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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Mon, 01 Jun 2009
GHOST OF FASHION by Leslie Jenike
Ghost of Fashion by Lesley Jenike is a jaunty, humorous read: Jenike riffs on popular culture with a casual wit that belies the sophisticated intelligence at work.
Consider "Bye-Bye Birdie":
Bye-Bye Birdie
The army’s got you now
So the Lord came down, said, Lemme make you
sovereign of Heaven and I said, Man, take me back
to that long brown torso of a desert, Jordon a scar
dragged through the land and I would’ve kissed him,
would’ve held a sign and waited on the tarmac
for his plane to land ‘cause, Lord, see if you can stand
when the wind comes in playing a man playing
a woman playing the guitar all hips and lips and
ass. You be his bitch, his décolletage glowing star-
bright symbol, his choir of teen angels singing
in paradise forever. “Do you know how to twist?”
Boy, do I. My little river and fruitless lake
can mambo even in the middle of a horror
of a winter when the sky is an eye clouded over
and mother comes in, just as his song pitches
a fit on the radio. The phone’s tucked between
my jaw and shoulder and I’m talking to God
and I’m telling God I’ve loved more. More
have I spent so bye-bye now to my holier-than-
thou baby digging his pin into my naked chest
saying, “Now we’re going steady. Now we’re official.”
This poem drives through an intense stream of phrases and associations, evoking as much as it states, until it lights on the gentle line: "Now we're going steady. Now we're official." Sound and fury, sigifying something.
The poems of Serena Fox's Night Shift are gritty in their subjects--scenes from an emergency room--but surprisingly varied in technique. Some of Fox's poems are traditional lyrics, while others are more fractured and fragmentary sequences--a collage of voices, images, data, and stories.
Here's one good example of Fox's style:
The Angio
My father lies at the end of my white coat,
witnessing his own angiography. He jokes,
winces occasionally. The techs are reading
Malcolm X. Two vein grafts are
occluded. The internal mammary artery graft
looks good in many different projections. In
this decade, we are redirected towards the
mammary, for our hearts’ blood. It
strikes me that my father has no grandchildren.
A patient of mine had his coronaries done for the
third time with a graft from his gastric artery.
Truly, the way to a man’s heart...
ha ha... We have bitten of the heart and the
heart is The Tree. The serpent recoils post-op.
Not one of us is ready for the next exposure.
I did not want to
bring him here, because I did not want him to
know how easily he fits into my pocket, and
to what lengths I’ll go to keep him there. My
father observed the
autopsy of his father, who walked around Miami
for a week with a massive coronary occlusion,
and he can— my fingers at his temples,
holding all I ever need
to be-- watch steadily as the
dye, serpentine, drips
down the screen.
The rapid stream of images here, bordering on surrealism, evokes the sense of dislocation that a patient faces: this small example is entirely characteristic of Fox's strong technique.
FINDING WATER, HOLDING STONE by James Bertolino
James Bertolino's poetry is striking for the way it makes quick, startling connections between disparate images and ideas. Melding hyper-attentiveness to detail with, at times, a gentle surrealism, Bertolino's work in Finding Water, Holding Stone never fails to surprise.
His technique is on strong display in "Molecules":
Molecules
Back when electric lights
were a new thing,
people thought the tiny
flashes they sometimes
saw beyond the corners
of their eyes
had to do with
the mystery of electricity.
Now we know those
blinking bursts are from
almost unimaginably small
alien spacecraft.
We needed to comprehend
that intelligence doesn't reside only
in things that are large.
Even molecules have
creation myths
to help prove
they exist.
Alien spacecraft? Perhaps that's a bit absurd, but the notion of creation myths applying to the smallest units of matter is a striking one.
GEOMETRY OF DREAMS by Barbra Nightingale
Geometry of Dreams by Barbra Nightingale is a collection full of surprises. Nightingale is not afraid to make connections between the small events of everyday life and large, even fundamental questions about love, the physical and natural world, and more.
Here's one good example:
Particle and Wave: Quantum Physics
Say there is a wall
and a gun
and atoms clustering
where they can't be seen.
Each "bullet" floats
to a Bell curve
as clearly as if pasted,
as unexplained as light
exiting before it enters
like two people
whose spatial planes
move together and apart
in the destabilized air
if only for an hour.
What quark of recognition
ignited in that time?
What charm created or broken
in the unstill space between them?
Does movement make a sound?
If so, does it go ta dum
ta dum or tinkle softly
like broken glass?
Evoking atoms as if they were bullets, as it were, is a striking connection. Nightingale's work offers many such pleasures.
POSSESSING YOURSELF by Tim Kahl
What I admire about Tim Kahl's Possessing Yourself is the way the poems in the book often worry their ideas, work through them, turn them over in a thinking-aloud fashion, that shows the mind at work. Here's an example, "To Live Enough":
To Live Enough
The morning sun slaps me with purpose,
and in America that means I should be
competing somewhere. But I am analyzing
the news come from afar and making no progress,
witness to another moral vacuum,
dark clots of desire thickening here and there.
I push myself to ask what’s wrong with
wanting, that little pinprick of the flesh
that keeps everyone moving in the morning,
but in America the word heaps: it means
wanting too much. I ask the empty branch
of the apricot why it should want to live enough.
The mouth of a busy robin answers.
I hurry off to school with my two sons.
A mother tells me she is holding her son
back from starting kindergarten,
another year before he learns
how to do what must be done.
I could tell her that the markets will
punish him, but I don’t want my story
to influence her decision. She hails from
Mexico City, and I let her America soak
into me. Time for analysis later,
when my winnings are
bleached and burned by the sun.
"I am analyzing/ the news come from afar and making no progress..." This is a frank admission. But the poem itself enacts the process of analysis, before finally concluding, "Time for analysis later,/when my winnings are/bleached and burned by the sun." The "bleached and burned" image is startling, evocative, and, emerging from Kahl's musings, decisive.
Karen Head's Sassing is an aptly titled book: these narrative poems are full of sass, their speakers standing proud against difficult, sometimes hardscrabble experiences.
A particularly strong poem is "Southern Gothic":
Southern Gothic
The best I can offer
is that my granny and papa
lived on a dead-end dirt road
in a single-wide trailer,
that one of Daddy’s sisters
accidentally drank rat poison
stored in an old green wine jug
after a night of cards and drinking,
that Mama and Daddy married,
sixteen and eighteen,
three weeks into his Army Basic Training
and no baby came for over a year,
that I was born on Peachtree Street—
Crawford Long Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia
six weeks early, four pounds,
nothing but wailing,
that I was baptized outside
Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church,
then blacklisted from membership
when I became a Catholic.
My life has been full of movement
one Army base to another—
opera in Stuttgart
schnapps at a Mississippi levee.
Hell, for me, has two syllables
and I’m always fixin’ to do something
so, you can imagine my surprise
when the doctor said, “Lupus,”
and I realized what was finally at my door.
"Hell, for me, has two syllables/and I'm always fixin' to do something": that's the voice of defiance. The poems in Sassing are always doing something.