A Fine Compare

I just finished judging a poetry contest for one of the state societies this week, and then read the poems in Poetry mag. Hard not to think, well, which of these poems would have won my contest walking away? Answer: not all, by any means.

For me, the poems in Poetry feel highly polished, written by dextrous and savvy poets, but an uncomfortably high number simply stop there. They provide no insight, no depth of meaning or emotion. No frisson. It is educational to realize how different my concerns in poetry are from those of the top editors. Keep that in mind when using any insights found here to raise your game to the next level. ;-> The editors seem to want every line to be a surprise, even at the cost of meaning. Maybe since I read so many fewer poems, that is not a value to me. Meaning matters more.

I want the poem original, and dextrous, but I want that punch of insight at the end, that emotional slap, and the ability to read multiple meanings — when the hair goes up on the back of my neck. The poem that won my contest had all that, and up to a dozen poems displayed a depth of meaning — more than one possible reading. So people are doing this out there, they just aren’t always getting in the top magazines for it. Is this a disconnect between the poetry writing public, and the literati at the top?)

Nor do I mean to imply the editors at Poetry, etc. are insensible to concerns of depth and power, that would be silly and inaccurate of me — those are just not invariable requirements for them. And absolutely the depth of good writing is far greater in their magazine. But I still believe the best poems in my contest hang tough with the work found here.

Anyway, there are three Kay Ryan poems in the current issue, and every one would have won my little contest walking away. “Party Ship” is a meditation on loss, “My party ship / is pulling out”, “Album” more explicitly about death, “Death has a life / of its own…” and “Still Start” uses multiple meanings — look at the title itself — and a great, original metaphor: “As if engine / parts…” Oh, and Ryan of course uses a sly humor. Boy that’s a wonderful gift.

I loved James Hoch’s “Round.” Only on a close second reading did the title transform its meaning for me to something deeper, and darker: “its uselessness / in matters of yearning or feeling / another’s yearn…” Spooky good.

Rick Barot’s “Tarp” has a great turn. “I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets / under the trees…” to “You cannot put a tarp / over a war.”

I was very glad to see Simon Armitage get three of his arch and amusing poems in here. This is the first time he’s ever cracked Poetry? Hard to believe. “The Unthinkable” starts “A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight…” and chuckles along from there.

But the best poem in the magazine, and one of the absolute best villanelles I’ve ever read (I don’t say THE best out of concern for writer’s remorse, and also an unseemly ego: I’ve written a couple of the puppies myself over the years ;-> ) is by the winner of the Ruth Lilly prize, Marie Ponsot. And a more deserving poet is hard to imagine. Her poem “Northampton Style,” is a tour-de-force and an education in how a villanelle should flow line by line with no artificiality, no confusion or dull moments, but having beautiful, original lines, surprises and a sense of inevitability. “Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer / Northampton-style…” and the multiple meanings that arise out of that phrase, Northampton style, the faint whiff of irony, the inevitable loss arising from the choices of life. “a dulcimer / that lets us wash our mix of dreams together.” Oh yeah, and great rhymes.

Wow. This is why I read poetry.

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson

New York Mashup

So, this week in the New Yorker Dora Malech gives us “To The You Of Ten Years Ago, Now.” One thing I notice about New Yorker poems is they tend to approach themes differently (and often have different themes) than standard conventional poems (“the usual suspects”), and this work is no exception. A lot of internal rhymes here, “I know the difference between / arteries and ardor,…a weak-kneed need…” Again Paul Muldoon has chosen a fun poem, something a general reader will “get” and enjoy. And only after we get much of the way through it do we see it IS a standard theme, in fact it’s a love poem — I’m starting to realize he has a weakness for such. As do I. “your body has a few ideas / so bright we might meet some night and render / a dark room light…” I like this poem very much.

The other poem from this week is “From The Canal,” by Matthew Dickman. I think this poem could serve as a primer for people who write nature poetry and want to crack the big time. It starts out in a non-linear fashion: “small fistfuls / of green lights hang / from your every / word” I like that last enjambment the best. But this is not, ultimately, a non-linear poem, it’s a poem about being down at the canal, just like it says, and we get lots of images therefrom: “The box turtles stack up one on top of the other…” and “The blue heron looks back one million years…” as though each image the poet saw at the canal becomes a jumping-off point for a very brief meditation, and because the images are all canal images it all hangs together in some crazy way. The ending is this way as well, only even more so.

Last week’s poems took a little more work for me to get into. “Beach Wedding,” by Simon Armitage, seems a relatively straightforward description of a certain spot on the beach. “Being… a stone’s throw from the pretty church / they often tumble out onto the beach…” there are slant rhymes galore here, and somehow Armitage mixes up the image of the wedding party with a beachcomber: “Each empty evening a figure arrives / in a shooting jacket and combat trousers.” It’s a solid poem, but only after chewing on it more do we see that the beach comber becomes the devil, and this is juxtaposed with the husband and wife discovering life after marriage is not perfect. So a poem about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, subtly done.

Lia Purpura gives us the poem, “Beginning,” also with a biblical theme: “In the beginning, / in the list of begats, / one begat / got forgot…” It presents this theme, it develops it, then it bounces off somewhere else entirely for its ending. Not a very long poem, not easily gotten into. Am I missing something and Muldoon chooses themse like this for each week, biblical this week, love poetry next? I’ll have to keep an eye on that. He DOES like biblical themes, and rhymes, for those of you trying to appeal to his sensibilities… ;->

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson

Evoking Avocet

So the spring issue of The Avocet starts with three poems by ed galing, the most powerful of which for me is “voyage for two,” about a man and his wife going on a familiar journey through the woods each spring — to a cabin maybe? — “ducks were always in / no danger from us,” bringing us a beautiful scene. “sun shining on the / ripples making a sort of web…” But the web catches more than just water: “the doctor had already / told me that / memory loss is evident” and there is a beautiful twining of the natural and the personal from there to the end of the poem.

Peter C. Leverich, freed from his editing chores, gives us a poem about a heron on his pond: “he marks it with his air of hauteur…” giving the creature a real personality through the heightened tone, and making the poem fun: “he behaves like he’s the king of France!” The turn to the narrator’s voice leads us to a more philosophical end, very satisfying: “Yet I would be his alter Audubon, the illustrator of…”

Joan Colby gives us a poem, “Spring Green,” about yearning for spring — since we had snow here yesterday, particularly apt for me. ;-> “First grass / hormonal with a green intensity…” Great line. And then a paired poem, “Spring Snow,” which goes deeper into the soul, lending it power when contrasted with the previous poem. “The moon stalls…I toss in its headlight / unable to save myself…”

Charles Portolano gives us a portrait of “The American Avocet,” very appropriate indeed: “I watch unseen this / long-legged shorebird, with its pied plumage / and a dash of red around / its head and neck…”

I liked Andy Roberts’ poems, “Waiting” and “Bluebells in the Floodplain,” and the emotional renderings of M.J. Iuppa’s “Hemlock Lake.” “They are staring us down — standing guard over / 120 confined eggs.”

Finally, let me mention “Black Swallowtail,” by Charles H. Harper, having an interesting beginning: “I believe in the visible world / there is no creature softer…” which, put the way it is, gives us the first line to be read not only as a commentary on the butterfly itself, but also a declaration of the narrator’s whole approach to the world, a belief in the image, the concrete, that which is real. This sort of sly complexity recurs throughout the poem. Very nice.

Peace in the valley,

P M F Johnson

The Clash of Icons

There are a whole raft of magazines whose concerns are different from the academic, “highest literary quality” magazines that make up such a large presence in American poetry – thank goodness for the variety. I am thinking not only of such outfits as the haiku magazines, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Mayfly and so on, nor only of the genre magazines that publish speculative poetry, Asimov’s and Strange Horizons among them, but even straight-no-chaser mainstream poetry — such places as Blue Collar Review, Main Street Rag, Avocet, and this week’s mag, Iconoclast. These latter do not concern themselves nearly as much with the arch, original phrase, nor the breathtaking technique, but with the honesty of the observation, the truth of the language, the power of the emotion. It gives our poetry strength that such places exist. And so it is with the poems in the current issue.

The first poem I’ll discuss is “Save Me From The Self-Appointed Saints,” by Michael Ketchek. Maybe one important aspect of these sorts of poems, of this one in particular, is the self-recognition of the reader in the poem: “better the gentle sinner / than the righteous do-gooder…” this poem begins, and I’m like, right-on. I feel less alone in the universe because of poems like this. “let my path not intersect / with those who are sure / their bullets have rainbows…” How apropos after this last week’s events. How reassuring to know this urge for supporting each other, not dividing from each other, is out there and growing as well. Magazines like this give us such reassurance.

And then Beth Staas did a good job with her discussion of living with illegals, “Streets Paced With Gold.”

I liked “Toaster,” by David Martin Orloff. “Some days it was all we had to eat.” And the revelation that comes at the end. “much later…my sister / informed me…the toaster we had as a kid was nothing more than…” We need such plainspoken revelations of the world (I ain’t giving away what the toaster was, though, go buy the mag!) that the world we thought we knew as children can change, that surprises can happen years later and give us understanding of our family or the people around us that we never had before. Good poem.

I liked “A Trio,” by Toby Lurie. It was a bit experimental, and because of its structure delivered its message in a poignant way a more conventional stanza structure may have failed to succeed at. A poem about loneliness, the emptiness surrounding us, and how we can get beyond that.

There are too many poems in the magazine to mention them all, but I also want to call out a shout out for “Teenage Boy, Bad at Flowers,” by Bill Meissner (didn’t we all feel like this once upon a time) and “Corporate Casualties,” by Brady Rhoades “two hundred sick days / unused” — such a sense of betrayal, powerfully conveyed — and finally “Mandell,” by Brady Rhoades “When the time comes, I want to / disappear like the Cheshire Cat.”

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson

Poetry’s Month

Lot of worthwhile poems in the April Poetry Magazine this month. I was struck first by Adam Kirsch’s triptych, “Revolutionaries, 1929,” “The Butcher’s Apprentice, 1911-1914,” and “Professional Middle-class Couple, 1922,” each a rhyming poem reflecting on photos by August Sander. I actually read them backwards in the magazine, and liked the result — the poems consider how economic justice affected each of the subjects. “What justifies the inequality / That issues her a tastefully square-cut / Ruby…” begins one. The strongest of the three for me was “The Butcher’s Apprentice,” maybe because Kirsch explores the tension between how high-tone the apprentice looks in the photo, and the gore he normally would have been covered with: “The starched cuff and the brandished cigarette / Are what..we will see, / Though in the closet hangs an apron flecked / With bits of brain…” A good theme for exploring economic justice, as well. Straight-punching poetry.

Michael Robbins brings us a few humorous poems, playing with words in interesting ways. “Big Country” is the first one. “Fiddle no further, Fuhrer. Rome is built.” And “My stigmata bring out my eyes.” Oh, these are not politically correct poems. But how can you not like someone who subverts a board game? “Charles Simic, in the gloaming, with a roach…” That’s from “That’s Incredible.” Even his titles are refreshing.

Gwyneth Lewis also has fun with her poem (in past years, Poetry has featured humorous poems in the April issue — though it is undeclared, I’m thinking that’s what they are doing here as well) “Fooled Me for Years with the Wrong Pronouns.” “You made me cry in cruel stations, / so I missed many trains.” and “Have pity / Kill it.” Kind of a fierce little poem, underneath.

But I found nothing funny in J.T. Barbarese’s poem, “The Dead House.” “mid-corridor, / a rotting cat / furry and fey / in a nap / of gore / glued flat…” Powerful images, disturbing, about a place the narrator once loved someone, which has now gone to ruin. Gave me shivers.

Finally, I must mention Randall Mann’s “Order,” a poem where after each line scrolls out to the middle of the poem, the lines pop up again in reverse order back to the first line, with an interesting result. Christian Wiman has always liked trick poems, and I pretty much go along with him on that. This is a good example why. “Sorry to think / what thinking has done to landscape,” becomes by the second half of the poem, “he loved…what thinking has done to landscape.” Not all the lines work, which is a flaw for me, but enough do work to make it enjoyable for me. And aren’t challenges like this part of what poetry is all about, at its best?

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson

Treble NY

Back in the March 18 issue of the New Yorker, Gibbons Ruark presented us with a poem, “Lightness In Age,” that I am still trying to get my head around. “It means not having to muscle your bag / Onto the baggage rack…A girl your daughter’s age will do that for you.” A poem about the irony of getting old, then. The slight bitter flavor that comes, but the appreciation as well: “Those lightnesses are not to be taken lightly…” After the description of moments in the narrator’s life that define the narrator’s age, the poem turns to detailed images of birds — “the goldfinch feathering down at morning…” then ends with a consideration of the love the narrator has for his/her person. And it IS a poem of light touch, a love poem, nothin’ deep. Why did Muldoon choose this poem? It’s skilled, surely enough, and does a nice job of handling a moment hard to describe without getting klunky. Sometimes the editor just likes to include a simple, straightforward poem done very well, we’ve seen that before.

In the April 1 issue, Yusef Komunyakaa gives us “Night Gigging,” a poem about spearing frogs. “A silhouette lingers, cleaved from the kneeling man, / back to hunger & simple philosophy of the spheres…” Komunyakaa tends to go thoughtful about little moments like this, at least that’s my impression of his approach. It gives us something to chew over, to unwrap in the poem. “There’s a ghost poised between free will & the gig, / waiting for the song…” I like the images of this poem, and I like the ending. Can a sign of success in a poem be simply the willingness of the reader to linger on the language, after it’s done?

And the other poem in this issue is by Louise Gluck, “An Adventure,” almost a bookend poem with the one in The Threepenny Review I discussed a couple blogs ago. Like that one, this poem deals with end-of-life issues. “It came to me one night…that I had finished with those amorous adventures / to which I had long been a slave…” The second stanza develops this idea — “The next night brought the same thought, / this time concerning poetry…” The third stanza goes into the land of death and the dead. “Now I could hear them because my heart was still.” She rides into/through the land of death. “All around, the dead were cheering me on…As we had all been flesh together, // now we were mist.” Note the pun there. But it is all just a dream. She ends by waking from the vision, and in referring to a second person, the narrator’s love, we assume, wraps the poem up in a satisfying way. And the reader is left with…

Well, the direct confrontation with death gives the poem a weight and grandeur that’s rare these days. But the poem twists away from conclusion. From taking a stand. Are conclusions not to be a part of top-end American poetry anymore? Do editors feel they would be fools to buy such a work? Must today’s poems always wear their cloak of irony, be elusive, duck away from the ineffable? As though our whole culture still were terrified of meaning, of taking a stand? Of the grand failure?

For me, that unwillingness to go that last step, to lay out the fear that nothing is there on the other side of death, or the faith that something is…to grab for that melting sense of something more, a connection with us, with something, is a sad loss for poetry.

I want to shout out, what is poetry for, if not such moments? I want to argue, this unwillingness is a failure of courage.

Whether or no, Gluck refuses to go that last step in either of these poems, even at what seems the end of her life. Is that refusal one of the reasons she has done so well in today’s poetry environment, where more bold visionaries would be rejected? Is this unwillingness endemic to the many, many editors who do not seem to ever buy such work, from her or anyone else?

I do conclude this: unlike her other poem, this poem feels as though it had another step to take. In current American poetry, who may be willing to take it? No, let me say instead, who has the courage to publish a poem that did take it?

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson

The Republic’s Current Picks

The first poem in the March 25th issue of The New Republic is “Appraisal Theory,” by Julie Sheehan. The first line starts: “My son’s in his Watch This years.” And this is the first of the two threads in the poem, the child wanting his mother to watch him at various antics. The second thread relates more closely to the title: “the house, bought just before the bubble burst, / loses value by the hour.” The poem ends by bringing the two strands together in a simple simile. Powerful and effective. Not the trickiest poem, but I always like poets who show courage in putting the innards right out there for anyone to analyze. In this case, we are rewarded by the resonance between small boys showing off and bankers who have damaged our economy, damaged real people in real houses, by their unrestrained childish behavior. One likes the small boy more. ;->

“White Ashes” by Liam Hysjulien takes a similar approach, opening with “My dentist tells me about his dying white ash trees…” The narrator then relates his own teeth to the trees. “The tooth, he says, has its own widening rings…” The dentist reminisces about the trees, the narrator feels apologetic. The closing line, as above, ties the two motifs together, though not in as simple a simile. This is more a feeling poem — that is, it brings up a sense of nostaglia and loss. An interesting compare and contrast moment between the two works.

The third poem in the magazine is Mary Jo Bang’s “Rude Mechanicals.” This poem sort of plays tag from image to image throughout, each image wandering off in its own direction. “Against a white wall / someone’s hair was a treetop.” From there, “It was a time / when everyone said, / behind every great veil is only a human…” Then the poem goes off to: “I don’t know how / the stage curtain caught fire…” …you get the idea. It’s maybe most profitable (fun?) to relate each image to the previous image it springboards off, without looking at the larger context of the poem. In fact, when I try to view the larger context, I run into difficulty. What is the larger whole here? We get only scattered clues — a machine sucking air in the early part of the poem could relate to the rude mechanicals mentioned at the end. We’re left with emotions of sorrow, and helplessness, in a rather unpleasant world. Honestly, the whole does cohere, for me, in a non-verbal way, and certainly gives the reader plenty to dip into. I suspect simply taking the poem as is, without trying to draw too many conclusions, is the least frustrating approach: it is what it is, don’t worry your pretty little head. It does seem typical of other poems of hers I have read recently — not easy to read literally, but swept by undercurrents and feelings that reach indirectly to something lacking in the narrator’s life. Worth a couple reads, anyway.

Peace in poetry,

P M F Johnson