Lots and lots of neat

recommended: Patricia Lockwood

I think Patricia Lockwood has a problem. I was reading her poem in a New Yorker from last month, and I think she got stuck in a time machine. And not even a modern time machine. One invented in 1859. First off, the word "parrot" has totally changed. When I was growing up, there were only parrots, the bird kind. They star in movies. They make appearances at the local zoo. Lockwood says the word "parrot" "will never / be replaced." I quote from her poem. "Parrot" has been replaced, Patricia. Look how I'm using it right now. I think I am. Maybe.

Just like love is getting replaced. I love now like your love poem loves rope and parrots and the Western Wind and, I imagine, My Fair Lady. I don't love My Fair Lady. I love your love poem. I would love it even if it mentioned My Fair Lady. I don't know how else to give your poem due homage except to repeat that I love it. I love it! Even if you wrote it on a time machine. Even if you didn't get your props back in the 19th, 18th, 17th or 16th centuries. You always have today. That's what love is! It's language that bears repeating. A poem that can reiterate, retract, reorient and replace those old love poems. They're tired of being replaced, I know. Oh, love poems. It's called the tradition ongoing into this century. It's called get ready. Because more centuries are still to come.

Recommended links:
Patricia Lockwood blogs! She jokes, "Poems are jokes." 
She comments on writing a poem.
Octopus Books is publishing Lockwood's first book. 

Mark Doty's My Alexandria

There is this vein of American poetry that produces what I’m going to call the Stadium Arena Voice. It’s loud and saturating! And when I’m reading it I feel like it’s vibrating me in my seat. It’s deep and probing and the wisdom is implicit to the tone, so that it feels like the language is this textured old growth forest, and you’re inside it, the shadows of the forest, the grain of the individual trees. Poems in this voice give me an overwhelming assurance. And honestly, I can never get enough of it. I wish there would be a Stadium-Arena-Voice Movement! There could be small shrines set up for Robert Pinsky’s An Explanation of America and Larry Levis’s The Widening Spell of the Leaves and Robert Hass’s Human Wishes and Carolyn Forche’s The Angel of History. I could name more. Very importantly, there would be a shrine for Mark Doty’s My Alexandria.

When Doty is inside this voice, I am given intimate access to the complications surrounding death and mortality. I have not lived through this experience, but I know the voice in these poems is interested in my understanding it; it is capable of holding the experience before me for consideration. Together we’ll be devastated and coping and unable to go on, though we have to. This isn’t to say that My Alexandria is an emotional pummeling. Maybe I could understand a book of poems like that. But Doty is sensitive to the scope of literature. In fact, I admire how often the book recognizes literature as an intellectual and emotional endeavor, not a reenactment. Can I truly understand what it is like to have a partner diagnosed with H.I.V.? Of course not. But then Doty points out neither can he. And he was the one who lived through it. I look at the transition from “Fog” to “The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Museum.” “Fog,” for me, represents utter tragedy. To follow that with a poem that puzzles over glass sculptures of rotting fruit, calling them “lovely because they seem / to decay,” sets art apart. It is merely mimesis. Art can only seem to express this tragedy. And yet, I felt a tragedy inside me when I read the poem. How can art only be something that seems when that feeling for me was very real?

I’m grateful to have the Stadium Arena Voice there as my guide, because the voice is capable of anything. Doty frames different views into his loss. The turtle that hides in its shell in “No.” The wave that breaks into the statement You’re dying in “Becoming a Meadow.” In any frame, that voice is assuring and earnest. I might understand how to live with mortality, if only I listen. This speaker might too—however difficult it may be, he is trying to understand more about his experience. I think that’s the touchstone of My Alexandria. This speaker who says, “Maybe, when we read through these poems together, I’ll understand what I’m feeling.” The poems mark the difference between knowing of devastation and living with it. It is the voice that negotiates between these two perspectives with such assurance. And it’s the complexity of the Stadium Arena Voice that allows comfort to reside amidst all the tragedy.

Recommended links:
My Alexandria
Mark Doty's home page
Mark Doty examines Walt Whitman
Still Life with Oyster and Lemon (like Doty's longer poems, except as prose!)

recommended: Alec Niedenthal

It's odd sometimes to think about mythology, and how it feels like there are so many scholarly layers assembled around an individual myth. With popular myths, like Icharus flying into the sun, or Persephone being kidnapped by Hades, there are tidy correlations drawn to life lessons or nature. We "know what they mean." And I fear it leads people to shelve mythology as something quaint and entertaining. So that when they come upon a myth, like Cronos sneaking into his father bedroom and castrating him, it doesn't make sense. Or it's exotic. In either case, the first impulse is to consult these scholarly layers and get the definitive answer. Why did something so horrible have to happen?

Alec Niedenthal's short piece, "The Possum He Was Say This Long" in Agriculture Reader 4 feels like myth to me. It features "the father" and "the son." And it addresses the very complex relationship a father and son are going to have. Of course, the son will want to overpower the father. The father will encourage the son's spirit, but he won't let the son cross a certain line. And the son will admire the father, because the father is so encouraging. And the whole cycle surges forward. The son testing that line. The father keeping the son eager. How is anything like this supposed to end? In the Greek myth about Cronos, the son comes to his father at night and castrates him.

Not in Niedenthal's short piece. In fact, I would say the father wins in this struggle, cutting the son at his little knees at the last line of the poem. I admire the sudden shift. But I recommend Niedenthal's work, because it puts me in an uncomfortable position. I feel all that paternal warmth in this poem. I feel the son's gleeful affection. And woven in with that, I feel a disturbing fealty expected by the father from his son. And the son's happy compliance. I refer specifically to the scene of the father and the son in the shower, which, to me, is reminiscent of Abraham in the book of Genesis instructing his servant to put his hand on his thigh and swear an oath. For me, Niedenthal's piece is saturated with allusion. It's like a big ball of complicatd mythological relationship world, and that ball is bearing down on you while you read.

Recommended links:
Alec Niedenthal's Blog (Be careful. He is up for most things.)
Agriculture Reader
A letter Niedenthal wrote to the Times where maybe he casts himself as the son of this short piece. 

Thalia Field's Point and Line

Hermeneutics has always been a difficult word for me. On one hand, I understand it deals with insularity and the innately oppressive force that that kind of inward focus exerts on the subject. On the other hand, the boundaries of hermeneutic influence never seem all that clear (are there boundaries?). And so, whether right or wrong, I always think of hermeneutics in terms of a suffocating inwardness, and all the complications that that would imply.

What does this have to do with Thalia Field’s Point and Line? I can’t help but think of her book as a hermeneutic study of the lyric I. Perhaps I am probing too literally into the Kandinsky quote that serves as the epigraph, but for me the book probes at its point (the I) to discover what might be possible when extending a point. The book indulges the voice of the lyric I throughout, whether it’s the nearly catatonic client in “A [therefore] I,” or the hyperdetailed perspective offered  in “Walking,” Field essentially “leaves the mic on” for the lyric self to express and express, until we realize there need be no fatigue to the lyric. The pressures of a hermeneutic self create a perfect Carnot engine for generating language. May it be ad infinitum!

I would venture to say that Field is the Experimentalist Extraordinaire, at least when it comes to thinking through this subjective self. Allegory, stream of consciousness, imaginary families, dramatic productions. There is no shortage to Field’s resources, and there is no conceptual boundary she’s unwilling to cross. In the poem “Seven Veils,” who is Sal? What is Sal? Just for some lyrical fun, I like making Sal (who is either a him or a her or an it or an interstellar comet that has a room in the palace) that client from “A [therefore] I.” Why not? Field’s experimentalism is infectious. I’ll say it makes me an Experimentalist Reader, and Field offers a lot of material for a reader to experiment with.

What I’m most fascinated by, though, are Field’s [bracketed phrases]. And here I return to the Kandinsky relationship between point and line. The [phrases] remind me of reading Timothy Donnelly’s itemized poems in Twenty-Seven Props, if only in the way they seize the flow of language and prioritize a conceptual framework. But Field’s [bracketed phrases] often come in the course of a dialogue between characters. If a reader were to fill in the blank with what the brackets say they should, with “7 outdated objects that dangle” or “3 symptoms of epilepsy,” then the dramatic “conversation” Field has staged between her characters would veer into the absurd. Field chooses instead to hold down the volume, so that you have to speculate about why this character would be asking the reader to list these items. Why would a Monkey be thinking of 7 outdated objects that dangle? Why would an Unformatted Child be thinking of 3 symptoms of epilepsy? The “conversation” becomes a game where I try to read each character’s subjective reasoning. And, even further, to consider that subjective reasoning in light of the ridiculous dramatic situation Field has staged these conversations in.

Yes, the book is exhaustive. It could be exhausting, unless you’re the ambitious reader who rises to the book’s obviously ambitious scope. I don’t even know where to say Point and Line proposes its ending is. According to the “Impotence of First Lines,” there’s a p. 998 somewhere!

Recommended links:
Point and Line
Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit
Thalia Field's page at Brown University (if only for the brief account of each book)
An article from Fanzine offering some thoughts on Field's version of hybridity. 

 

recommended: John Olson

I guess pretty much everything makes sense. I mean, if you read Olson's poems in New American Writing 29, you'd think the world was pretty much made out of sense. And if you were a speaker in those poems, that's the main thing you'd have going for you. Don't get bothered by all the chaotic details that might make things confusing. It's part of the logic. You'll be familiar with it soon enough. In one poem, there's even an "Avatar of Chaos." But, don't worry. He's actually employed by "us." He's our gardener. And he can plant almost anything: thoughts, knowledge, feelings. He can even wrestle his words so they'll have meaning for us. 

Maybe there is something magical about these poems, because I am absolutely incapable of worrying while I'm around them. This gardener, or "Avatar of Chaos," is full of violence towards us. He plants knowledge of knives. He plants feelings in the speaker's heart that blossom into hammers. Am I supposed to be disturbed? Honestly, that would be the most ridiculous reaction of all. Because a good garden is bumbling and chaotic and turgid and plentiful. You might try planning a garden, but I think the true pleasure comes when you happen upon the garden's will. And this is what Olson's poem excites in me. The continually regenerative potential in nature. Olson writes like there is no end to what might spring into being. "Why do we hire this guy?" the speaker of the poem asks. "Because he can make anything grow. / Because he is ancient as earth."

Olson has three poems in this issue of the magazine, each of them fecund and overflowed.  It is the true definition of poetic largesse.

Recommended links:
A statement he makes about his writing
Larynx Galaxy
New American Writing