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recommended: joanna klink

Especially since her second book Circadian, I have thought of Joanna Klink as a poet of intense earnestness. I feel that she is writing out of this sentimental knot--a knot she only wishes she could untie as she begins writing this particular poem. And that may be what I mean by earnestness. Her poems aren't reveling in their pain, they are methodically plotting their resolution, though they are guaranteed to find nothing of the sort.

How is someone supposed to untie a knot? In my experience, it's usually a tricky occasion where I might tighten the knot, or I might loosen it. I can never tell which direction I'm going. That's what it feels is happening in "The Radiant," Klink's poem in the Winter 2009 issue of the Chicago Review. The nature of this knot, I don't think I could come close to unraveling, except I see it is dealing with love, dense night, accumulation, and some dark origin nature operates out of. I have been a fan of Jane Mead's work for a long time, and it seems to me that if Mead's poems (especially from House of Poured Out Waters) speak quietly out of this dark space, Klink's "The Radiant" turns the volume up. The poem grabs at anything within arm's reach, and sometimes even reaches beyond reality to explore the properties and truths about this particular knot.

And this exploration, this earnest desire Klink shows to know more about why this occasion had to happen, and is happening as she writes the poem--for me, it's the impelling energy, and it draws me in. It can be something falling out of the sky. It can be the two people sleeping on a box spring. The poem is present for me.

Related Links:
Chicago Review
Circadian

recommended: john tipton

I think it's hard to write a poem that has any idea of Americana, or pronounces itself as the middle of America. There are the James Wright poems from The Branch Will Not Break. And I guess that example helps to distinguish poems that, to my mind, use Americana in some fanciful way, as a box of trinkets or novelties that can be pulled out and shown off to the reader.

John Tipton's poems in the Winter 2009 issue of Chicago Review have seated themselves in the middle of America, which is a good place for a God-fearing Christian to appear and add some perspective. Not that these are in the voice of the devout, mind you. I'm not really sure whose voice these poems are in. Whoever it is, he reserves a mix of skepticism and belief in Titus, an attendant in a Kansas church in flames on the day of "Pentecost," and then in "Luck," the Rev. Thomas Bayes. 

And I suppose it's the speaker's faith in the plausibility of these two men that makes me compare Tipton's poems to Wright. They may not be drenched in that same nostalgic and defeatist tone Wright maintains, but they are located in a definite place--America. And if they don't completely believe in that place, they accept enough of it at face value so that the reader must accept it in order to understand the poem on its terms.

Of course, there are other points of this poem that recommend it. Tipton's style makes up for its lack of grammar by making formal elements (like the line, or the stanza) hint at a complete grammar, while still keeping it open-ended enough so that most sentences don't really feel complete. At least until the stanzas that then pose a question. What to do then?

Related Links:
Chicago Review
Surfaces