lots and lots of neat

recommended: anne marie rooney

I like Shane McCrae, and I don't even know him. I like him for his poem "Horse Running Fast" that appeared in a recent issue of APR. I mentioned in my recommendation for McCrae that I felt like he was making use of Stein in repeating this image of the horses running. He came to my mind when I read Anne Marie Rooney's poem, "What my heart is doing" (found in Pleiades 29.2). It's similar just in the fact that Rooney brings her poem back over and over to "My heart," it is a "lifted willow bud," it "lifts nothing." The heart in Rooney's poem has a magical intensity that is continually remade with its repetition.

I have to say, though, that Rooney's poem is smarter than some bland anaphora stringing together a bunch of sentences. This poem is centered on the heart by sentences and similes consistently drawing attention back to it, and in my mind it runs a big risk doing that--the risk of being too earnest. Few people really want to be told, repeatedly, about the state of someone's heart. Even when it has that magical intensity to it, the speaker can very easily tip into the pathetic.

Rooney avoids this by keeping the state of the heart ambiguous. After all, the poem's title is simply "What my heart is doing." The poem doesn't say "aching" or "jubilating" or "simpering." It talks about a heart that is lifting, but it has weight, unlike shadows, and sometimes it can be a dark animal. Rooney runs the risk of an earnestness that leads straight into the magically intense mystery of why and what and how the heart feels.

Related Link:
Pleaides

recommended: jim moore

I like the peace that can be found in a room whose furniture has been arranged so that it suits the room entirely. I like considering the phrase "feng shui," because it's a real example of English appropriating a foreign language phrase, and then using it as though it had been English all along. I like how both these things simply accumulate over time--the tidy arragnement of my apartment, the words I keep in common usage when speaking with friends.

I like how Jim Moore's poem "Courage" (found in Volume 29.2 of Pleiades) is an arrangement. Yes, I do mean as an object on the page. But more interesting to me is the way each of the ideas have their place. As Moore shows, courage can be something that arises from confrontation. Like watching two friends' marriage dissolve, and then learning how to remain friends with both of them. Like dealing with the untimely death of your father.

But courage is also something that accrues, and the wise person draws on diverse impulses and impressions to learn what courage is. Just shifting the perspective on a couple of the ideas I used in the previous paragraph. Sometimes courage is confrontation. It is a common belief that we learn courage from our fathers. This would probably explain why there are three different father figures in the poem, creating three different impressions. And I guess that's the peace I find in this poem. After all the images and their position against the ideas preceding and following them, I find that courage has a wider scope. There are simple elements to it, and complexities. That might sound like a mere platitude, so let me offer this. The Iliad would be an obvious example of courage for its simple catalogue of men killing other men. But it's an example of courage for the less obvious, but entirely relevant, complexities that arise when men are killing other men.

Related Links:
Pleiades
Lightning at Dinner: Poems

recommended: michael waters

Maybe it's a problem that superiority isn't such a foreign sentiment. In fact, I would venture to say that we crave superiority in some way. Even poems that are charged with a victim identity are making an appeal to some higher justice that grants their speaker the higher, yes, superior, ground to whatever he or she views as the aggressor. I guess what I'm saying here is that the immediate stance in Michael Waters poem "Dead Iraqis" from Pleiades (volume 29.2) shouldn't be so familiar, but for obvious reasons it is. But it's Waters rhetorical situation that surprised me on the first read.

Because I am an American who has issues with American service men being in Iraq, "Dead Iraqis" make me uncomfortable. I don't want to imagine two Iraqis eating a dead Iraqi, which is the image this poem starts with. And I don't want to shift my first impression to a more permissible thought, that these "Iraqis" are really just birds, not people. Isn't that worse? Doesn't that imply that all these people we're killing over there are no more significant than the birds I find have been run over on the street? Birds children could kick, whose feathers would explode into the wind.

Yes, Waters has written a masterful political poem, because there is no easy resolution for it. I would even say that its political agenda is fairly clear. I think I know what Waters' opinion is on the war. It's the dilemma he poses that keeps me interested. What does it mean to have such disregard for people that we leave them to rot "underfoot?" How can we be responsible for so much carnage and remain oblivious? Even if these were birds, we would never stand to live with so much death around us.

Related Links:
Pleiades
Darling Vulgarity

recommended: john gallaher

I know. If you follow this blog, I already recommended John's poems before. Yes, he's a friend, and it's always a pleasure to recommend friends. But I assure you it's more than just friendship that brings him to these pages. This new style, this pivot that he does from one approach to the next is really captivating me. Just because it all feels so easy. It's not like it feels pained trying to come up with some other way to observe a situation. There is ease, and with that ease comes the poem's intelligence.

I guess with "Poem for the End of January," the payoff hits with the beginning of the seventh stanza. All these questions, asking what does this have to do with it, then this, then this, all of it ends with "This performance in pale hues." And that very simple statement after all these questions resonates with me.

Recommended Links:
John's other recommended poem from this blog
Pleiades (worldcat search for Pleaides)
Map Of The Folded World
The Little Book of Guesses
Nothing to Say and Saying It (John's blog)

recommended: allison funk

I am assuming that this is part of a project that Allison described to me last year. A group of poems that speak to being trapped in a box. And considering the subjects of the poem (the trapped sense this man must feel, and the trapped sense a mother must feel in her helplessness), I have to say that it would make sense.

But what I am especially fond of with this poem is the form, and how the form could itself be a box keeping the poem strained inside. I like to imagine the meter and the near rhymes are hitting up against the box's containers, trying to free themselves, but apparently to no avail. The sonnet stays strong. I suppose the real treat will be reading this in Allison's upcoming book (due I think this fall), where there will possibly be more sonnets, or possibly other formal poems pushing against their walls.

Related Links:
Pleiades (worldcat search for Pleaides)
The Knot Garden: Poems