Going through the stacks of new books arrived, most poems are working images, some the angle of ideas. Most have an underlying sadness to them. Hard to separate the interpretation from the projection. Is that what is resonating or being imposed?

67. The Small Nouns Crying Faith by Phil Hall (BookThug 2013), p69 gives a sample but its not excerptible in the way some books are. It’s more long poem so pieces and sensibility go in long loops. But this has beauty, presence in details, economy and the doubling back to question.
    

    October    or early March    late in the day
    the sun come-round long & russet off the lake
    will reach right through the log cabin storms
    (just up or still up) & though the little mica-chapel door
    of the cold wood-stove      the light will be shaking
    in there in the ash-grate like a real fire
    why do I still write shitty little poems like this

    The tight sense of time and place, the illusion of heat and church that is the fire we make for ourselves all could unpack like a fractal to consider. I’ve never seen the oven window as mica-like but that having been said, it seems like its always been like that, and a stained glass window.

68. Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga, ed. by Scott Wiggerman and Constance Campbell (Dos Gatos Press, 2013). Also p. 69 is one by Barbara Blanks. I was struck by how it is metaphor and isn’t. It’s an expression but it is direct of how the grass looks in certain fallow areas,
    

    missed by the mower
    dandelions dance
    in cowlicks of grass

69. Horses Hooves, ed. by Mike Montreuil and Luce Pelletier (Haiku Canada, 2013) has no page numbers but a senryu by Elizabeth Fanto reads as follows,
    

    clothes drying tumbling
    going over and over
    what to tell him

    It strikes me as strongly built. How the mind turns, getting hotter and more tumbled when fretting. The middle line can tether to either L1 or L3 without harming either meaning. A sort of semantic trompe.

70. A Hint of Light by Luminita Suse and Mike Montreuil (Editions des petites nuage, 2013) is a duet book with pieces responded to one another as it goes tanka by tanka. I hardly know what to pull out as a characteristic sample. The poems are sensual and vivid. Here are two from p. 10:
    

    we must always
    remember
    what we are –
    white peonies bend
    towards the ground
    peony petals
    between my toes
    his fingers
    turn reasoning
    to pink silk

    And another achingly universal. Like how it is able to pair the concrete with a human situation.

    he has a cold
    therefore no kissing
    for one week
    the snow will build up
    on the rosehips

71. Sympathy Loophole by Jaime Forsythe (Mansfield, 2012). A lot of the poems are dream sequences, leaning on disconnects. Perhaps in novel the equivalent would be Chris Eaton’s group biography of people sharing the same name. What happens when you abstract but keep details? Take p 55 of Sympathy Loophole called “Fight or Flight”. Here’s the last third,
    

    […] His husk
    put his face on the table. Branches shrugged
    above him, the nervous system of trees
    a feat of engineering. His husk listened
    to the piano in the next room, imaginary
    wire taut from the top of her skull
    to the ceiling, ballet posture. Rain
    of felted mallets. One explosion
    detonates another.

    It feels carefully distant in a different way than Hall’s. You get a sketch of a scene here but it seems romantic and detached, controlled explosions. Small firecrackers. Flight and fight are both muted down so the argument never blows to kingdom come, but doesn’t go away either. There’s defeat in the posture and the world echoing in nature so the whole tree is as large as one’s nervous system. The language is lush even against the terse plain statements with its felted mallet rain. I’ll have to listen for that.

72. Poetry, April 2013 (Poetry Foundation) had a striking poem by Jane Hirschfield, p. 24
    

    An hour is not a house
    An hour is not a house,
    a life is not a house,
    you do not go through them as if
    they were doors to another.
    Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
    four walls, a ceiling.
    An hour can be dropped like a glass.
    Some want quiet as others want bread.
    Some want sleep.
    My eyes went
    to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

    While a quiet poem it is simple without being simplistic. Things that are not concrete burn off in time. It feels essential without an extraneous word. It explores ideas, impersonally from a cosmic point of view, principles observed from an historical calm. It expands on one physical idea and time ideas within transience. Perhaps some would say it is moving. It seems more intellectual to me than provocative of loss although there’s gestures to that. As we divide our life into little boxes we come to know exactly when the timer will go off when set to 7 minutes. Or when a day is more a bungalow or hotel. Interesting comparisons to chew on.
    In the 1913 issue of Poetry Pound wrote “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste. In this issue 3 poets have some things to add after a century-gap in reply; Sina Queyras (Not the prayer, the moment before prayer), William Logan (Don’t think that if you cheat on form or slip the meter, no one will notice) and Marjorie Perloff (Don’t play the victim card).

73. Unknown Actor by Jason Christie (Insomniac Press, 2013). I’m pretty sure I’m the wrong audience, knowing nothing of embedded references to film actors and the structure of plays he’s playing against. It’s rather like Clockfire of summaries of impossible plays. I don’t know enough about the writer to know if it is irony describing bromantic comedy or criticism. There’s a lot of explosions. Christie’s film references are interspersed with sections of sketches towards poetics, a sort of in-group comedy for academic poets, lists that go cheekily into the meta. p. 46
    

    Notes towards a plastic poetics with a lid and some peanut butter inside.
    Notes towards an avant-guarde poetics desperate for state approval.
    Notes towards a seamless universe full of poetics.
    Notes towards a night of unmusical poetic statements.
    Notes towards a poetics suspicious of poetics.
    Notes towards a poetics suspicious of notes.
    A poetics suspicious of notes towards poetics.

    That’s lovely and playful. Earlier in a poem called Act X, Scene X, another from the bits that amused me most, p. 15

    Notes towards a dislocated poetics of frature and acceptible practice
    Notes towards shopping online at the virtual mall and still complaining of the crowds
    Notes towards a shake and bake poetics, poetics in breadcrumbs, in a plastic bag and shaken vigorously, add whatever spices you’d like
    Notes towards a “follow me over here” poetics
    Notes towards a distinguished chair for poetics
    Notes towards a poetics of externally placed genitalia, of building castles, or leaning towers, or moats and draw bridges
    Notes towards a poetics of fittingly romantic mold […]
    Answering the call of poetics and then putting it on hold.

    It’s a curious position hybridizing poetics essay and stand-up. Some start complaining about the list of surface things one might like, like puppy pictures, until it segues to abstracts (p.72) “razorwire like data transfer/cornerstone like symbology/guitar like orangutan/cedar smoke like philosophy”. Nice journeying there.
    The poems are funny and strong in places but the movement on the whole seems to be restless, unhappy, about tearing down the contemporary and mocking the way people do when they watch a film they love until they love until they hate it for the way it repeats and clichés itself by being played on a loop. The agitate for change but in what direction?
    Here’s an interview with Christie.

Some books/people I know I don’t have the hooks I need to understand enough, and some I only think I understand but am seeing a different facet of the disco ball. I can see what I like in poetry is much the same as what works in products and marketing according to Made to Stick. Concrete, template but not cookie cutter, unexpected but not arbitrary. Having some significance. Poetry that is about signifying or stripping signification to the loss of grounded in purpose and sense is hard to attach to.