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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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Tue, 10 Jan 2012
IN COMPANY by Kate Bernadette Benedict
Kate Benedict's In Company is a sharply observant collection about the foibles of office work, delving into that environment much more deeply than most contemporary poetry does. Benedict finds both objects of satire and celebration within the office environment, and her collection is memorable.
"View from the Front Desk" is characteristic of Benedict's style here:
View from the Front Desk
I’m in before anyone. I’m a sterling employee.
I’m here when the first hiss of air whooshes
from the vents, sibilant as a librarian’s shushes.
Then the phones ring, the bosses come, the raree
begins. I take it all in. Whatever messengers bring—
parcels, lunches, roses—I accept.
If all three come at once, I’m quite adept.
There’s room on my desk for everything.
It’s the lulls that throw me: minutes that drag
on and on and no bells ring. Workers from inside
whizz past, flushing with purpose and pride.
I drum my lacquered nails or claw my bag
for gum. Then all bells blow at once! I grieve
no more: my lot’s to wait, my calling to receive.
This poem aptly captures the hurry-up-and-wait atmosphere that envelopes many office workers, especially those in public-facing/customer-service positions, where frenetic activity can give way to crushing boredom--and vice versa. If you want to get a sense of modern office and corporate life, In Company will deliver that sense in depth.
THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW by Annabelle Moseley
I admire the way Annabelle Moseley's poems treat traditional poetic subjects with traditional poetic forms in a way that manages, despite its classical overtones, to remain fully modern and engaged with the contemporary world. That combination of old-world craft and new-world subjectivity is harder to pull off than it seems, and she does so in The Clock of the Long Now.
Consider this poem:
The Persistence of Memory
Our house clocks stopped the day my father died—
at three, the very hour that he passed.
No catch of shifting gears, no pulse defied
his absence. Time itself mourned him. The past
and future froze in one long pause. We kept
this lack of measured music, mourning him—
the clock-lover and watch-buyer. Except,
time offered itself up in grief. The trim
minutes and hours that my father filled
grew greedy to engorge themselves with him.
And days after his death, a parcel thrilled
when it arrived. He had ordered a slim,
black-banded watch. On its face, a Dalí
painting of melting time. His memory.
One summer night in childhood, I ran
chasing a firefly. Then I let go.
That is the way my father died; the man
felt time dripping off of his fingers: slow,
honey-paced drizzle. But he shook it free
when he beheld a distant speck of light,
and lunged, then with a laugh, fell forward. He
rejected past and future for the bright
and promised steadfastness of the long now.
My father's unworn watch bore on its face,
between the marks of twelve and six, the brow
of dripping, melting time. And likewise, grace
had marked my father's countenance, though age
had not. He had not reached the fading stage.
The elegant formalism here contrasts powerfully with the eerie image of time melting away, a mix of precision and looseness that remains in the mind. Nicely done.
I really admire Judy Kronenfeld’s technique in Shimmer. She pays careful attention to the details of the particular and domestic, but the poems also give glimmers of the larger cultural, political and historical currents charging those events.
Consider this poem, “First Salvo”:
First Salvo
My heart leaps in my throat, I cannot speak—
they’re flaunting with the “mother” of all bombs;
I have a daughter in the Middle East.
She has three milk-white scars on her left knee.
“Surgical” strikes roar fire, then the strange calm.
My heart leaps in my throat, I cannot speak.
Mushroom clouds ascend in air smoke-greased.
Her name is Deborah, her name Hanan—
my shining daughter in the Middle East.
When palms and almonds blaze beneath blitzkrieg,
I see the birthmark on my son’s right arm.
My heart leaps in my throat, I cannot speak.
Crossfire will get Johnny, a Tomahawk, Malik,
though each one goes to battle saying psalms
for his God’s judgment on the Middle East.
Her name is Fareeda, her name Denise,
his name is Samuel, his name Bassam,
my heart leaps in my throat. Someone must speak
My children all live in the Middle East.
Recalling such intimate details as birthmarks and scarred knees, Kronenfeld places those against the backdrop of the battlefield. The contrast in these rhymed and metered lines is powerful, and enlarges the reader’s attention in a compelling way.
SHE IS A PUPA, SOFT AND WHITE by Elinor Cramer
The poems of Elinor Cramer's She Is A Pupa, Soft And White are careful in their attention to detail and the larger resonances those details reveal. Whether pausing over a lyric scene or narrating a more complex story, Cramer's quiet poems achieve precise illumination.
"Carp" is one example of Cramer's technique at work:
Carp
Drowsing as at the breast,
lips pumping, then not,
big as that feeder come home.
Only a mouth.
Mud baby, bottom grazer,
sucks root and weed.
He suns near my boat, his chubby dorsal
warming above water
in the shallows.
My boat nuzzles into hummocks
and blackbirds charge from the stubble,
their damp nursery.
The boat and I rock in floating rushes;
water laps at baby's back.
Then the carp's gone-
channeling plumes through the muck.
The poem draws an analogy between the lolling fish and a feeding baby, a moment that is disrupted when the carp vanishes into the water, perhaps evoking a parent's fear of the inevitable separation of the child as well. It's a quiet, but powerful, poem.
BEARABLE WEIGHT by Michael Cleary
The wry poems of Michael Cleary's Bearable Weight do not shy away from confronting the harshness of life, but they do so in a way that gives grace to the struggles they document, with humor and affection. It's a compelling combination.
"Warm" is a good example of his technique:
Warm
Though my mother complains she’s tired
of telling those worn out sob stories, her life
had the bleak twists of a Dickens tale
starting in the Depression at 9 years old
when her mother died, leaving 8 kids
to their alcoholic father, a worthless
hard hearted 100% son of a bitch
who sold 2 sons for adoption,
tried to hang another, abandoned the rest.
They were stuck for a while, though,
when he wasn’t off on a bender.
When floors and water pipes froze
and 10 blocks of wind waited to slice into
the girls’ bare legs and everyone’s thin jackets,
they all skipped school and snuggled
like puppies under a heap of blankets.
Now, 80 years later, she knits baby hats
for donation to the hospital maternity ward.
She favors pink, yellow, white, blue
because, she says, they’re spring colors
and who doesn’t love spring?
Despite "the bleak twists of a Dickens tale," this poem ends with an affirmation of warmth, of love: "who doesn't love spring?" It's hard not to love a poem with such rich emotional tones.
I have loved Colette Inez's poetry for years, ever since I read her heartbreaking collection Family Life. Her new book, Horseplay, takes a different approach--ingenious wordplay instead of documentary narrative--but the result is no less powerful.
The title poem, "Horseplay," is an excellent example of her technique:
Horseplay
Horselaugh from that hussy on the piebald.
Horsefly don't bother.
How many horses to carry the red
afternoon as it rides over the blue plateau?
The astronomer pins her wrists to the dust.
Hoarse voices. Brambles like stars.
Horsewhipped. Giddyap. Hearsay evidence
of horsehide, horsehair sofas,
horse heard naysaying.
She knees him where he's weak.
His hands on her shouldesr sweep down
to her breasts.
The hare's afeard of hearses, hisses.
Nightmares ride bareback.
Four Horsemen talking horse sense.
He says the universe hasn't run its course,
She races away. Mythical horses jumping light years.
The Square of Pegasus desires its hypotenuse.
"Here's looking at you and The Horsehead
Nebula, "the publican nods to the astronomer.
"Ow, that's an 'orse of a different color."
The star bloke orders a White Horse Ale.
"Horseman, pass by, " the woman appears,
nice as you please, pokes him in the eye,
imagines the chap punching empty air
garlanded by stars.
How many punning variations of the word "horse" can be found here? I've lost count, dazzled as I am by the poem's dexterity as it drives toward its sobering, suddenly quiet contemplation of death, of emptiness.
MONSOON SOLO by Gretl Claggett
Gretl Claggett's Monsoon Solo is a whirlwind book. Claggett creates razor-sharp lines that cut so deftly the reader doesn't even feel their sting.
Consider "The Send-Off":
The Send-Off
Age six:
I tell my father
I can walk to school
alone. At the corner
my hand slips
from his. Each step:
a birth and death.
I don't look back.
He watches me
stride through an alley
to the main road,
where, without a wave,
I vanish. He stays,
watches, waits,
The crosswalk's
painted lines
fade. Decades
pass.
It's hard to imagine a greater economy of words, but what an emotional impact this terse poem packs. Its sketch of separation and alienation is devastating.
Fri, 28 Oct 2011
THE REFUGEE CAMP by John Drury
The collage of voices in John Drury's The Refugee Camp place the reader in the absurd heart of the Cold War--a German refugee camp in the early 1970's. Drury's fractured narrative creates a surreal, yet terrifying, environment.
While a collection of this sort defies easy characterization, the first two sections of the long title sequence give some example of Drury's approach:
From "The Refugee Camp"
1.
In the ruined city
of toymakers and singing guilds,
they were so fanatical at the war's end
even civilians fought,
shooting from rubble, from cellar windows.
I climb the cobbled streets
to Heathen's Tower
past half-timbered houses and the repaired
wreckage of air strikes, patchworks
of clean and weathered quarrystone.
When I say to a friend, Too bad
we bombed the churches,
he corrects me:
the Nazis used them
to quarter the Gestapo.
And yet-a song remains,
if only a clashing music,
as trams wrench
around tight corners, whining
as power lines spark, in Nuremberg.
2.
Each morning I trudge uphill
to the refugee camp where I work.
Aliens huddle by the vestibule
while officials brush past,
muttering a password
to the guard at a glassed-in booth
who buzzes them-and me-
through the heavy door.
Turned back, the refugees grumble and curse,
kick cinders in the parking lot.
Everyone says they carry knives,
hands jammed in pockets,
their faces half scraped, half stubble,
women left behind
in cramped flats or muddy villages.
They stare at our questionnaires
and leave too many blanks.
I learn Do you know nothing, sir?
and See you later, mister
in languages I will never begin to fathom.
"Languages I will never begin to fathom"--this refers not only to the literal words being spoken, but also to the larger context of these events, placing the speaker and these refugees in such proximity in that place and time. It's a fascinating story, one Drury expertly tells.
THE ARTEMIS SONNETS, ETC. by Anne Harding Woodworth
I love the way Anne Harding Woodworth's The Artemis Sonnets, Etc. enacts the quest of Artemis, goddess of the hunt. The poems explore the tension between love and hate, life and death, in provocative ways.
"Deer and Me" is one good example of Woodworth's skill:
Deer and Me
The caris skid is beginning.
You and I are the only two left on earth
moving toward each other
on the night-time county road,
your hooves on packed snow,
my rubber treads on ice.
I see your brown fur, you see me.
We are staring frozen, locked eye to eye
and Iim going to hit you, youire going to hit me--
I am the deer now, I am the hooves in the road.
You are the car, the tires, the flare of the lights.
Iim going to kill you, youire going to kill me.
Iim killing and braking and sliding and skidding
inside this steamed-up glass and metal,
while Joe Cocker is singing
You are so beautiful to me.
The speaker bears down on the deer, unable to stop, and in that frozen moment becomes one with the deer; amid that impossible intimacy, the radio blares, "You are so beautiful to me..." It's a compelling, unexpected image.
I like the quiet power of the poems in Kathryn Jacobs' In Transit. Jacobs' work is wry and observant, leavening humor with tart conclusions.
Here's one example of her work, "Planet Pre-Owned":
"Planet Pre-Owned"
"This planet's pre-owned." Well, I guess it is:
Strange advertisement, though. Be useful to
an alien, perhaps. "Hey, don't land here:
the whole globe's pre-owned, and we love to fight:
you're better off on Mars." Saves money, too;
A small investment in the Solar Times,
and we can concentrate on conquering
our earthbound friends and neighbors (Don't butt in:
it's just a family matter). So that works.
And really, if they've got their web-cams on,
they hardly need the warning; probably
they read our ads and laugh. I'm prudent though,
and when it comes to inter-species war.
I'd hate to be complacent. They get Mars.
This poem's understated satire of environmentalists, suggesting that "this planet's pre-owned," opens up into a sly meditation on our place in the universe. It's well-done.
Mon, 19 Sep 2011
HITCHCOCK'S COFFIN by Kim Bridgford
The latest of Kim Bridgford's excursions into the sonnet form is Hitchcock's Coffin, a series of witty lyrics about classic films. Bridgford's forte is using the sonnet form's brevity for cleverly constructed observations about culture and human experience.
"Some Like It Hot" is a good example of Bridgford's style:
Some Like It Hot
It's both the ultra feminine and not
Aboard love's train in Wilder's gangster plot.
The sax and sex combine to make us watch,
And all the multiplicities of touch.
The hermeneutic question: Who wants heart,
And who wants money? Sugar knows them both.
Yet mind is swayed by this important truth:
A kiss is practice gathering into art.
The phrase "Nobody's perfect" carries weight,
When there's the moment of the true confession,
For feeling, with the courage of expression,
Wins out. Like Darwin, we find in our fate
The thrill of what is strange and what is true,
The ecstasy of nature making do.
"The ecstasy of nature making do" is a striking thought, love and material comforts entwining in unexpected ways. It's a strong poem in a strong book.
THE MOON FROM EVERY WINDOW by Rob Grifith
Rob Griffith is a skilled poet. The graceful domestic scenes and fluid blank verse of his book The Moon from Every Window probe past their domestic limitations, finding the larger import that lurks in any scene; that's not an easy thing to accomplish.
Here is a good example of Griffith's technique at work:
Each Night
You sit in bed, back bowed like a fishing pole
taut against a heavy catch. The pose
is one I always mistake for sorrow, pain,
or despair. I touch your arm, cool and smooth,
and ask, "What's wrong?" You surface slowly,
shedding the dark water of your prayer
before opening your eyes and smiling archly.
Youid think Iid know by now that every night
you take your small boat out to the deep waters
and cast your line. And all the while, I pace
the shingle, ignoring the lap and click of waves
against the stones, ignoring all that moonlight
trembling on the bay. Instead, I watch
for that black wake that signals your return.
The speaker of this poem describes a quiet, intimate scene: his partner sitting quietly in bed, pensive, seemingly troubled. It then opens up into a larger metaphor, of delving into "the deep water," as the speaker ignores the "moonlight/trembling on the bay." Opening from domesticity to deeper realms, this poem is resonant, and is characteristic of Griffith's fine book.
NECESSITY OF FLIGHT by Jane Alynn
Birds stitch the recurring threads of Jane Alynn's artful Necessity of Flight, ranging across song, flight, a glimpse of divinity, and other topics. Alynn's carefully crafted lyrics are both thoroughly grounded and graceful in their gestures to the spiritual realm.
Here is a good example:
Small Gods
Sitting outdoors at the neighborhood cafe,
pen in hand, I scratch on paper
like a bird in winter, trying
to scrape up something to feed that dire hunger,
the burning emptiness from being
unable to find words for so long now.
The mind a mere immensity of nothing.
And breath shallow as the dying.
Then from the gutter a sparrow
drops to my feet, puffed up, beak going
cheep cheep, cheeping loudly for crumbs,
a small fit welled up from emptiness.
Something settles with this divine, adaptive song.
And for a little while, at least, she renews my faith
in a life of radiant poverty.
"A life of radiant poverty"--I love that image. This poem, despite its brevity, opens up a provocative realm of insight.
The intermeshing between public and private history is the focus of Zara Raab's Swimming the Eel, a well-crafted collection that grounds a narrative of the Western migration in the tactile details of place and the remembered experience of family.
"Pine Trees" gives some flavor of the book:
Pine Trees
The pines grow bored with mountains,
wind whistling in the quarry,
making rute of needles.
Yet they are loyal, steadfast,
indifferent to vainglory:
They let wind tease and wheedle.
When I see their simple grace,
can I mind my sad story?
Spring comes, and pineis there, bustling.
Do they yearn for the seaside?
They seem to rise against wind,
but wind blows through them, rustling.
It moans Who are you? to them.
Still they stand like bowling pins,
lined on the crests of valleys.
Though once legion in this place,
a handful still bowl and spin
their cones along the gullies.
"When I see their simple grace/can I mind their sad story?" That's the poignant question this poem asks, symbolizing the tension between the internal and external, the private and public, that Raab explores.
Thu, 04 Aug 2011
QUESTIONS FOR THE SPHINX by Stuart Bartow
Stuart Bartow's Questions for the Sphinx delves deeply into questions of knowledge and insight (emobdied in the remote image of the sphinx), and the book's search is ultimately tenative--seeking knowledge that can only be glimpsed.
"Ars Poetica" is one fine example of the book's thematic focus:
Ars Poetica
One night you're out walking
in the village where you have lived for years
and stray down a street
you never noticed before.
You pass several houses,
force yourself to ignore the one
whose tenants are under the spell
of a television's blue haze,
pass the one where a naked body
drifts behind a curtain's veil,
and step briskly through the strains
of Hank Williams, another
with Mozart's violins.
In one house there are birds,
Finches perhaps, chaotic and lovely,
in a clandestine aviary.
A voice seems ready to break through a window,
to fly from the house
crying something shrill, insistent,
human enough to make you realize
there is a language all beings speak,
but in unfamiliar words.
Back home you attempt to translate
the dialect you heard
but lose it just like any other memory
you told yourself you would keep forever.
You vow to return to the street,
the house, the living book
that each bird makes.
Things get in the way, so weeks,
or years pass before you're back,
only to find the house abandoned,
windows broken.
So you go home with nothing
and write a poem about an empty house
where the silence inside is massive
as a forest at midnight.
"Back home you attempt to translate/ the dialect you heard/ but lose it just like any other memory/ you told yourself you would keep forever." The knowledge in memory is fleeting, grasped only briefly, before it before it escapes our clutches. It's a sobering thought, of how little we truly know.