Lots and lots of neat

recommended: Kathleen Ossip

"A. in May," by Kathleen Ossip
from Boston Review March/April 2012 

Some days I think dissipation deserves a trophy. Like we could set it on a marble dais, we could feed it Turkish Delights, we could flatter it with some sort of devotional verse, maybe about the regularity of its phonemes. I've always felt that Mary Jo Bang's Louise in Love gave at least a healthy nod to dissipation, if not an outright embrace. Like if there was a lifestyle piece in the Times about what it feels like to have no direction in life, and a full measure of wealth to invest in this shiftlessness, it would end up being a selection of poems from Louis in Love.

Ossip's "A. in May" starts with that feeling. As though the woman being described could barely trouble herself to create language. "Natural it is to be disgusted and hopeless, / Disgusted and hopeless at being related to her, / Relating to her is what keeps me alive." The language actually feels as though it can't get up out of its chairbed. Or it won't. And yet, the literal message from the speaker is that she can't help but observe this woman. In fact, the statement "Natural it is to be disgusted and hopeless" could be what this speaker thinks the woman is thinking. It could also be what the speaker is thinking as she looks at the woman. We could say the first half of the poem is a double entendre dedicated to dissipation.

And the second half of the poem would be the struggle with disappointment. But not the disappointment where the speaker can stand at some distance and judge this woman, as though that woman and all her unurgable minutes are some grand disappointment. The dissapointment in "A. in May" has to do with how "natural" it is that this scene exists. In fact, how natural it is for the woman on her chairbed to be suffering, and dissipated, and self-absorbed. And how natural it is that we, along with the speaker, would be disappointed, and, naturally, our judgment would have no basis. If you can pull the frame of reference back far enough, say to the whole "universe of process," there really is nothing we can claim is unnatural. 

It's like the poem is one long pean to discouragement. The woman's. The speaker's. It's like Ossip tapped into malaise. And, quite honestly, that woman on a chairbed might benefit from reading a poem about that.

Recommended Links:
The Cold War
Louise in Love , by Mary Jo Bang
Kathleen Ossip home page 

recommended: Matthew Gagnon

"Some Novelties of Stagecraft," by Matthew Gagnon
from Boston Review, Jan/Feb 2012 

I remember these poems from a few years ago by Linnea Ogden. For instance, "Contact," published in 2008 by Boston Review. Ogden takes a snippet of legalese and inlays it into a lyric occasion. So simply. And so seamlessly. In fact, the connection between the two could make you think the legal statement simlpy generated the poem from its own juridical intent. The beginning of each stanza may be legal jargon, but the sentiment syntactically fits within the lyric and offers further complication for its occasion.

What happens when you open the poetic possibilities of jurisprudence? I say subversiveness. It's like poetry just happened to wander into the courtroom, or the zoning office at City Hall, and then started kicking its way into the law books. Perhaps that's too kind and too enthusiastic a take on the poems. But I want political poems that aren't so brash and unsubtle I feel awkward for them while I'm reading them. Is Poetry really going to win a fight with fisticuffs? I don't think so. Subversive poems are subtle. They occupy their space quietly. They rearrange the logic of the space to suit their own terms. Ogden's poem appropriates and confronts a vital and active and self-consuming part of our culture. I would say it's closer to protesting the 1% than many poems that scream about how angry they are with the 1%. 

And what, in God's name, is Matthew Gagnon's poem doing? Looking for a corporate sponsor? Describing the lyric exuberance of a poem that has already found its corporate sponsor? Here, again, is an appropriation of language: underwritten, churning, in the pipeline. The term, "irrational exuberance," that appears about 2/3 of the way through the poem, actually has a Wikipedia entry to describe it. The fact is, Gagnon's speaker has been underwritten. And his message is spreading like water threading everywhere. But what does that mean? If a "punch line" has some sort of corporate backing, who benefits? In this world where Facebook and Google are going to use data about us for some supposed diabolical plan, I wonder why we are so eager to presume these corporations will harm us. 

Are we not capable of being like Gagnon's speaker: "storied and customized." That guy is like a "fuse box humming beside a thornbush." As with many poems of the exuberant, the ecstatic here is an ironic gesture. Gagnon hasn't really decided which way he would go with this. However, I appreciate Gagnon taking a moment to speak for the 1%. Or at least to slip onto the balcony overlooking the proesters and toast to subversion in all its poetic immensity.

Recommended links:
Boston Review
Maybe this is Matthew Gagnon? More subversion?
Some other poems of his at Conjunctions.

recommended: geoffrey g. o'brien

It is fascinating to think about how grammar, and sentence, create a momentum by manipulating syntax. Those wily academic sentences that pile one subordinate clause onto another succeed when they know how to build the tension of the sentence's momentum, and then release it. It's a beautiful thing, really. Often enough it alone can stretch the intelligence, and widen the concept the writer has in mind.

Geoffrey G. O'Brien's poem in the September/October 2009 issue of Boston Review relies upon the momentum created by a sentence. But the sentences in O'Brien's "Poem Beginning to End" are not participating in a closed system. And what I mean is not just that the sentences can point in multiple directions, it's that the sentences that get started are derailed, usually as the function of a line break, but sometimes mid-line. But, and here is the magic of the poem, most of the time it doesn't feel as though there is anything grammatically irregular. Yes, there are distinct moments when I feel disoriented reading the poem, but O'Brien maintains enough consistency with the images, like men, a cup, some house, that I feel as though I'm still in the same general location.

And so I'm left with a vague sense of disagreement. I'm assuming the speaker can feel that all these people around him don't really have a common purpose, and they're not going to find one, because they're not all that interested in it. For me, this unhinged grammar is meant to make me feel unsettled, the same limbo that the speaker is in. Yes, meaning cannot be produced by a poem that defies the mechanics of communicating, but I can still claim a sense of what this all means. And for me there is value in that.

Related Links:
Boston Review
Green and Gray

recommended: forrest gander

I'm not at all interested in the occasion for this poem. The action described here, of "touching" someone with new-minty breath, is fashioned into something much more precious than it really is. I'm not sure I can imagine any poem that could take that gesture (a woman who has just smeared toothpaste on her upper and lower teeth), tie it to evaporation (the poem is titled "Evaporation 2"), and then claim that the speaker is "touched" in any way.

However, I am still recommending this poem, published in the May/June 2009 issue of Boston Review. The parenthetical asides, and their constant rhythm shifts, invigorates this poem. "the meanings (in increments) lie / bare (she says) (Oh, to her friend) // who is watching" That moment, "Oh to her friend" is where I feel the poem invents a new grammatical relationship (she says, "Oh to her friend") or the speaker says "Oh" in response to the meanings), and, at the same time, changes up the pacing of a reading. Mr. Gander continues to make these parenthetical comments, and they may be straightforward descriptive additions, or they may have this element of ambiguity, adding a graceful density to the poem's possible meanings.

Related Links:
Boston Review (read poem online here)
Eye Against Eye

recommended: jynne dilling martin

On the whole, a good group of "Discovery"/Boston Review Contest winners in the May/June 2009 issue. But I have to say that Ms. Martin's poem, "Reprucussions of the Current Import/Export Ratio," stands out as my favorite of the group. I like it when the theme of a poem is tied to the action of multiple images in a poem. For this poem what this means is that within the first two stanzas, the idea of "personal mystery" and "invisibility" are made central to the poem. They go together. Of course, they go together, but the art Martin uses in stating invisibility makes me feel a depth to the concept, partially because of the skipped rock sinking, which for me evokes a physical sensation that doesn't seem to have an end, or a bottom to the whatever this body of water is, only sinking.

But this depth is also created by the simplicity and specificity of the images. Turnip seeds sewn into coats and skipping stones sinking out of sight. They have such an easy coincidence, and that ease is what I think lends the poem authority. So that when Martin extends the image, I trust her, and I keep trusting her enough so that when it lands on these turnips sprouting out of gravesites, and a donkey (which had appeared earlier drawing mathematics in the dirt) who has its leg poised for more problems, and I'm not sure I can put in words who "you" are at the end, I'm willing to accept the speaker's need to pose a question without my knowing what all the parts of the question are about. Because this poem is more about the sentiment that drove her to ask a donkey anything.

Related Links:
Boston Review (or read the poem online)