I find myself lately impatient with poems that have any suburban content, let-me-tell-you-about-my-every day genre. No more room in the buffer for poems about petting their cats, or watching their grandchildren play or pining from their bedroom about some girl to talk to. Dreamy and content poems, a valuable part of life, sure. There tends to be a prevailing wind of internal monologue that informs anyone who might walk within eyesight range of something. What makes someone curious, animated? “Certainty is death”, so is vague blather or lather. It’s not a matter that any of these things are invalid or taboo but overstocked. I want a balance of the placid and the acid.
What I’m interested in hearing is an electrified grid in every direction zapping and buzzing. I don’t want to be lectured at, unless it is humble and eloquent or funny to my sense of humour. I don’t want to be confessor priest with someone bringing the raw confusion that once started to be vented feeds itself as a perpetual whine machine.
Poems that aim to make me feel something on a visible track make me feel railroaded and resentful, resistant. I want to have a distance to approach and opt in or out. Poems that play in language or attempt to interact and engage have my attention faster. Making sense is oversated. Tell me a story but only if its well-told and with significance and ideas have been thought out and presented with insight. I can get description everywhere. I’m pretty imaginative and can take large leaps. Pedantically spelling out each step. Everyone is talking. What’s said haas to be an improvement over a break of silence. That’s a harsh criteria to meet that this sentence doesn’t even make.
These poems generally scratch at that sweet spot tho:
National Poetry Month by AngelHouse of visual poems.
Jess Mynes’ How the Cows (Cannot Exist Chapbooks, 2011). A sample poem (first published in The Portable Boog Reader 5):
pervs all over the midland
sun sinking mockingbirds cockney
inhabited lack of motive
notice beyond right by your side
one size is all
admitted second discussion
density’s push to hold still
binding these larger truths
my gallery, a small collection
tried cat mad belfry
working out insides in sunlight
homes in rotted wood
beds to body pocked
cruel bearing sky pure
muscles of the pelvic north to
your leaning sea shell
odd hours larkspur swallow flowers, or
it made me feel superior
indispensible study in this indifferent form
Each line somehow uneasily connects and resist and yet it gives immediate pleasure of sound and for its lack of telling me a story from the workday.
Andrew Topel‘s Renegade (unarmed, 2011)
[see his visual poems here]
This will take a longer sit and peruse. Some I’ve seen about and some are new but there’s a lot of different styles within. They resist a skim-reading which is an appealing trait. I’ve taken to skimming poetry instead of reading. Scanning on speculation that there might be a ping of a phrase somewhere. I can’t hear music or proper voice on fast forrward but with text I’ve started to come to expect being bored so look for the good bits instead of finding a companionable silence to listen to the text. Because visual poems defy my impulse to pick out world view and slap my stamp of agree or disagree, then look for skill markers, techniques, I have to come at the text a different way.
In the regular irregular issue of unarmed, a poem by Clemente Padín which made me laugh aloud and find out who this guy is. Astonishing the near infinite number of impressive people to learn about. Such a tight energy of John Olson. Much to dip into.
Best Poetry of Stephen Crane (on Kindle, no page numbers)
XVI
There was a man with a tongue of wood
Who essayed to sing,
And in truth it was lamentable.
But there was one who heard
The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood
And knew what the man
Wished to sing
And with that the singer was content.
There’s a dexterity of perception. He’s got a slate grey comic position in the world. He doesn’t come across as a know-it-all and yet there’s a biblical influence to some of the poem’s cadence. Yet for having died over a century ago, a poem that puts the blame back with men who would blame women seems utterly contemporary as does his poem of the people reading newspapers crowing a melon king.
Compañeros: An Anthology of Writings About Latin America, ed. by Hugh Hazelton and Gary Geddes (Cormorant Books), p. 171, an excerpt of Toxicity by Erin Mouré,
What if the blocked space in the liver is just sadness,
can it be cured then?
Can the brain stop being the brain?
Can the brain be, for a few minutes, a simple gland with its fluids,
its dark edges light never enters, can it let us alone?
When I think of the brain I think
how can something this dark help us
together
to stay here, as close as possible, avoiding underwater minefields,
the ships of trade churning perilously toward us,
the throb of their motors calling the mines up,
as close as our two skins
Like how she tangles together the personal and political, the reflection with the concrete of biology.
Wistawa Szymborska: Poems New and Collected (Harcourt, 1998), translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, p. 200
Children of Our Age
We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.
All day long, all through the night,
all affairs — yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.
Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.
Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.
Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always of politics.
To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,
or a conference table whose shape
was quarrelled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?
Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.
Love how she pivots and then reverses. Makes an argument then undermines her own position of sureness. That act is compelling to me. The mantra that you can’t not choose. Every option you take is a choice has been within me for 25 years. Yet this reinforces and extends. What are omissions saying? Are they incidental or significant? What does the collective make as a negative space to show the positive space? Thank goodness for 3 Quarks Daily for pointing out this writer. Her poems are simple and yet not.