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