Lots and lots of neat

recommended: Gottfried Benn

"Left the House," by Gottfried Benn
(translated by Michael Hoffman)
from Poetry March 2012 

On a recent tour at the Eames House (Case Study House No. 8), I learned that Charles Eames would at times hang a painting face-down from the ceiling, so that he could view it while reclining from his chair. This makes me unsettled to think of it. I mean, I get why. It's kind of like the argument for recumbent bicycles: if they put less stress on your joints then why wouldn't you prefer them over the normal bicycle. If Eames were to give himself to this painting for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, it makes sense that he should do so in a relaxed position. For me, I just don't feel like my organs would be in the right place for concentrating. I would feel like my attention was laid out flat, like on an ironing board. I would feel as though my life were askew.

This is the closest semblance I can draw to what I think Gottfried Benn means when in "Left the House" he talks about feeling "shattered." He's not talking impossible devastation. More like controlled delirium. Like if the world were suddenly put at a 15-degree angle, so that no matter where you walked you always had to lean to the right. Or, from the second part of Benn's poem, a world where "at least / this mixture of death and laughter would persist." This mixture leaves a coppery taste in my mouth when I imagine it. Who pairs death and laughter in a poem that's just trying to talk about some guy going out for a walk?

Benn's poem is controlled and cynical. There's always something in this speaker's life putting remarkable yet not untenable stress on his ability to do anything. Problems with a rent check. His uneventful ambitions. A girlfriend back at the apartment who's crying. And it feels as though these things are always going to be happening to him. They are additional links in a causal chain that he's pretty sure will never find resolution. The speaker feels "shattered," but in that strangely resilient way that marks the modern life and, though Benn never saw it, the postmodern life as well. "How far are you allowed to push your I, / and see peculiar things as somehow symptomatic?" Benn's speaker is suspicious of how healthy this kind of life is, and at the same time he is suspicious whether these kinds of misgivings in any way deviate from the natural course of anyone's life. 

And with this juxtaposition comes the indelible mark of Benn's poem. The suspicion that a fraught existence has always been our destiny. "Damned evergreens! Vinyl whines!" What else can you curse to make clear your objection to this life? To make clear your resignation that this life will just keep proceeding?

Recommended links:
"Left the House" (available online)
Primal Vision

recommended: Tim Bowling

I cry at movies, especially if it's a movie that deals with any part of the mother-son relationship. It's just true. My wife finds it touching and ridiculous at the same time, because it comes across almost like a reflexive trigger. Like a Pavlovian experiment that maybe I should have grown out of by now. 

It's no surprise to me, then, that I have such a strong response to Tim Bowling's poem, "The Last Days of Summer Before the First Frost." At its core, it's about a boy finding his mother after getting lost at a music festival. And how did he find her? "I followed my heart, he shrugs / so matter-of-fact" Which is, of course, perfectly touching. I suppose this should be sufficient occasion and sentiment for a poem to be successful. 

But it isn't. Well, I'll rephrase that. Plenty of poems are written where some event like this drives the poem. I understand. Events like this help us to define life--the inexplicable value we find in life and frankness and parenthood and poems and most definitely epiphanies. I admire poems that probe into life. I admire poems that make that inexplicability even more inexplicable. And that is why I recommend Bowling's poem.

It introduces threat in the form of a wolf's throat, or deer-blink and salmon-kick along the avenue, or a spider threading its microphone into a blackberry bush. In fact, the density of these bizarre images at the beginning makes me disoriented, and I think this may be intentionally mimetic of what it's like for a child to be lost. But the poem turns. And the turn is into this very sentimental moment with the mother and her boy. And when the boy says he followed his heart to find her, I can't help but connect it to that spider that was threading its microphone down into the blackberry bush. Maybe this makes sense, comparing two instinctual impulses. Maybe it's simply inexplicable. But it touches something in me that maybe makes that mother-son relationship seem a little more sensible. 

Recommended links:
In the Suicide's Library: A Book Lover's Journey

recommended: Josh Wild

There is something so deeply satisfying in magical realism. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Maybe it's just the very incidental nature of it. It's like surrealism made really convenient for regular life. I think of Magritte as more a magical realist than straight up surrealist, because I'm kind of fooled into believing this might be real. But, then, ha ha, it's not real.

What's happening in that ha ha moment? A shift of some kind. Life has a twist to it. This art has a twist to it. I think it's one of the reasons so many poets adore Russell Edson, because that guy's twisted. And his best poems are imaginative, but not in that fanciful flight of creativity, but more like a deeply gnarled fractions of some narrative that you're kind of grateful you don't have to know the whole story to enjoy the poem. 

One of the reasons I'm drawn to Josh Wild's poem "Self-Portrait after Paul Morphy's Stroke" is that I start the poem mid-narrative, like Edson might do to me, but then I feel like Wild plays the whole scenario out way past the simply hilarious point of Paul Morphy falling into the tub. In fact, it's this statment that wins me over to the poem: "You can look // into anything and see what you want." For me, this is the serious catch that justifies all this hilarity. Stock returns pictured in Morphy's pruned thumbs. A girl with a shoe on her head. A man, who might be all thumbs at this point, described as "floral, with shoe petals." Wild has these broad strokes of fairy tale whimsy, so much so he verges on nonsense. But all these crazy events have a point: certainty. Everyone in the poem is so sure of what he has to say about Mr. Paul Morphy. And yet no one seems to notice the man just suffered a stroke.

Recommended links:
As an editor of the Sycamore Review
Mathematics of Fire (a chapbook available at Amazon) 

recommended: jeffrey schultz

I know poets are always going to be drawn to the series of poems. It indicates an ambition, a self-defined poetic form personal to the poet, which he can use and alter, so that it develops a voice outside his own and that voice comments on the subsequent poems of the series. In this poetry world of filling out grant applications, writing statements of purpose, or offering the easy hook to a publisher, the series, and the graduated level of series, the project, appear as some holy grail. And this isn't just a pursuit of the younger poet. Rita Dove, Mary Jo Bang, Claudia Rankine, just to name a few recent examples, have all taken on the poetic series, to varying degrees of success.

This is, of course, a larger issue. But one facet of it arises surrounding magazine publication. Too often, the series, or project, shifts its character from ambition to formula. And it's an unfortunate fact that, if magazine publication is introduced into the equation, the likelihood of this shift over to formula is much higher. In fact, I can't think of a project in the last few years, whose individual poems were widely published, and then whose book was anything more than a bunch of the same poem over and over again. I don't often invite comments, because I assume no one is reading this blog, but if you have a suggestion for a book that contradicts this statement, I'd be happy to hear. Mary Jo Bang's Elegy is probably the one exception I can think of.

This is the approach I take when reading Jeffrey Schultz's poem in the November 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. "J. Finds in His Pocket Neither Change Nor Small Bills" is a poem with heft, and breadth, and I run out of breath reading it out loud, or just to myself. And I feel as though the entire life of L.A. is right here in my chest as I am inside it, and I am inside this poem. I love this poem for its messiness, and for its complicated agendas. I like this poem because it makes a mess of its politics, and so I find a new way of considering the political poem. But I've read other poems in this J. series, and they come off as Matthew Dickman-esque. They come off as a narrative where the speaker is forced to confront a situation unique to this ultra-contemporary moment, a situation that would have never been possible just five years ago, and he has to formulate a moral stance that accounts for his place. I like these poems, I like Matthew Dickman's poems, even though everyone says he's a jerk. But I wonder where Jeffrey Schultz's project is taking him. I wonder if the different register present in "J. Finds in His Pocket..." is a constructive push out of formula, or just a crown for a series of very publishable, very appealing, but not nearly as ambitious narrative occasional pieces.

Related Links:
Poetry Magazine
Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang

recommended: eric ekstrand

Extending the image in a poem takes a certain amount of responsibility. The poet owes the reader an excess. The poem can't be a simple means of drawing out the equation that matches object to idea. Competent poems do that. And, yes, everyone can take pleasure and enjoy a competent poem, but I'm not interested in pursuing the work of poets who write these competent poems. An image, if it's going to extend over the life of the poem, must show me the poet's constant reconsideration of what it might mean that this object means this idea. Or, better yet, how the world is impacted after this object has been changed, or associated with a whole new set of connotations.

Eric Ekstrand's poems "Plumblossoms," published in the November issue of Poetry, keep an intellectual agility. The first poem declares the spine "a hierarchy of white florets," and then two prose stanzas later explains that "the spineless aspire to incessant interludes that never arrive anywhere." It's an idea, this spinelessness, that he continues to develop over the course of the poem. And it's an idea that seems troubled, possibly because the speaker sounds so forgiving of the condition. Mary, Ekstrand's exemplary of the spineless, might have destroyed the art of life, but she has a sense of her loss when she stands among the garden she planted. The speaker can see it in her face.

What I am most happy about, though, is that each of Ekstrand's images follow a sincere desire to unfurl all the complexities that follow from this imagined condition. There is an intense imagination in the work, but it isn't for service to pyrotechnics and flash. This poem needs to relate a sad truth, and the woman coming to terms with it. 

Related Links:
Poetry (direct link to the poems online)
A picture of plum blossoms