I am captivated by the concept that underlies Holly Day’s “My Safety Net,” which opens this issue. “…if I pretend I am a machine, I can stay calm, I am // just a washing machine humming to myself…” So real, so personal. No idea if it’s true, it doesn’t matter. It says so much about human interaction, about the desire to connect, the fear and shyness that can raise, all done in a quick, short poem. Brava!
Reese Conner writes “Bring Flowers to What You Love,” which starts, “I am aggressive tonight. Bring flowers / to the cemetery.” And indeed this is an aggressive, jagged poem, taking sudden corners, hurt and hurting. “Let’s dance on the graves of men… bearing the funniest names.” But this is not a poem of limited palette: “no one will know / how to hug when it matters.” Both of those lines show a sly use of enjambment to surprise us, throw us off track. Very much a smiling through the pain poem; one is left with compassion and sorrow.
Paul Bone’s “Recurrences” uses the trick of repetition to hint at the subject of his poem. “It is the one in which my kids are gone… It is the one in which my ex-wife is / my now-wife and my now-wife never was.” My answer to the riddle is recurring dreams, but of course it’s more complicated than that. There is a progression of characters and place, from stanza to stanza. “…my son is lost / but there is no one to help in all of Tokyo.” The narrator morphs into Everyman, and reading along, we become all of these refugees, these children, these seekers, lost and helpless. A complex, beautiful work.
Catherine Swanson does a great unwinding of a poem, “It Will Be As If We Never,” and indeed, the poem is about erasing things. “First, I’ll take my footsteps / from the dirt.” Stones will skip backwards / to the shore.” We start with external, physical items, but of course the narrator soon turns to memories, and actions. “I’ll reclaim my breathless phone calls… you’ll think / you hear knocking… but no one / will be there.” So it’s about the ending of a relationship, which as we understand that, feels just exactly right. Fiendishly clever ideas, worked out one after the other, with a satisfying final line.
And finally, Brandon Hansen gives us “When We Saw Coyotes,” which starts, “They blitzed the path, pumped / their strung-out legs.” Great image for me, because there is a sense of the junkie about coyotes, though I never identified it before this poem. Another spiky, dangerous-feeling poem. The coyotes find a fawn and attack it. And in so doing, give the location itself an emotional presence. “we hate it there, / that grove where we go / to burn pictures of ex-boyfriends…” Our actions correlate to those of the animals, we even identify with them. “we get it… we are all hungry.” A shivery poem, indeed.
Peace in poetry,
P M F Johnson
My eBook of poems, Against The Night, a sweet, rueful look at love in a long marriage, is available on Amazon, and at other fine e-retailers.
Related blog posts:
Convergence Online – Fall 2017
The New Yorker – Oct 30, 17
Posted in Mainstream Poetry, tagged From Like Nebraska, La Mediterranee, mainstream poetry critique, Nick Laird, P M F Johnson, Poetry, poetry commentary, Sophie Klahr, The New Yorker on November 9, 2017| 21 Comments »
I read and reread the first poem in this issue, Sophie Klahr’s “From ‘Like Nebraska.'” It starts, “He drinks like the faithful, / the way they fold their hands… like two owls roosting in an elm.” The poem is full of subversive metaphors like that, fun, a bit puzzling, quite original. When the narrator and her man leave the bar, they run into a stranger who rails at them about the environment. “…the bees going damn drunk / with hunger.” There is a backfiring truck, an opossum that “practices its death,” and their desire for each other. So, a poem about how fragile life is, how we find our fun while on the edge of disaster? I guess so. It’s hard to get inside this poem, and maybe that’s on purpose. Or maybe there is no interior, only the yearning to find a meaning the poet withholds. We’re left with all these little sensual shocks, and a moment captured in time, and a reason to reread once more.
“La Mediterranee,” by Nick Laird begins, “In the midst of our lifelike life / I come to this fork in your hand…” Such sly amusement runs through this poem. “I fully understand its pronginess, / the bent of want.” The narrator, his partner and the children are out at a restaurant. “…the waiter brought // your sea bass… its seared arrangement of chain mail.” But there is a sense that we are considering more than the surface life. “If we did continue further in — // into an atom of the flesh.” The poem unfolds, but only in a sly, noncommittal way, to discuss: “emptiness — as at the heart of any restaurant.” So are we talking of their relationship? On the surface, as you see, it’s about dining out. And that darn sea bass, giving the narrator the fish eye (not an explicit metaphor, but lingering just beneath the surface). So we go back to that first line. A lifelike life. Not a true life, then? And each observation in the poem can certainly relate to a space between the couple, a coldness, a formality as found in restaurants. Note the chain mail. The bent of want… away?
And most of all, there are the children, watching this. We wonder how they are affected. If they even know what is going on. We wonder if this is simply a momentary glitch between the couple, or perhaps we misunderstand, and the moment being described is about something else entirely. A little in-joke, perhaps. We hope for the couple, we worry for them, we accept that things are going on we will never learn about. Their moment is private, though they are out in a public space. The humor is a shield, not an invitation inside. A very good poem, though tinged with sadness.
Peace in poetry,
P M F Johnson
My eBook of poems, Against The Night, a sweet, rueful look at love in a long marriage, is available on Amazon, and at other fine e-retailers.
Related blog posts:
The New Yorker – Aug 21 17
The New Yorker – July 31 2017
Rattle Magazine – Fall 17
Read Full Post »