, which makes me eager to look at Salvnia Molesta.

Related Links:
The Journal
Salvinia Molesta
Circle
Victoria Chang's personal blog

recommended: mary leader

A poem separated into columns, any number of columns, has so many ways that it can fail, really. And Leader's poem, "Among Things Held at Arm's Length," from the summer 2009 issue of The Journal, appears to rise from a desire to describe this couple, both of whom have both died--a couple the speaker seems so incredibly intimate with, so that I suspect there is a larger narrative at work over many poems. An occasion like this makes me incredibly skeptical. I have read poems like this and felt the incidental nature is too much of the forced incidental. It has too much of the <i>Spoon River Anthology</i> cute episode tone for my tastes.

And yet, I feel that Leader pulls me out of that expectation, and I think it happens mainly in her treatment of the columnar form. I feel a real tension between Joe and Katharine Jo, mainly in the way that the two columns have moments when I think they are fitting together as read across. "That's how | lines I wrote so unfamiliar / He perceived it. | I think, amazed / He had a Purple Heart. | How did I come on that?" I find such delight in this weaving sense, and how it is one way to think of the complications that arise during a 50+ year marriage. In a like manner, I find there are other moments when this lateral reading of the lines contrast, making dissonance, which again, speaks to this marriage.

And so I was won over. Though I admit I still harbor reservations about how this would work in a book. Would it be presented at an awkward angle to other poems, forcing a narrative on me that reads like a poet pretending to be a horrible/overly sentimental fiction writer? It doesn't have to, but I think it's a legitimate concern. I suppose I should follow Leader into one of her current books to see what I should expect.

Related Links:
The Journal
Red Signature
The Penultimate Suitor