Lots and lots of neat

recommended: joshua marie wilkinson

If you get the copy of Colorado Review that this poem is in, as well as the poems I mentioned in two previous posts, I would direct you to the poems in the issue by James Shea. The two poems are doing the same thing I've seen from Wilkinson's poems these last few years. The crisp, flashy imagistic drive-by. Oh, how exciting they are for writers and editors alike. They risk little, really, because they work mainly by leaving most everything implicit. I made a friend recently who likes to show me parts of poems she likes. She will open the book to a poem, and then point to the exact lines I should read. Because those are the best part of the poem.

Personally, I don't believe poems are allowed to get off so easy. I think a poem should stand with its best parts, possibly conscious of which parts are its best, and it should lead me to them, with an intentional crescendo or decrescendo. Or it should be conscious of the tradition surrounding the poetic turn. It's very seldom the orphaned image, whether offered to someone as excerpt to a poem, or as stand-alone poem, can accomplish the resonance of the longer work. For evidence I point to Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow." Read it alone, as it seems everyone in America has (praise God, at least, for that point to ubiquity), then read it as part of Williams' book Spring and All. Yes, the wheelbarrow is supposed to be a crisp, flashy drive-by. But it's one shiny point among an entire arsenal of prose fragments and poems, including the popularly anthologized "Spring and All" and "To Elsie," that work toward Williams' general argument.

How does this relate to Wilkinson's poem in the Summer 2009 issue of Colorado Review? "A Saint Among the Stragglers' Beds" is, at last, to my taste, a committed work. Having been overwhelmed by Wilkinson's first book Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, whelmed by his U. Iowa book, Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk, and then underwhelmed by everything I've seen in magazines since, I had become a reader-in-mourning of his work. Suspension... is vulnerable and openly thoughtful. It has flash, it's even stagy (with Wilkinson, at times, taking on the voice of Egon Schiele), but these gestures come in service to a center.

And this center is what I see in "A Saint Among the Stragglers' Beds." Yes, Wilkinson has splayed out a set of images, flashy images, like a forest summoned from a man named Ashley, a mattress of hydrangeas and wasps, a saint's shiny pocket watch. But these images are strung together by implied pronoun referents (at the very least an "I," the saint, and a "they," the stragglers), and this offers the structural convenience of narrative. There are also pleasing associative leaps stringing many of the images together. Most importantly, though, there appears to be a modulation from the general and chaotic, to the specific and centered. Toward the beginning of the poem, there is "the river // cored like an apple" and "a wind / which summons the forest from / a man named Ashley." Both images touching on a paradox that could unite the general and center. How can a river be cored? Does a forest coming out of one particular man only complicate the idea of his self, to himself, and to the general idea of the self?

And this is only the beginning of the poem. A glorious beginning in my mind. I'm still not sure I have a full handle on how the saint and the stragglers are interacting, nor who all the pronoun referents are, nor how much narrative I should be granting, but I can surely sense Wilkinson knows. And with every shift from general to specific, I find a flash that further complicates my ideas about how these two things might relate to each other. 

Related Links:
Colorado Review
Joshua Marie Wilkinson's home page
The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth
Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments

recommended: jennifer moxley

Having spent four years stationed on the U.S.S. Eisenhower, I feel, sometimes, I'm destined to see most of my life as one long definition formed from the time I took to watch the ocean. The Atlantic Ocean in particular, whose heave has just enough control to it that I could safely escape onto one of the sponsons above my berthing and enjoy the whatever stretch of the evening that was left to me. An ocean is movement, in every direction, it moves, ceaselessly moving, in large aching piles of water, then smaller pivots, where the water stacks on that, and then even smaller movements at the peak, along the edges. A certain kind of movement that can collapse suddenly, or, as is usually the case, a rise met by a simple fall, and every infinite variety that lies between.

I can't help but think of those oceans when I read Jennifer Moxley's poem "No Place Like" in the Summer 2009 issue of Colorado Review. The poem has that large, inefficient movement to it. Persistent, and troubled, and unapologetic for venturing even into what might be questionably relevant. But the fact is I want these tangents and forays. I want to be carried by the heft inside this poem's voice. Moxley has set a big job, connecting a prophet and Hector Berlioz and then the speaker herself, and I feel that this bond can only be explored through these wide open swaths of thought. So when her language maneuvers through that special combination of distraction and intensity, it feels necessary and appropriate. 

Especially as they serve to inform me of the speaker's past, that absence she feels in Paris. The alienation that someone might understand from Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. The language that might satisfactorily describe the difficult Word of God that was whispered into the prophet's ear. What else but an ocean, full of carelessness, full of intent, could justifiably express this, could possibly present a logic that makes these connections so solid and natural, however unlikely they would have seemed otherwise.

Related Links:
Colorado Review
Clampdown

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: joy manesiotis

I think it's tricky to write a poem about science and selfishness. It's tricky because there aren't that many people that have thought about how selfish a human body can be, scientifically. Joy Manesiotis apparently did. And not just her selfishness, even that little embryo guy, trying to grab on to her uterine wall. Who does he think he is? She has her own identity to deal with here, embryo. Can't you be a little sensitive? Just a little bit?

This poem, "Small," in the Spring 2009 issue of Colorado Review, is quite a feat. I want to call it a scientific lyric, but not in that "fractal poetry" kind of scientificism (I'm sure Ms. Fulton wouldn't say hers is scientific, more mathematic), more like scientific as the type of language and perspective at thet poet's disposal.

Related Links:
Colorado Review (worldcat search for Colorado Review)
They Sing to Her Bones

recommended: christine hume

"Between the Way Out and the Way Home," in the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Colorado Review, at first, well, it took a bit at first to get started. But then, it happened, it stood up, it took in the river, that river, it was absolutely unstoppable. It just kept revolving around river, and depthing it, and diving beneath it. And then Hume's second poem, "Leash," like your tongue is a leash. SERIOUSLY! (That's me being pleased, susumptuously pleased!)

recommended: janine oshiro

Who is this mystery poet? Who writes a bio note saying, "lives in Hawaii?" Yes, another one from the Winter/Fall 2008 issue of Colorado Review. This one is....YES! "Chorus." It reminds me a lot of Emily Wilson's work in The Keep, with language individualated and careful. It's almost doing the walk, like words could walk (the walk, they might say) together to make chorus. Together now, sing! A chorus of what? Oh, Him. YES?! Him.

recommended: lyn hejinian

Full disclosure, I have poems in the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Colorado Review. Which is awesome. And guess what my delight was when I opened to the table of contents to see a poem by Lyn Hejinian. Not that anyone really needs to have Lyn Hejinian recommended for them, but, you know, everyone should have Lyn Hejinian recommended to them again and again. Really these poems in particular. Fragmented fragments, or sentence fragments used to describe fragments of things, or names are fragments, really, just pieces of really even. I just love it. LOVE IT!