Romanticism

Romanticism April BernardW.W. Norton, 2009Most of the poems in this collection, the fourth from April Bernard (whom W.S. Merwin deems “brilliant” on the flap copy, a poet of “power and ambition”) are rather lovely—and at their weakest, merely innocuous. A few are knockouts.Romanticism derives a lot of its content and emotional thrust from music. For example, the unassumingly titled “Beagle or Something,” the book’s fifth poem and one of its best:

The composer’s name was Beagle or something,one of those Brits who make the world wistfulwith chorales and canticles and this piece,a tone poem or what-have-you,chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one

—for one feeling a little vulnerable, she goes on to say, and the lyric moment is a sort of epiphany of sadness brought on by the silly music and the vision of a shaking tree seen through the windshield. Few things are more annoying that a forced poetic epiphany, but I like Bernard’s epiphany for being humble and self-effacing and taking place among the “telephone wires and dogs […] along Orange Street”; I picture her—or me—driving and crying down the Orange Street in my neighborhood. Because a dumb song does make you cry when primed for crying.Plus, the epiphanies are few and far between in this collection. Many of the poems are spare, mysterious six-liners, such as:

In a Stolen Boat,push off what seemed safe: The fishing dock,pitch pines, children glazed to sheenby ruthless summers. Pastthe jetty, past the past, to open sea—all violet and green, that choppy path between doom and luck—Put your back into it, and row.

Another high point is the book’s lone prose poem, “Underneath,” one part of a brief sequence titled “Concerning Romanticism.” “Underneath” is a poem I will read again and again for gorgeous, open lines like “Do you know what it means to be ‘under erasure,’ that lovely post-structural notion, your words and deeds red-lined-through by some revisionist, who may be guiding your hand so that you are complicit in the silencing?” I wished every poem in the book was as lush and layered.The third section of the book is the most overtly musical and was the least interesting to me initially—a number are based, according to their epigraphs, on various opera. These struck me as amusing but rather low-risk. Then I discovered the end notes where Bernard discloses that the cited arias, composers, etc., are her own invention. The risk in these poems, then, is that a reader may not get to the note. Being in on the fakery instantly imbued the poems with more intrigue. Which is to say, Romanticism is a rare book I’m inclined to read twice.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney is Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found in Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.

Poemland

Poemlandby Chelsey MinnisWave Books, 2008Chelsey Minnis is something of a poet’s poet, and to certain readers her third book, Poemland, will come off as undisciplined, even ridiculous. But to readers who want to be in on the joke, that is exactly the point. And it is, the book itself professes, “a very expensive joke,” but it is also “a fistfight in the rain under a held umbrella” … “a chance to tell the truth” … “crap coming toward you on a conveyor belt” … “a regretted regret” and “double everything!” Poemland is a book-length definition of what poetry is and what it does, a description through over-the-top metaphor (“This is meat colored candy”) of what being a poet is like. So those who hate poems about poems need not apply: “This is a long boring attack,” she writes. But for a reader like me, who dislikes description and similes in their usual context, this book is anything but boring.Minnis’ trademark is the forbidden punctuation of ellipses and exclamation points:

You must have some sort of agenda to promote in poetry!Such as self-sympathy or vengeance…You must seduce and counter-seduce…And glow with extreme sensual grievance…Like an undeserved sunset…

This is part of the poet’s self-announcing form of subversion. Her poems are subversive, but they’re delivered in the voice of a naughty little girl who defies “god’s wish” by passing out on the “sticky floor” at “catholic school.” (This girly yet grotesque aesthetic helped spur Arielle Greenberg to coin the term “Gurlesque” in 2002.) It’s the voice of a girl who indulges in funeral daydreams: “If you die everyone tells a sad story about you! […] Do not die or everyone will continue to care only about themselves and not you!” This adolescent logic is later echoed in a snide dig at every grownup writer’s fantasy of living on after death through writing: “Death will come to end swinishness… // But my swinishness will continue in my poems…!” This is what Minnis excels at—teetering in perfect balance between the childishly vapid and the ultimately truthful. To write poetry, Poemland claims, is “to enchant someone meaninglessly.” And the book enchants with a long attack of self-contradicting truisms and glittering images of a bad girlhood.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney isDon’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found inColorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.

Satellite Convulsions

Satellite ConvulsionsTin House Books2008In Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, Portland’s Tin House Books has released an enticing anthology of contemporary poetry: It’s got one of those nice paperback covers with page-marking flaps, proclaiming contents by hip young poets like Matthea Harvey and hip old poets like James Tate. A flip through the TOC reveals many more of the former (the Dickmans, Alex Lemon) and latter (Rae Armantrout, Lorca).It’s a “diverse” mix of contributors, across age, gender, and country of origin — but are the poems themselves wide-ranging, in style and tone? Not exactly. I love many of the poems included here, but if I have a complaint about the book — and this of course is to be expected from a collection of poems chosen by an editorial staff with a unified vision — it’s that most of the poets have very similar sensibilities. They write first-person lyrics that make emotional appeals and tonally exhibit a kind of exuberance which is often pleasing but, after too many poems in a row, a little annoying. If I have two complaints, my other is that Satellite Convulsions feels a bit overproduced, almost smug in its slickness — much like Tin House itself. As in, where do they get off with their huge budgets?But surely this second is a complaint only an editor of a less well-endowed journal would make, and as a reviewer, I tend to search for potential faults. Approaching the anthology as a reader I find it highly likable. I’m happy to have in my possession Olena Kalytiak Davis’s wonderful, sex-drenched sonnets that first appeared in Tin House in 2006 (this from “Francesca Can Too Stop Thinking about Sex, Reflect upon Her Position in Poetry, Write a Real Sonnet.”):

i apologize, i offer no excuse:but, poet, though you have right to scoldit was high-souled you who made my mouth holdwhat it held and tell what it told: a truce …

Another inclusion that mixes high and low language to delightful effect is Darcie Dennigan’s “City of Gods,” which opens with the line “Thistly Augustine, disser of the shy world, I cannot consider your city” and ends thusly:

Hey god in the window, god of loneliness, god of smelly spacesstacked with newspapers, god of walks home from the L before the light ends,if I ask you to please turn my sooty camisole into wingsand me into an industrial moth, I am asking to be man-made—I don’t want to be this girl anymore.

Other highlights in the collection include Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Long Queen” and Bruce Smith’s “Devotion: Medea.”If a few of Tin House’s selections bore or irritate (like Sharon Olds’ line “I feel as if I’m like / a teenage boy in love” — seriously?) most are well worth reading and reading again.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney isDon’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found inColorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.

State of the Union

State of the UnionEds. Joshua Beckman and Matthew ZapruderWave Books, 2008There are many things I like about the new political anthology from Wave Books, State of the Union. I like its size–very manageable at just over 100 pages–and I like almost all of the poets represented within–old favorites like John Ashbery and James Tate alongside new favorites like Matthea Harvey and Tao Lin. I also like its dedication: all royalties for the book will be donated to a nonprofit organization that benefits poor and homeless veterans.But there are a few things I don’t like about it. Some of these poems seem only superficially political, as though to serve a conscience-easing function for the writer and the reader (and the publisher, I suppose); including the word “war” in a poem, as the second piece in the collection, Nick Flynn’s “Imagination” does, isn’t necessarily going to make me feel anything, be it indignation or rage or complicity. And complaining about the president (“i’m so happy i’m suicidal, like a psilosybin trip that’s moved in for good and his name is george bush,” writes Garrett Caples) may convince me you have good political sense, but it doesn’t convince me you’re a good poet.Many of the best poems in this collection come at their subject a little more obliquely, but are more fully realized as poems, by virtue of being emotionally complex and provoking more than one thought (e.g., War is bad or The government sucks)–I don’t read poetry to find assertions I already believe to be true (that’s what the Internet is for).One of my favorite poems in State of the Union is “Forgiveness” by Mathias Svalina, an early-career poet (unlike most of the authors here, he has yet to publish a full-length book). Svalina’s poem manages to be both funny and tragic and contains no platitudes. I felt the last stanza exactly where I was supposed to:

If you see a photographof a murdered girlyou will forever afterwear her teeth as anecklace for your throat.This is not forgiveness.It is forgivenesswhen you eatwith her teeth.

Another poem I liked was “Covenant of Sticks” by Dan Chelotti:

there is a hunger when I go birdwatching:I want to yell, do something you fucking bird,do something that isn’t flying, feeding, landing.Why don’t you explode? Why aren’t you the bombthat I want you to be?

Chelotti’s risk lies in admitting an animal appetite for destruction (Mary Ruefle’s poem proclaims, “We should try to be more like animals / and less like them at the same time”), and this opens the poem up to far more nuance than simply stating the obvious, that destruction is bad.–Elisa Gabbert____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney isDon’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found inColorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.

Quaker Guns

Quaker GunsCaroline KnoxWave Books, 2008Caroline Knox is a serious goofball. In Quaker Guns, her sixth and latest book of poetry, her over-the-top whimsy pays off more often than not, sometimes with big dividends.Though Knox’s poems are often downright silly, there’s an intellectual heft behind them that keeps this collection from feeling like novelty poetry. Like a literary analogue to Jeff Koons (the sheer delight of his giant Mylar balloon), she’s working largely on a conceptual level, though the work is also beautifully crafted. Her “conceptual” poems include one where the title (which is “The Title”) appears mid-poem, another that functions as the “source text” for two E.E. Cummings poems (had they actually been erasures), a recipe for a really fucked up Jell-o salad, a ten-line poem whose couplets adhere to a pointless eye-rhyme scheme: “A Jesuit / appeared in an apesuit” (suggesting that rhymes do not a poem make).In general Knox makes a bit of a mockery of form. “A Lot of the Days I Wake Up” is an abecedarian whose N and Q lines are, in their entirety, “Nerf” and “quiche”—but lest we think these words serve only to fill out the form, the concepts return in the final lines:

We couldn’t tell what was really going on in the photograph of thexebu, because of overexposure.You see, we’re in the Nerf quichezone again.

Don’t think Knox must resort to such gags because she hasn’t got the skills to dazzle with lines alone. She can also pull off major sonic fireworks, as in “We Beheld Two Nebulas:” (“These were atomized rotor-thrown / specks pocking a fresco— / a marks and sparks assay // in spume made out of rays”), and sparkling philosophical inquiry, as in “My Husband Sat Up”:

My school friend Annieis descended from Garrison,so Garrison is hidden in Annieas mica is hidden in vermiculite.Garrison famously said, “I will be heard.”What weight would you give to this.Do you want to know more.

I wanted to know more and kept reading.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney is Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found in Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.

Human Resources

Human ResourcesRachel ZolfCoach House Books, 2007Having read a little about Human Resources, I suspected I might “get” the project pretty quickly and not need or want to finish the whole thing. It combines corporate language (“I took it offline”), machine-generated poems and unsettling numeric codes (based in part on a database of the most frequently used words in English, as explained in an end note) – which gave me the impression that the poems would be soulless and creepy by necessity.But I surprised myself by reading the entire book in one sitting. I can’t think of a time I’ve digested a 90-page book of poetry so quickly, which is a testament to its sustained liveliness and accessibility. And while it’s not not creepy, it’s funny and true in equal doses.Zolf rotates through a handful of different “forms,” none longer than a page – prose blocks, PowerPoint-style bulleted lists, short poems of about a sentence per stanza, and poems generated by a Flash poetry program – and this variety keeps things interesting without losing the reader in an overly chaotic system. The voice of the poems, more an un-pin-down-able uber-voice than a single persona, reads like a ticker tape of office-ese:

We’re in a bit of a holding pattern right now providing you with a pulse on ‘inquiring minds’ I’d kill this sentence entirely.On our side of the family my day got totally blown out of the water push back if you think this is a ‘must have.’

As you progress through the book and learn its codes (“Include a link to the Code,” a list titled “How to write for the Internet” advises), gradually certain words are replaced with the number presumably representing their frequency of use. (If so, the last word in the line “Ambiguities of the human condition are a threat to surfeit of 1267” is “meaning.”) This turns the book into a kind of interactive game – readers can look up the words (the URL to the database is supplied in the back), guess at them or simply enjoy the robotic effect of the alphanumeric lines as they stand.This isn’t just a comment on what it’s like to work in an office, but what it’s like to live in a culture flooded with office-generated artifacts. It’s a daring experiment – Zolf risks unreadability but never succumbs to it until the very end, and then provocatively – that raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions: How do machines speak? Are corporations machines? Are humans machines (merely “resources”)? Are they corporations?____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney isDon’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found inColorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.