April 23, 2008
Since they stopped exclaiming
Since they stopped exclaiming
Panic at the Disco seem happier,
“panic” more ironic now
than eccentric punctuation had ever been.
Which reminds me of how
everything got better
when I turned twenty three
and stopped speaking in italics.
I would have been depressed too
if I’d worn that much eyeliner.
April 22, 2008
Lucky Me
(Written by a guest poet today. I think it’s brilliant, but perhaps I’m biased…)
Kaleidescopic
Explosions of Love
Reside within me when I am
(a)Round
You
April 20, 2008
The Emily Valentine Poems by Zoe Whittall
I realized, from the last book of poetry I read, that I seek out paths allowing access into the poems I’m reading. I suppose this is the way one reads anything, but the paths are usually more straight-forward in fiction. With most cases (and in the case especially of the books I like to read), we’re led through the work with the author holding our hand– even as basically as the points of beginning, middle and end. In poetry, without that guidance, I find myself lost, in particular when form is unfamiliar.
In Zoe Whittall’s The Emily Valentine Poems, pop culture references led my way. I am not sure I would have bought this book at all if not for the title. Other references– musical, literary, and more television– gave me confidence that though I did not know the terrain, I could certainly find my way around all right.
But Whittall’s style represents a quandary for a reader such as I. Her poems are not poems as I was learned them, pentametre iambic or otherwise, and though I sense she is being free with form, stretching its bounds, it all makes me a bit uneasy. By all accounts it should set me free, but see, she is liable to do anything. Who knows what lies on the very next page?
As I go though, I realize it’s worth relaxing for. That the very next page possibly contains a fan letter to Judy Blume, Rayanne Graff, Axl Rose, Corey Haim? So how could I not get along here? A list poem of “Satisfying Soft Victories” (“2) Remembering and using long division”) Much of it like jottings from a notebook, and none of it boring.
I am beginning to see that with a poem you have to read it over and over. By my second and third time through this, I was comfortable enough blazing my own path. The poems more concrete with every read and, however contradictory, ever-changing.
April 20, 2008
A pleasure
“I think a young poet, or an old poet for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he’s written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading. But if it doesn’t, he shouldn’t be discouraged. I mean, in the seventeenth century every educated man could turn a verse and play the lute. Supposing no one played tennis because they wouldn’t make Wimbledon? First and foremost, writing poems should be a pleasure. So should reading them, by God.” –Philip Larkin, The Paris Reviews Interviews, II
April 18, 2008
Born that way
Have you ever know such a flare
for trousers? That girl could put out
bright lights with her eyeteeth.
But then some people are just born that way.
They come out sucking on spoons.
April 16, 2008
Things that happen
Things that happen creep
with silent feet, urging
time with its machine parts.
Forward lurches, forward spins.
April 16, 2008
The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder
When I say that Laurel Snyder’s collection The Myth of the Simple Machines is accessible, I mean that I read the collection and encountered actual pathways down deep into the heart of the message: sometimes literal (as in the line from “Glass”, “Like it or not, this is for you/ so pay attention”) or else constructed from my own experience, my personal connection (“I Covet Everything I Own”). These poems do not put up blocks; the language is ordinary, the images familiar, and I felt comfortable enough to venture inside them. Their simplicity lulling, assuring, but then look– simple is a myth after all. One probably should have known.
That these simple machines would do much more than they appear to. The ordinary language is arranged in extraordinary ways, syntax twisted to catch on, wordplay belying horror, images arranged with every element in its place and things are not what they seem, nor will they stay that way. The seesaw illustration on the cover absolutely fitting, tilting back and forth with every line– hanging on “only”, “despite”, “but”, “and then…” and even when these conjunctions are not present, we sense the same weighing effect.
I got a real sense of narrative as the collection progressed, a coming of age. In the beginning we have “The Girl” and she is small, and she is figuring out how the world works, stumbling and falling. But she’s a clever girl, we’re told– she is both everywhere and elusive, and she is figuring out, using her “simplest solutions”. Enough to have her own voice, her own “I”, examining herself in relation to the rest of the world, conscious of her constructions. Soon pulling away from herself to see the world as it is, in all its complexities and configurations. She has wised up, lessons learned– she keeps her “Triptych(s) of Useful Rules” and she’ll pass them along. But she hasn’t stopped dreaming. The Girl slips like a fish, and I choose to believe that she is happy she is happy she is happy. In sugar or otherwise.
From “Triptych of Useful Rules (Words)”:
Intimacy-
1) You’ll know it when you see it. 2) Anything that lasts longer than it needs to, sentence, look, hand on shoulder. 3) I mean to say, it lingers. I mean both things.
April 15, 2008
Crossward, downword
a cop-out,
could it be? but it
requires double the effort
owing to verticalness and horizontality.
surely, you can see
the beauty in the form, or
is it destined, just– perpetual
crap?
April 14, 2008
Insouciant teabag: a missyllabic haiku
Insouciant teabag,
its string slung over the rim of the cup,
awaits the kettle’s boiling
