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It helps to finally start submitting The Work. Duh. Many start-up, fledgling publications run by the nicest folks who really, truly care about the written word -- even if is on a computer screen. Not sure how much of it actually gets read these overly distracted, too-much-going-on days...
Still, the running list is here -- forty-four individual poems (as of today) and another batch as a chapbook:
I read this volume of poetry today: Kissing God Goodbye by June Jordan. I liked the politically-charged, fearless, brazen confrontation Jordan's language was willing to make, speaking truth to power, to the attempted shackles so often displayed by our dominant culture. As an African-American poet, she spoke with authority and verve. That said, her aesthetic and mine are divergent. Her languge on the page seemed very prosaic, at times un-poetic. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I suppose I didn't work hard enough to get her aesthetic. Still, I applaud her cheeky sassiness. You go girl!
The Morning of the Poem by James Schuyler. I'm reading this guy after a review in The Nation intrigued me. I have to now say—once again, I must not be getting the fuss. These read as somewhat dated, 1970s confessional poems to me. If I wrote similar things in contemporary writing workshops, I'd get dinged for poor enjambments, arbitrary line and stanza breaks, and also being too egocentric and thus putting people off.
I am thinking Schuyler was of the New York School and maybe that explains that aesthetic and why it is so often offputting to me: the wearying self-centered, New York-centric, and no prayer or hope for any of us writers who (egads!) chose to migrate west. There are superb lines, crisp images, and beguiling narrative but overall I have to say—meh!
Oh, the guy did have a rough life, often saved by the kindness of friends. And an odd relationship to love, relationships, and his sexuality. Once again, maybe that's where all the accolades originate—loving the idea of the poet not the poems themselves. Complimenting a difficult life lived with difficulty. There is definitely a preoccuption with that sort of voyeurism in poetry of the past fifty or so years. Maybe it's a guy thing. But I found many of these pieces well, adolescent.
I spent the past week reading over 200 pages of poetry from all of Larry Levis's volumes over the years. In 1996, Levis died of a sudden heart attack when he was 49. He grew up in Fresno, California where his family grew grapes.
Levis is the first poet I've read in a long, long while whose work completely and utterly spoke to me. Why was that? His poems surprise me in their use of narrative and language. They run deep below the surface of the words to make meaning that is often profundity. They seem deceptively simple but are far from that. I read them like they were prose, at times, and didn't have to feel all dumb and uncertain because I could not "get" what he was trying to write about, often the case with other contemporary poets. And yet, they were also surreal and meandering, often ending in a way I could never, ever have guessed from the start of a poem. So, finally, a poet who is a keeper for me...I look forward to adding many more to my top shelf over this Year of the Rabbit in Poetry.
Levis has already inspired me to write my own poem about the singer Billie Holiday. And yesterday, I got his volume of essays, The Gazer Within, along with his Winter Stars and will be diving into both of them later this week.
[Photo of a California migrant family was taken by Dorothea Lange in March 1936.]
One with Others by C.D. Wright once again blends investigative journalism with poetry. This time, she goes back to her native Arkansas and chronicles a 1969 civil rights march against fear. The testimonials of people who marched are juxtaposed with memories of her recently-deceased friend, V., a woman active in the civil rights movement from the start. Like her other books, Wright meanders, chants, lists, cites, quotes, and echoes language over and over again so that, as the book proceeds, you end up having a strong sense of what narrative threads she is emphasizing. Her work is eccentric and approaches her subjects in an oblique fashion. Still, I think this might actually be a smart way to get at the messy, tangled, challenging morality that can then try to confront the horror of racial discrimination in this country—continuing, unfortunately, to this day.
FYI -- One with Others was reviewed by Dan Chiasson in the January 3, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck. This volume won the Pulitzer Prize. In it, Gluck inhabits the world and voices of numerous flowers. Sounds dumb and, in spots, I found myself wondering what that prize committee was smoking when they chose this book.
The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Transtromer translated by Robert Bly. I really really like this guy. But I have no cycles today to tell much of why. His language, in translation, surprises me, maybe that's it. I'm looking forward to reading more of his work in a translation done by Robert Hass.
Alphabet by Inger Chirstensen (translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied) is based structurally on Fibonacci's mathematical sequence, i.e., a series of numbers in which each number ( Fibonacci number) is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The simplest is the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, and so on.
The poems in this volume start small and build, accreting language, resonance, repetitions, and obsessions along the way. Existence, observation of the world around, parallels between the quotidian and the cosmic, the leap from everyday sun to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic blasts. Christensen is not afraid of bold, encompassing statements about the air we breathe, the pull of love, the certainty of death. And each succeeding sequence contains language/words that are the next letter in the alphabet. Because of the Fibonacci sequence, each piece gets longer and, with this, the poetry becomes less crytic and fragmented and more in a narrative vein, telling story.
I'm sure there is more formally to this poem that I'm not even getting (yet)—for now, I'm simply reading and enjoying and trying to absorb her intent and music at the most superficial of levels.
Sunflower photograph is by Estras Calderan.
