lots and lots of neat

recommended: john yau

It feels sometimes as though the prose poem has been infected by supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and we're never going to get to retrieve it. And there's something wrong with that. I mean, yeah, sure, we all want our turn behind the wheel of the poetry hot rod. We all want to dress up like kittens, and then hoist the elevator up to the third floor. It's just fun. It's Bo Jangles and P. Diddy all at once.

But, usually, the prose poem can only stand up as some valorous blitzkrieg of the imagination. It doesn't make sense, and without sense a poem can only operate at a limited capacity. These John Yau poems in the Denver Quarterly (Volume 43, Number 4) are just at the very edge of that nonsense. And that's part of their appeal. Maybe I feel like Yau acknowledges the need for something solid that can anchor the imaginative spring in these poems. With "Marquee Moon," there is a film that we might have heard about, by a director with a local reputation. The framework is solid, and it gives Yau some boundaries he can operate in.

Sure, there are times when it feels as though it's spooling out too far. The image of the dog eating a stolen ham while he sits on a traffic island on the other side of town feels a bit gratuitous. But Yau spools out, to the dog, to diners eating green salad and chicken croquettes, then he returns to the movie, and he makes "You and I" feel like the heroes in the movie. And then, all the talk about the film has something to do with me, his reader. I like starring in movies.

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recommended: susan maxwell

"Modernized Minotaur" is exactly the kind of allusive poem I like. It just sips from its source, or visits with it here and there. I remember reading Rachel Zucker's Eating in the Underworld. I left it feeling as though the poems couldn't escape from the myth. In fact the poems were more the needy type. They kept clinging and clinging to the Persephone myth, and they wouldn't let go.

This Maxwell poem, though, it's got that lyric flirtation going on. Starting with the "saplings" at the very beginning, which I can't help but read as a subtle allusion to the young boys and girls sent by Athens. And from this first image of the saplings bending with the wind, compliant, Maxwell drives her poem around and through the familiar myth of the minotaur. She includes elaborating juxtapositions, like this one in stanza four: "Feeling for the thread / and balled inside, the riot at the rite // of spring." She touches on the sensuality of a beast eating humans by associating it with the last sexual acts between these adolescents. In fact, I can't help but feel, when finishing the poem, that Maxwell has managed to add onto this myth the way the Agamemnon suddenly made me see the Iliad in a wholly new light.

OK. That might be an exaggeration. But I do feel that Maxwell manages that tricky negotiation between her own original impulse and the all-too-familiar narrative that has been set in literary granite. And I think her success comes mainly because the sentiments in the poem are immediately relevant--the desperation and fatalism of these young Athenians. Where other poems feel as though they're leaving some adulating tithe to the myth, Maxwell presumes an equality with the narrative--a more appropriate policy, I think.

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