lots and lots of neat

recommended: peter gizzi

A poem can be an engine. I mean, often we call it a vehicle for talking about something, or a writer uses the occasion of the poem as an excuse to talk about a much larger issue that he is concerned with. For a poem to be an engine it has to be actively welding together concepts, unlikely concepts. It's the feeling I have when I read a poem by Robert Duncan. The poem is an activity among subjects, and, as it churns along, it creates an understanding.

What might fascinate me most about these poems is how they can be sentimental. Not in the sense that I feel pulled by the heartstrings, like what might happen if pathos were stirred up. What I mean is that it feels as though the certainty is sown into my skin, or my emotional fabric, or whatever registers an abstract concept being something solid. The poem as engine makes an idea vibrant, and my understanding is then an enthusiastic assent.

If all this is too abstract, I'll try to use Peter Gizzi's poem "On Prayer Rugs and a Small History of Portraiture," from the Summer 2009 issue of Colorado Review, as an example. The title itself proposes a thesis: prayer rugs and the history of portraiture could have a common denominator. Not that this idea is immediately evident, I believe I came to this after reading the poem, and noticing the proximity of green and vibrant and being. Or how about this quote, "I am alive today, yes alive not being alive // being with the lost ones and the living lost within the lost hours lost / faces lost who find // tendrils of smoke and shoots bursting for in rain" What I find here is this desire to reconcile the mere figure appearing in a portrait and the way that we are reminded of the person's existence, and life, as we look at it. It is similar to the way a prayer rug might try to transcend its static existence by keeping designs of greenery in trendils around the outer border.

Of course, Gizzi doesn't really offer any explicit cues in the poem that could solidify this impression of mine. The closest part might come in the final section: "Every day a portrait. Every day a point. A pirouette / into ought // awe, off-centered asymmetrical lighting / alive in contrast, alive // to contest." A quote which I again find contends with the tension of absence versus presence, as proposed by the portrait of someone. Following that with the "pirouette" and the reference to "symmetry," I feel Gizzi is putting impressions he has of the history of portraiture alongside his impressions of a prayer rug. It's a tricky articulation, perhaps, but the weaving of these impressions actually makes me understand these two unlikely ideas as inevitably landing on this common denominator.

Related Links:
Colorado Review
The Outernationale

recommended: jeffrey schultz

I know poets are always going to be drawn to the series of poems. It indicates an ambition, a self-defined poetic form personal to the poet, which he can use and alter, so that it develops a voice outside his own and that voice comments on the subsequent poems of the series. In this poetry world of filling out grant applications, writing statements of purpose, or offering the easy hook to a publisher, the series, and the graduated level of series, the project, appear as some holy grail. And this isn't just a pursuit of the younger poet. Rita Dove, Mary Jo Bang, Claudia Rankine, just to name a few recent examples, have all taken on the poetic series, to varying degrees of success.

This is, of course, a larger issue. But one facet of it arises surrounding magazine publication. Too often, the series, or project, shifts its character from ambition to formula. And it's an unfortunate fact that, if magazine publication is introduced into the equation, the likelihood of this shift over to formula is much higher. In fact, I can't think of a project in the last few years, whose individual poems were widely published, and then whose book was anything more than a bunch of the same poem over and over again. I don't often invite comments, because I assume no one is reading this blog, but if you have a suggestion for a book that contradicts this statement, I'd be happy to hear. Mary Jo Bang's Elegy is probably the one exception I can think of.

This is the approach I take when reading Jeffrey Schultz's poem in the November 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. "J. Finds in His Pocket Neither Change Nor Small Bills" is a poem with heft, and breadth, and I run out of breath reading it out loud, or just to myself. And I feel as though the entire life of L.A. is right here in my chest as I am inside it, and I am inside this poem. I love this poem for its messiness, and for its complicated agendas. I like this poem because it makes a mess of its politics, and so I find a new way of considering the political poem. But I've read other poems in this J. series, and they come off as Matthew Dickman-esque. They come off as a narrative where the speaker is forced to confront a situation unique to this ultra-contemporary moment, a situation that would have never been possible just five years ago, and he has to formulate a moral stance that accounts for his place. I like these poems, I like Matthew Dickman's poems, even though everyone says he's a jerk. But I wonder where Jeffrey Schultz's project is taking him. I wonder if the different register present in "J. Finds in His Pocket..." is a constructive push out of formula, or just a crown for a series of very publishable, very appealing, but not nearly as ambitious narrative occasional pieces.

Related Links:
Poetry Magazine
Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang

recommended: eric ekstrand

Extending the image in a poem takes a certain amount of responsibility. The poet owes the reader an excess. The poem can't be a simple means of drawing out the equation that matches object to idea. Competent poems do that. And, yes, everyone can take pleasure and enjoy a competent poem, but I'm not interested in pursuing the work of poets who write these competent poems. An image, if it's going to extend over the life of the poem, must show me the poet's constant reconsideration of what it might mean that this object means this idea. Or, better yet, how the world is impacted after this object has been changed, or associated with a whole new set of connotations.

Eric Ekstrand's poems "Plumblossoms," published in the November issue of Poetry, keep an intellectual agility. The first poem declares the spine "a hierarchy of white florets," and then two prose stanzas later explains that "the spineless aspire to incessant interludes that never arrive anywhere." It's an idea, this spinelessness, that he continues to develop over the course of the poem. And it's an idea that seems troubled, possibly because the speaker sounds so forgiving of the condition. Mary, Ekstrand's exemplary of the spineless, might have destroyed the art of life, but she has a sense of her loss when she stands among the garden she planted. The speaker can see it in her face.

What I am most happy about, though, is that each of Ekstrand's images follow a sincere desire to unfurl all the complexities that follow from this imagined condition. There is an intense imagination in the work, but it isn't for service to pyrotechnics and flash. This poem needs to relate a sad truth, and the woman coming to terms with it. 

Related Links:
Poetry (direct link to the poems online)
A picture of plum blossoms

recommended: rick barot

I have wanted to describe the sensation of understanding, especially the sensation of certainty that occurs when the conclusion of an inductive argument is arrived at. But I come short. Is it a solid feeling in the pit of my stomach, or a bracing in my chest, or the image of a boat when it has guided its way into the current. These give me a sense of that deeper implicit note, and possibly the pleasure I feel when I experience it in a poem. One of the things I'll always admire in Mark Doty's poems is his ability to touch that in me. It's almost like he can write a poem that is set up like an argument, an argument whose logic is complemented by the emotional notes he elicits from his reader.

I want to call this a "poetic syllogism." And though I can't find this term in my trusty Princeton Encyclopedia to Poetry and Poetics, I did find out that it is an existing term in Islamic poetry. In recognizing the truth that a poem can touch on, Islamic critics have identified a poetic structure that consists of propositions and conclusion. This structure allows for these poems to construct a moral argument that elicits sympathy for the person being eulogized, or it allows the writer to satirize evil. The main point is that the form has a specific end in mind, with each proposition serving a specific purpose that should lead to what seems like a fairly predictable conclusion. This isn't meant to discount the sincerity of sentiment in the poem, only to say that a reader can start reading this poem and have a fairly reasonable idea of where it's going to lead.

This is a long lead up to Rick Barot's poem "Exegesis in Wartime," found in the Fall 2009 issue of The Kenyon Review. But I think it's necessary to understand the conscious structuring Barot uses, and how much that structuring relies upon inductive reasoning to make all the connections. The phrase Hemingway uses in one of his stories, talking about the war, and the connection that has with a blogger stationed, I presume, in Iraq. The events Hemingway implies by the phrasing of his statement, compared to the events the speaker gleans from the soldier's blog.

Most of all, though, this reasoning serves to dig the reader into a sentiment. To give that sensation of certainty in the end as Barot turns to the phrase from the soldier's online journal, and the reader gets to know exactly what Barot knows. Some understanding that reaches beyond what any explicit statement could accomplish.

Related Links:
"The Islamic Roots of the Poetic Syllogism" (from JSTOR)
The Kenyon Review
Want

recommended: sally keith

I recently found this video on youtube of starlings in one of those fluid formations. I don't know if I can really describe it, except that they are flying over a marsh, and whatever their rhythm, they appear to collapse into themselves, and to form what looks like some solid object. And that object, as soon as it drifts into itself, drifts away from its center, or coerces to form another object. I know it's a common sight. And I know every time I get to see it I'm captivated. One time, when I was living in Virginia, driving toward the Newport News Tunnel, I saw a rope of these starlings flying over the highway. They were going north. And there was no end of them that I could see.

Sally Keith's poem "Lullaby on the Marsh," in Issue 09 of A Public Space, is not about starlings, or birds. The poem is about Achilles. And it is about motive. And the way motive moves inside Achilles, sometimes solidifying, sometimes just drifting, not necessarily aware of a purpose, but acting, still, with purpose, like the men who prepare their houses for winter. For me, Keith is able to move language in her poem like those starlings. I am always aware of some solidity present as the impulse of the poem. "Shape of the wave underneath the wave" she says toward the opening of the poem. She touches that shape in different ways.

It's what I am always impressed with in her first book Design. Keith writes with an acute awareness of what matters in a scene, and she keeps that focus very present for me, even making it feel as though that concept, that focus, is a solid thing in my chest. And her poem is there to help me understand this complexity as a denseness. However quickly it might morph into another denseness.

Related Links:
YouTube video of starlings
A Public Space
Design
Dwelling Song

recommended: derek walcott

The more poems I read in magazines the more I am disappointed by their specific occasion. Whether it's the "I have an imagination so let's celebrate" occasion or the "I have found this new way to relate to my past" occasion, the depth is limited and predictable. And what upsets me most is how it seems the more senior the poet, the more efficient the poem is at fitting into either of these occasions. I understand the pressures at a magazine to feature poets who will be recognized by their subscribers, and then might attract new readers. I understand why these poets' poems are appearing. I just don't understand who can read those poems and not get cynical about those poets, and this editing system that keeps ushering these kinds of poems to publication.

The new poems by Derek Walcott in the new issue of A Public Space (Issue 09) are intriguing to me. On one side I admire the poems because I admire Walcott's poetry, and his deep consideration of citizenship, and place, and how identity weaves and conflicts with these elements. On the other side, I feel as though every book of his I've read is dealing with this issue, using very similar approaches (the larger forgiveness offered by nature by virtue of her obliviousness, the invasive nature of what Walcott terms the "enemy" in "21" from APS). And so then I wonder if Walcott is showing mere competence in these poems, an ability to write another Walcott poem, or if I should recognize and appreciate the continuing nature of his project. What does it mean to continue writing poetry?

This is probably a larger issue than I can address in these brief-ish blog posts. It's mystery enough that keeps people writing, and I suppose what I'm asking here is what obligation a poet has to his subject, and his evolution as a writer. Is Walcott still evolving? With someone of his stature, accomplishments, and, of course, accolades, this is a tricky question to pose.

Related Links:
A Public Space
Omeros
Selected Poems (2007)

recommended: terrance hayes

Should poetry require a specialized knowledge to be understood and enjoyed? I teach poetry to third graders, and to university students. And with both I stress the importance of feeling the poem. And what I mean is taking the poem on its own terms, giving the poem space to touch them intellectually and sensually. Usually I don't have to coach the kids so much. They really can be one of the most accepting audiences for a poem. The older students, however, suffer from Preconceived Hierarchy Syndrome. At some point of their lives, they were told that poems have a secret language to them, some grand symbolic hierarchy, and if they are really going to understand poetry, they need to know all those pieces. It's maddening sometimes to listen to their intellectual shoehorning. This must mean this. I can say that it's not their speculation that discourages me, it's the absolute certainties they frame them in.

What, then, to do with Terrance Hayes' poem "Snow for Wallace Stevens" in the recent issue of Harvard Review (No. 36)? Should I need to know that Terrance Hayes is black? Should only black people find offense at Wallace Stevens' open racism? Can a white person ever really know the nature and depth of this offense? Does this poem limit its audience then, to black people, who are capable of feeling the poem on these terms?

I understand that this issue of specialized audiences is not raised for the first time in this poem. I can never be housewife in the 1950s, so does that mean I can never relate to Adrienne Rich poems? But I wonder how much knowledge of this moment is necessary to understand the love hate relationship Hayes is describing here. I came to the poem knowing Terrance Hayes is one of the editors at jubilat, that a diagram explaining how to read Wallace Stevens wraps the cover of the most recent issue. I can guess, without knowing he participated on an AWP panel related to Stevens, that he has a deep commitment to his poetry.

So then I wonder, when I read the poem in the Harvard Review, whether dropping the title of one poem, "Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery," is enough offense to force the crisis, "How, with pipes of winter / lining his cognition, does someone learn / to bring a sentence to its knees?" I don't think I'm being naive in asking this. These "pipes of winter," that refer as much to the italicized lines earlier in Hayes' poem allude also to the snow in the cemetery, touch on Stevens' racist attitude. And Hayes wonders here how it's possible someone so close minded could be so capable of wisdom or resonance or understanding, or whatever the power is that Stevens passes in his poems.

The point of this blog entry, then: is this mention of this one poem enough to establish Stevens as a racist? Or should more information be required. As I started to write on this poem, I searched for any other links between Hayes and Stevens, and I found Major Jackson talking about Stevens' insulting reference to Gwendolyn Brooks. That finally convinced me of the crisis in Hayes' poem. But shouldn't something of that caliber be in Hayes' poem? This poem succeeds most at the love/hate dynamic Hayes has with Stevens. He admires Stevens' poems, there is plenty of love. How could he make me understand the hate better?

Related Links:
Harvard Review poetry editor Major Jackson speaks of race and Wallace Stevens.
Harvard Review
Wind in a Box