Lots and lots of neat

recommended: Malachi Black

"Compline, by Malachi Black
from Pleiades Winter 2012 

Perhaps the poem is rightful home for the everliving sentence. And yes, I do mean like that one-sentence-long story "The Bear," or the inexhaustible Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans. And, yes, I mean in the contemporary vain of poets like Shane McCrae and Samuel Amadon. A poem just looks so comfortable picking up on the subtle rhythms of syntax, asserting a timely accent, attending to those microbursts of energy that it must keep up in order to sustain the spirit of the piece. In one of these poems it feels as though the line break is that kid on the playground who's keeping the merry-go-round going with that little push, push, push until the momentum starts to feel dangerous, like it could be what's in control rather than that kid. And when that merry-go-round is the poem, a reader has to just marvel at the way language can start to take care of itself, can feel as though it keeps itself going, without even needing a poet to tend to it.

So Malachi Black's poem "Compline," a poem that formally offers a prayer to the vague boundary between day and night, is everliving sentence marking that moment where something "is left," and in its place there should be something to "come." It is a moment that is delicate with expectation, and, for Black, deflation. For while it would seem that a poem positioned to mark the closing of a day, and to welcome the coming of night, would have some hope to it, even a foreboding hope, Black explains "what is left for [him] has come / to nothing ever after." That "nothing" is the dwelling place of this poem. A kingdom come to nothing. Nothing come to nothing.

And yet this poem is a prayer, is even self-conscious of its role as prayer. As such, to claim that nothing has been left to the speaker, to manipulate the words of the Lord's Prayer so that it is not a request for God's kingdom but an avowal that that kingdom has come to nothing, is an act of pessimistic aggression. Or, if not aggression, then it is at least a point of tension. To the point that there will be no reconciliation drawn between the poem's reverent tone and its pessimistic subject.  How does the Christian not address this irreconcilability with an everliving sentence? In fact, the seemingly unending sentence leaves one wondering whether the poem should be taken as a sustained act of defiance or a last ditch hope for God's intervention.

Recommended Links:
A poem from Black at Poetry

recommended: Eric Smith

"Ash Wednesday," by Eric Smith
from Pleiades Winter 2012 

What can't a fable make into truth? I guess the grammatically appropriate way of saying this is: What can't a declarative statement make into truth? But there is something that takes over the declarative statement when it's fixed by fable's assurance. And that something is like sweet syrup. Why else would Mathias Svalina's Decunstruction Myth have gotten so much play a couple years ago? You take on the authority of a fable, and you tilt the world to one side, and you tell everyone why tilting the world to that one side is perfectly natural, or kind of natural, or at least natural enough that all these weird oblong angles that seem to populate that world feel reasonable enough, and it frenzies the people. I would venture to say the fable is like crack for poets. Maybe it's not Stephen Burt's "New Thing," but it's that thing that just won't be snuffed out in 2000s and 2010s poems. What helped to spice James Tate's Viper Jazz and Mark Levine's Debt is what thrives in the voluminous speakers of Patricia Lockwood and CA Conrad. 

And it's good for some subtle undertones in Eric Smith's poem "Ash Wednesday." The poem opens: "The world gave birth to judges and famine." Why? You ask. Or you don't ask, because we're all smart enough to know that when the poet opens with the vested authority of that fable voice, we're in for adventure. Why would the world want to bear forth judges and famine? Please, tell me Mr. Smith.  

Spoiler alert. He's not going to tell you. In fact, Smith isn't even going to settle on a relationship between the judges and famine. If a famine is judged indefensible, which the judges do in "Ash Wednesday," is that a gesture of acquiescense or defiance? If judges keep famine in an ornate box, are they isolating it or revering it? All this to say, it feels as though the world of this poem is populated only by dark possibilities. And the fact that it won't settle on any one of the very particular truths it hints at only darkens the poem further.

In fact, this is what returns me to Stephen Burt. There's something in Smith's grand gesture to human impotence that I find relevant to Burt's "New Thing." "Ash Wednesday" starts off proposing this fabled world that gives birth to judges and famine. But then it settles on the human responses natural to that kind of world. The poem draws a tension between the larger idea of human resistance to famine and the specific activities and details that would probably occur whether the larger idea were there or not. Widows clutch to their hens. Boys paint angry eyebrows on their faces. And I realize, Hey, this isn't a fable. It's a poem that is noticing the world. It's not the world I live in, but if I did live in this world, well, I might not appreciate a poem so committed to ambiguity--a fact which only increases my appreciation of the poem from the perspective of my world.  

Recommended Links:
Eric Smith reads at AWP 2012
Stephen Burt's "The New Thing" 

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