lots and lots of neat

recommended: james hoch

I am always interested in the poem that doesn't know, that is obviously trying to know, that spends so much of itself looking into what it might know, I would think it got tired of not knowing. To me, this is the poem that is helpless to its subject, and, when it's being done right, when I can sense that the poet isn't just using it as a device, or a trick (as many poets do), then I am helpless to what this poet might tell me.

What's at stake here goes back to that maxim by Frost: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." Some poems claim that they don't know, because the poet wants to be seen as someone who is helpless to his poem. More often, he's just being lazy. He doesn't want to know what lies at the heart of his poem, because, really, he just wants to go on and write the next poem. Whatever validity Tony Hoagland has in his "skittery poem of the moment" argument, this, to me, is at its heart. Many poets are fascinated by the fact that they have an imagination, and they delight in all the craziness it can produce, and then they further delight in the quick associations it can make. But many, many of them don't take time to try and dig a little further into the source of all those imagination snacks. I don't care if they think they're impersonating Dean Young, because, ultimately, they aren't. If they were, they would take their poems as seriously as I think Dean Young takes his.

A long wind-up to James Hoch's poem "Disgrace and Oblivion in Ancient Rome," found in the September/October 2009 issue of American Poetry Review. Here is a poem with an investment that continually redeems itself over the course of the poem. What is history? What is history, according to a father who was a history teacher? What is history, when you don't know what you think of that father? What is a father? These are the kinds of questions I hear in this poem. And, then, what I hear more, is how these play out amid a backdrop of the ruins in Rome, or the sculpture of Stalin in Vilnius, both of which could be read as a figurative take on the speaker's history. They could also be read as a larger awareness of how these generational issues take place as a part of history. Generations make up history, though it doesn't always seem so immediately evident.

Hoch has made a poem here that is both sentimentally aware, and intellectually ambitious. Even if it hasn't come close to answering those questions it proposes.

Related Links:
American Poetry Review
Miscreants

recommended: shane mccrae

Who wouldn't want to be like Stein? Who wouldn't want to whip poems around like a game of olly olly oxen free? The woman's poems are like language crack. They're what you've got to sneak behind your professor's back so he doesn't know you're going to devise your own ruin. The problem is that their style is so distinct it's almost impossible to bring her into your own writing without looking like you're just aping her behind her dead woman's back. If you love Stein, you know she deserves better than that.

Enter Shane McCrae in the September/October 2009 issue of American Poetry Review. Who I have officially determined is not an ape. He's using her, but I like how he uses her to complement his style, which has a different intent. McCrae's poems are more deep image at their center. Where I would say Stein is usually moving her reader along a slow logic that accumulates with her reputation, I wouldd say McCrae is rotating his reader deeper and deeper into the emotional circumstances that inspired his poem. In fact, I would almost call these three poems in APR Gertrude Stein meets James Galvin. And not just because McCrae's first poem is "Horses Running Fast." 

McCrae has that darkness in his poem that can do nothing but be still. And perhaps what's most impressive about these poems is how that repetition, which for Stein can create a tremendous kinetic energy, is suddenly just barely stirring in McCrae's work. Thank God Cleveland State Poetry Center is publishing his book next year.

Related Links:
American Poetry Review
Cleveland State University Poetry Center

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: carl adamshick

One more poem from the March/April 2009 issue of American Poetry Review. Adamshick's poem, "Out past the dead end sign" starts off a little clunky. And quite honestly, if each of these sections were poems on their own, I would not think so highly of this poem. Individually, the sections don't have a lot to say. But it was that simple move of aggregation, with an italic "And" no less, that made me interested.

And, the multiplicity of voices. The sections move between what I think are male and female speakers, giving me the impression that past the dead end sign there are things happening, suspicious things, dangerous things. Loving things. Adult things.

And, as the poem goes on, and all these narratives push against each other for room, I find the stories more compelling.

Related Links:
American Poetry Review (worldcat search for American Poetry Review)

recommended: tony hoagland

Sometimes I feel as though the issues of American Poetry Review take on a certain flavor. With this March/April 2009 issue, in the stretch of poems by Goldbarth, Hoagland, and Carl Dennis, there is what I would call the instructional poem. Why instructional? Because I feel the poet wants to address me, his audience, directly. He wants to lead me to a place. With the Hoagland poems, that place is "appreciation." You haven't heard of it? It's where the poet has a certain take on a given situation, and you and I as audience are led to it so that we can appreciate it.

Altough maybe led isn't quite the term for it. Charmed. We are charmed by the diction, how the poet is so eager to engage us, how the poet is so funny and flirtatious.

I'm not always bought off on these kinds of poems. I'm suspicious. Or maybe I think that that appreciating place doesn't take full account (or advantage) of the given situation. But in the case of "Famous Feminist Breaks Vows," I'm very interested. The reversal of expectation when I move from the title to the poem. And the people involved.

Related Links:
American Poetry Review (worldcat search for American Poetry Review)
What Narcissism Means to Me

recommended: sasha pimentel chacon

"Blood, Sister" or everything, please, sister Sasha, everything, keep no reservation. I remember when I was in the navy, and we would start the engine room, and I was responsible for starting the ship's generator, and I opened the main valve (SG-V15, if I remember correctly), and I could just feel the power pushing that turbine round. This was heavy machinery, major electrical power.

And here's Ms. Sasha Chacon, in the March/April 2009 issue of American Poetry Review, opening up all the valves, giving everything. Is this her identity she's speaking of? Is this what she's been told her identity should be? Is this really a sister that she's asking me to recognize? I willingly entertain all the possibilities. Because in that panoply, and the violence, the bloodied violence, that ties all these pieces together, there is a pleasure.

Related Links:
American Poetry Review (worldcat search for American Poetry Review)

recommended: bert stern

I know I have a weakness for poems that even hint at a religious theme. And I know I'm also a complete sap for poems that tug at contemporary anachronism, especially in light of Ancient Days (yes, I had hard crush times over Anne Carson, I admit it). Here, Stern touches on what I take to be the story of Jacob leaving Canaan to find a wife, and his waiting for her (what better to wait at a Motel 6, right?). The poem is called "Wait," which makes me think, well, Jacob had to wait. Hopefully with a color TV, and free cable.

But mainly what I appreciate is the poem's ability to put me between a reverent past and a complacent present, all in the figure of this conflicted speaker (and wouldn't you be conflicted if you knew there was some hairy man in your homeland pissed off at your existence?).

Related Links:
American Poetry Review (worldcat search for APR)
Off the Grid Press

recommended: catie rosemurgy

The new poems Catie Rosemurgy has in APR delight in the world's materiality. But more than that, she sees her own poems, their act of creation, as something integral to that world, as though she has participated in creation. It might sound solipsistic, but she makes them available so she can speak of and celebrate them.

Oh, don't worry. This is done in the most earnest and thoughtful ways. A poet has to be careful if she's going to celebrate something like the definite article appearing in her own poem. Or the arbitrary goodness that makes an apple something we can hold in our hand, as opposed to a sofa, as opposed to some newsprint. These are delicate things to make gleeful, and Rosemurgy holds them like a bouquet of Valentine roses.

Grateful, grateful to the January/February 2009 issue of American Poetry Review.

Related Links:
American Poetry Review (worldcat search for APR)
My Favorite Apocalypse

recommended: rachel zucker

You can see, the November/December issue of American Poetry Review has been especially exciting. I'm a big fan of the Rachel Zucker poems (I'm thinking mainly of "Long Lines to Stave Off Suicide"). They have a long, broad arc, overindulgent confession (really? yes, really, the overindulgent confession about her children, and their importance to her, is so poignant), surreal image, and then quick syntactic switches in the sentences. It's like watching a dance with linguistic pirouettes. Very nice. I'm so into the thought that starts that poem off, too. At what age would it be best, or suitable, for a mother to die before her children.

recommended: matthew dickman

The poems in the November/December issue of American Poetry Review are so exciting. The ironic play on emotion (crying over a picture of cows, for instance) is almost too much affect, but the intention, to really address a surging and continually present emotion, makes me interested in playing along. It's strange to feel as though I could be distanced from an emotion but still serious about that emotion. Related, his new book: All-American Poem.