lots and lots of neat

recommended: shane mccrae

Who wouldn't want to be like Stein? Who wouldn't want to whip poems around like a game of olly olly oxen free? The woman's poems are like language crack. They're what you've got to sneak behind your professor's back so he doesn't know you're going to devise your own ruin. The problem is that their style is so distinct it's almost impossible to bring her into your own writing without looking like you're just aping her behind her dead woman's back. If you love Stein, you know she deserves better than that.

Enter Shane McCrae in the September/October 2009 issue of American Poetry Review. Who I have officially determined is not an ape. He's using her, but I like how he uses her to complement his style, which has a different intent. McCrae's poems are more deep image at their center. Where I would say Stein is usually moving her reader along a slow logic that accumulates with her reputation, I wouldd say McCrae is rotating his reader deeper and deeper into the emotional circumstances that inspired his poem. In fact, I would almost call these three poems in APR Gertrude Stein meets James Galvin. And not just because McCrae's first poem is "Horses Running Fast." 

McCrae has that darkness in his poem that can do nothing but be still. And perhaps what's most impressive about these poems is how that repetition, which for Stein can create a tremendous kinetic energy, is suddenly just barely stirring in McCrae's work. Thank God Cleveland State Poetry Center is publishing his book next year.

Related Links:
American Poetry Review
Cleveland State University Poetry Center

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.

Related Links:
Denver Quarterly
A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns
Paradiso Diaspora

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.

Related Links:
Denver Quarterly
Passenger

two books: dan beachy-quick & inger christensen

This Nest, Swift Passerine (Tupelo Press, 2009), by Dan Beachy-Quick
Alphabet (New Directions, 2000), by Inger Christensen

I like the book-length project, or at least I like a book-length project that feels organic in its intentions, respectful to its reader. I'm not looking for some onerous monument to an idea, or awkward gestures toward that gaunt figure of truth that has been gathering leeches in the still waters. I guess what I mean is that Beachy-Quick's and Christensen's volumes are tender and ingratiating about their ambition. They celebrate wonder, which I would say holds its own unique standing, which I would say is a stance uniquely qualified to make statements about truth.

Christensen interlaces two somewhat arbitrary forms to build her poem. Alphabet is an abecedarian poem, though the alphabetic quality appears somewhat loosened by the translation from Danish to English. The other form she uses is Fibonacci's Sequence, where each subsequent section of the poem grows with the same pattern. However these forms work and interrelate, they are really just catalysts for Christensen's endearing accumulation of simple things. Apricot trees exist, she tells us. Doves exist. Early fall exists. All of these things exist in this existing world. One can't help but feel grateful. But, as Fibonacci's Sequence pushes later sections in the book beyond a length where she could continue this easy cataloguing, Christensen takes her poem further, exploring what it actually means for the world to exist. Of course her hopeful tone from the beginning touches any subject she might include. Even nuclear weapons. Even defoliants. These things might exist, and they deserve reckoning, even if we want to be grateful for this world. And it might be that the extended section length brings about the lengthened gaze, compelling the speaker to  consider all the topics.

Of course, that kind of breadth would be impossible to achieve in a slim volume of poetry. But it's the ambition that motivates it that I most admire in a book-length project. It is a gaze, but it must feel as though the poet couldn't help but attend and attend and attend to the subect at hand. Dan Beachy-Quick's This Nest, Swift Passerine has that feel. Last spring I got to hear Beachy-Quick give a talk about the act of reading, and the ever-expanding self-referentiality that reading accomplishes for each person. The talk dove-tailed nicely into his reading from The Whaler's Dictionary that night. But it also fits with this book, where the act of reading and the careful development and expanding of perspective are complement to one another. While Christensen's book first makes me feel her delight with the world befrore she sets about attending to more serious matters, Beachy-Quick's This Nest, Swift Passerine immediately attends to the dilemma of personally experiencing the world, then it uses delight, in the image, in the suddenly relevant fact, to broaden that experience, and eventually his perspective on the world. Beachy-Quick's is a carefully built book whose argument grows with the book's progress, accomplishing an expansive persuasion.

And that expansiveness is the joy I get from a good book-length project, whether geared on Christensen's whimsy, or Beachy-Quick's organic intellect.

Related Links:
This Nest, Swift Passerine
Alphabet

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.

Related Links:
FENCE

recommended: albert goldbarth

Albert Goldbarth's poetry is the reason I don't do ecstasy. Not because it's a suitable substitute. I guess I really wouldn't know, but I suspect the feeling I get from Goldbarth's poems isn't quite what I've heard ecstasy is like. No, I don't do ecstasy because I really don't think I could ever know whether it was the real deal or some junk made in a dude's deep sink. That curl of the lip I get even thinking of this is the expression on my face when I start reading a Goldbarth poem. Oh, God. What's it going to be this time? Am I going to crawl out of my skin for all the Yuk! Yuk! moments he includes?

Or, is it going to be like "Everyday People" in the Summer 2009 issue of Kenyon Review? Because you know what? When Goldbarth writes a poem, I mean one of these slow accumulation kind of poems, where every important idea gets illustrated and lived through by a narrative that is itself meaningful, I am a Goldbarthian through and through. I savor the deep implicit. I can take any wise guy voice that might surface, because this poem must mean something more than that guy, or me, or Goldbarth, and I trust that Goldbarth knows that. He has given in to the undertow, and it's a beautiful thing to read when it happens.

How are we, such busy, everyday people, supposed to keep up with the things that complicate our life, and, while doing those things, remain civicly conscious about the world? Goldbarth is so sweet about this. Yes, there might be a dash of cynicism, but it's that realistic kind that recognizes people have limits. And what happens if one of those limits is indulging your sense of wonder? Isn't that what poetry is supposed to encourage people to? Is poetry opposed to civic mindedness? Oh, Mr. Goldbarth, why can't I make you have a conversation with Mr. Auden?

Related Links:
Kenyon Review
To Be Read in 500 Years

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!) 

Related Link:
FENCE

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.

Related Links:
FENCE
Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary

recommended: victoria chang

I have lately been thinking about how a poetry moves, and hopefully surprises both the reader and the poet. Sometimes when writing a poem, it seems easy to stay locked in to what you think the poem is supposed to be about, or you relegate it to a certain logic that was formed during the first few lines, and it gets locked in place. Sometimes this can be good. You create this little system for the poem, and as the poem goes on it kind of justifies that system. Sometimes a poet can ease the poem out of that place with a few fluid gestures. The system you thought you were in has been shifted, and it feels like that natural rationale experienced in a dream.

Victoria Chang has opted for the yanking the poem right out of its place. In her two poems appearing in the summer 2009 issue of The Journal, Chang starts her poem in one direction, a fairly interesting direction. But, for me, that first impulse isn't so impressive. I don't think I would be recommending the poems if they had continued on their initial trajectories. In "Elegy as Touch," the poem starts about ants--interesting in its particular facts, but not extraordinary. The same goes for "Self-Portrait as Control." It starts with a domestic scene, upset a bit by mild syntactic inversion at the first line break, but nothing spectacular.

But then Chang yanks each poem right out of place. In "Self-Portrait" the speaker compares this first domestic scene to a baby's efforts to gain control of its bearings, and moves on to surmise that these actions only lead it to situations where it will have less control. But from that concept she leaps into a scene where the speaker has 6-inch bees in her pants, and she's walking north in an alleyway. And, well, I don't want to ruin the end. But after all these claustrophobic situations this dream speaker finds herself in, she whips the poem into this last line, and it breaks everything. Honestly, I found Circle a bit too tidy for my tastes. These poems seem considerably different, which makes me eager to look at Salvnia Molesta.

Related Links:
The Journal
Salvinia Molesta
Circle
Victoria Chang's personal blog

recommended: mary leader

A poem separated into columns, any number of columns, has so many ways that it can fail, really. And Leader's poem, "Among Things Held at Arm's Length," from the summer 2009 issue of The Journal, appears to rise from a desire to describe this couple, both of whom have both died--a couple the speaker seems so incredibly intimate with, so that I suspect there is a larger narrative at work over many poems. An occasion like this makes me incredibly skeptical. I have read poems like this and felt the incidental nature is too much of the forced incidental. It has too much of the <i>Spoon River Anthology</i> cute episode tone for my tastes.

And yet, I feel that Leader pulls me out of that expectation, and I think it happens mainly in her treatment of the columnar form. I feel a real tension between Joe and Katharine Jo, mainly in the way that the two columns have moments when I think they are fitting together as read across. "That's how | lines I wrote so unfamiliar / He perceived it. | I think, amazed / He had a Purple Heart. | How did I come on that?" I find such delight in this weaving sense, and how it is one way to think of the complications that arise during a 50+ year marriage. In a like manner, I find there are other moments when this lateral reading of the lines contrast, making dissonance, which again, speaks to this marriage.

And so I was won over. Though I admit I still harbor reservations about how this would work in a book. Would it be presented at an awkward angle to other poems, forcing a narrative on me that reads like a poet pretending to be a horrible/overly sentimental fiction writer? It doesn't have to, but I think it's a legitimate concern. I suppose I should follow Leader into one of her current books to see what I should expect.

Related Links:
The Journal
Red Signature
The Penultimate Suitor