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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