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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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Sat, 28 Aug 2010
I enjoy the poems in Carol Westberg's Slipstream a great deal for the way that they test, and then surpass, limits. Both lyric and narrative, Westberg's poems develop a distinctive vision.
"Fear of Flying" is especially characteristic:
Fear of Flying
In our house pots sprouted wings,
flew swiftly after sharp words,
and kept on flying for days
after anyone forgot what set her off.
Was it the cat's paws
on the dining table? Knives
placed with blades facing the wrong way?
At the piano I sent my fingers flying.
For those hours music took over,
became refuge, proof of passion
and of tenderness.
After lessons I drove the back roads home
to practice, practice,
as if practice might prove my worth.
A gull sails on an updraft, keens
over the farmhouse a thousand miles inland.
The family crest rots slowly in the basement
where our father has forgotten it,
and our mother wills its damp demise.
Land-bound, we slide on in our lifelong roles:
matriarch, peacemaker, fuckup, scapegoat, clown.
In our house dreams flew under the radar.
I flew only at nighttime, alone,
thin arms outstretched.
By day I wondered what a flock might feel like--
inconstant formation,
each riding another's slipstream,
some taking turns at the lead.
While this is ostensibly a poem about fear, it is actually a poem about overcoming that fear, yearning for the slipstream. The poem's irony is powerful, and the rest of the book explores the tension in that yearning.
The ironies in James Brock's Gods & Money are both droll and sharp, as Brock examines the true objects of our worship and how we connect with them. Whatever our gods are, they are often not holy.
"Your Life as a Wealthy Man" is characteristic of this book's technique:
Your Life as a Wealthy Man
You decided to give up the poetry thing,
made money as a script doctor, which got you
into real estate and land brokering, which got
you out of law school, which included a short
stint web-mastering an S/M gay porn
site, which lead to the gig as an investment
banker. You sold cars. You sold personal wealth
plans. You went in for futures trading. And let's
say you made it easy. Here it is, the payoff:
you go to your female dentist from Brazil, her office
on upper 5th Avenue, and even the doormen
wear shirts that you would've paid your soul for
in your former life. They let you in. Her Brazilian
assistant, Moira cleans your teeth--she is blonde,
dark-eyed, and she is wealthy enough herself
to buy her own implants. She tells you she owes
no man anything. Dr. Pereira comes in, and she
smells of orchid and silver, and she's likely Moira's
older and prettier sister, the one with the wiles
to leave Brasilia and her father's deputy
ministership, high-tail it to London, landing
in Manhattan. She puts her perfect tiny
fingers in your mouth. "Your gums are very
firm, James." Of course, they are. And then
she makes the mold for the cracked tooth--it's
a temporary job for now, and she gives the
mold to Moira, who takes it to the lab where
four cousins, each a virgin, each seventeen
years old, fashion the filling. Dr. Pereira
shakes the nova-demerol cocktail. "Do you feel
any pain, James?" No. Not at all. But you are
weeping, sitting on all this dough, knowing
you'll have your own post-colonial island,
a porcelain cap, a titanium bridge,
weeping, weeping with money. And thus, it
is such a small mercy to issue, your own
private, final solution: Let every poem
be rounded up, blindfolded, and shot.
You could give those orders, with
these attendant women, your new world smile.
Nicely done.
THE RANCH WIFE by Robert Cooperman
Robert Cooperman's The Ranch Wife is a compelling narrative sequence about a woman's hardscrabble marriage and subsequent journey to a fuller life. Cooperman writes in a straightforward, accessible style that draws deeper resonance from common experience.
Here's one good example:
The Ranch Wife Remembers the Smell
of Sweetgrass
At our wedding
after the country quartet
had snapped shut
their instrument cases
and driven off,
Rick burned a braid
of dried sweetgrass:
blessing the happy lifetime
we'd have together.
"Close your eyes,"
he smiled, "and tell me
what it smells like,"
the grasses hissing
with a perfume
of cold, starry nights.
We kissed and waltzed
to the same song
we heard in our heads,
the aroma of prairie grass
sweeter than my glimpses
of the Northern Lights.
I close my eyes, now,
and relive that night:
our four-poster festooned
with wildflowers,
Rick and me so starry in love
we gave strange, secret
names to the constellations
when we stood by the window,
wrapped in one blanket
and each other's arms,
still smelling that love knot
of sweet prairie grass.
This is a lovely poem about love, capturing the heady rush of a new relationship, and which forms a contrast to the darker poems found elsewhere in the book.