lots and lots of neat

recommended: nathan bartel

Sometimes I really can be victim to the poem of the explosive imaginative energy. Is this me suffering from the Dean Young Effect? Perhaps. Or I get to feeling that "skittery poem of the moment" feeling, and it's like Patrick Swayze is all on screen again and it's time to dance. Oh, I don't think I've EVER felt this way before.

Or I have. In fact, I would say that most, except for the most complacent poets, have figured out the Effect/Trick, and I would say that most poets let it pass without notice when the poet really gives them nothing to notice. I say Bartel has some clever additions in his poem, "Brooder," found in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of FENCE. Yes, it has lots of dazzle: "a fool's-green silver of aquaculture, morning scrapes with snow, little gaps / coated in pitch & March thistles rotting at the mouth." OK, good. I'm interested, but not that interested.

No, what sets Bartel's poem apart is the heavy pivoting done on the word "brooder," where it feels as though he wants his reader to see the speaker sitting over a brood of something, everything, that thick spoken imagination. He is "emanating sad heat." He is "King of Hens." This is clever, but it also adds some gravity to the poem, and that gravity is what draws me in. One who broods has gravity, and I can hear how this speaker is losing everything, even while his suffering accumulates.

Now, if I was going to label a Dean Young Effect, this would be my personal call. Because when Young is good, he's making me feel a reason for his images.

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recommended: jennifer mackenzie

I am such a sucker for poems that translate the vast expansive potential that seems to just be sitting everywhere and then fits it into a poem. It's one of the reasons I think so fondly of Tony Tost's Invisible Bride. It feels a little gamy at points, ranging a little past the realm of sense for me. But it's that pure imaginative power that he pushes into the poems that I enjoy. I read through the book and I think I could write anything, and include anything, and there never were such things as limits only my fear that what I said was going to be too much for the reader.

MacKenzie's poems in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of FENCE manage to put me there. They have this potent imagination, where a couple's joy sounds like choking, or some bearded guy is shrieking (why shouldn't he be shrieking? It's Sunday!), or the speaker has a John Wayne body. I just love these things, and I love the confidence in the speaker's voice while she says them. They make sense, partly because what is happening in the poem suits the image, and partly because the poet has the will to make it work, and so it does.

But these poems are more than just imagery. They're sex. They're this shade of the imperative that gets laced into different parts. Only a shade, because it's not always clear who the speaker is ordering around. In "You Are Not a Bird" (my favorite of the three poems), the speaker says, "Become an object, come on!--each one has / its lacy train." I don't know if she's speaking in the voice of the officer from stanza 1, if she's got a suggestion for me, if this is her trying to suggest something to the officer. I don't know what it is, but I just find the whole thing so endearing. (Come on! Just play along!) 

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recommended: karla kelsey

Oh Lords above, when are you going to release the next book from Karla Kelsey? I read poems by her early last year in Colorado Review, I edited her into Gulf Coast, and now you give me these poems in FENCE. Enough already. Enough! I am a patient reader, and a considerate reader. Am I asking so much? Please, the bio notes promised a new book.

And, yes, the new poems in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of FENCE don't do any good to allay my impatience. "Roughsickweek One," "...Two" and "...Three" make a morass of language, where sense kind of swims around, vague, yes, and the ambiguity might limit the meaning that any reader takes from it. Many of the stanzas push at what the lyric can uncover from language itself--a style and poetic intention that I usually find interesting (yes, I'm biased for this kind of poem when it's done well), and, in the hands of someone like Kelsey, I trust the poem is going to lead me through an experience weighted with and by language.

But what I find truly exceptional in these poems is the imaged setting that starts to make frequent appearances over the course of the three poems. There is some place, a contained landscape, where these poems occur, and with each subsequent poem, I can see it--an atrium, this wood-paneled great room attached to the reserve, the terrarium (and all the energy that gets clogged in the center of the speaker's brain). And suddenly this place appears in "Roughsickweek Three" with an antenna built onto rocks, all overlooking a sea. Here is the surreal, dislocated landscape that accords with the morass of language. To me, these two things must go together to further unravel this sentiment, this "Roughsickweek." I feel that heated uncomfortability. And I guess all I want is for these poems not to stop.

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Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary

recommended: linda russo

One of the things I've commented on in my recent recommendation of John Gallaher is his ability to analyze an idea from multiple angles. This might not seem like the greatest challenge. However, it is if a writer is going to make it seem like a fun, intelligent adventure he plans on taking the reader on.

Linda Russo's poems have this element of investigation. But they also have this widened scope to them. And this very fun grammatical manipulation, where the word can take suddenly jump into a definition of itself. I'm intrigued. And I'm further intrigued by the styles in the different poem. I've been describing "Empowerment & Try," which sets up a more discursive framework. The other poems collapse, they're almost a word collage, while still maintaining enough hint of grammatical structure to communicate some meaning. Very nice.

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Mirth

recommended: stephanie strickland

I know I flash hot and cold with this poet. But for these poems appearing in the Fall 2008 issue of FENCE, it's all hot. I like the water. I like the syntax mimetically taking in the water, and then taking in the stars, and then taking in the light hit on a lens. I like all of it formally. And I guess it's that this method she uses makes me feel the energy in the subject. This has been my big thought lately (I'm reading Robert Duncan). A poem should host its subject with charm, and honesty, or some combination of those.

A poem like this is much longer on honesty. And I think I like the poems because I'm always drawn in by earnest expression. A subject needs the right and proper support. "Huracan's Harp" is doing all it can.

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