Oh, Ron!

We felt that this comment deserved special attention. If we can dish it, we can take it, right?
(this is a comment on our last post)

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Ronald Says: June 18, 2009 at 4:38 pm e

Based on the content and quality of the Canda Verses themselves, I have only one question for you.

Who the hell do you think you are?

This sort of writing and review reads uneducated and personally unreflective. I couldn’t imagine even my freshmen level poetry students thinking they could get away with producing this. You are making a bad name for yourselves.
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Ad Hominem Ron teaches poetry at the college level somewhere, it would seem, but we don’t know where because he didn’t deign to tell us. Also, Ronald gave his email address as notgivingyoumyemail@email.com, which isn’t terribly creative, but it does prevent us from selling his actual addy to Nigerian princes.*  Ah well.

Okay, so who the hell do I think I am? Since I (Andrew) wrote the review that piqued Ron’s ire, I’ll tackle this. I was a National Merit Scholar who received a full scholarship, including room and board, to a private university. While there, I was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society during my junior year. I’ve held all kinds of jobs, from roofing to writing for a major international tour operator. My GRE scores were in the 99.9+ percentile. In August I’ll be heading to a top creative writing program, having been awarded a fellowship. Tacky as listing all of that was, I hope I’ve made the point that you, Ron, aren’t operating leagues beyond my intellectual level — just so we’re clear on that.

Now, as to the Canda Verses, you seem to have misunderstood its nature and purpose entirely. They aren’t finished pieces by any means, which is explained on the About the Canda Verses page. A lot of it isn’t even poetry — it’s prose or observations from life. Additionally, all of that material is FREE. We don’t expect payment or even kudos for the project, which, by the way, has helped various writers by offering interesting ideas and phrasings that they are free to take and reshape as they please (see the creative commons license). It’s a sounding board for ideas, and while they aren’t all gems, I find it a little disingenuous to say that nothing on the site is as good as what your freshmen produce. I mean really, Ron, come on.

“I couldn’t imagine even my freshmen [sic] level poetry students thinking they could get away with producing this.”

Well of course your students couldn’t “get away with” an honest analysis based on their native tastes in your class. Besides, the work of a freshman should be explication, but that is simply not what this is. This is criticism. And, to paraphrase A.E. Stallings, any criticism that fails to come out and say “I like this because” or “I find this distasteful because” is either vacuous or dishonest. The vast majority of contemporary criticism falls into that category, so I try to express what I do and don’t like and why. What few readers we have know for certain that we’re laying it out for them plainly, even at the express danger of “making a bad name for [ourselves].” By the way, that kind of obnoxious threat is cited by Dana Gioia as one of the reasons why the art of criticizing poetry is in such dispiriting condition these days. Everyone is so afraid of losing a publishing or academic connection that the range of assessment has been reduced to a scale that runs the gamut from lauding all the way down to “merely” accepting the work. The hell with that. We aren’t afraid and we’re stretching that scale back into its original shape. If the work is awful, we’re going to put our weight into the punch.

Both critiqued poets (negatively) and readers have responded to us in a positive way, which does not mean they have necessarily agreed with us, but that they have opened an honest discourse. We welcome opposing viewpoints that address our arguments and assertions. My views aren’t static and I can certainly be convinced by a good point to revisit a poem with a new perspective.

But to end, Ron, in the words of one of our greatest living poets, Marshall Mathers, “I’ll be damned if I won’t stand up to a bully.”

*For the record, if you disagree with us, even if you’re ten times nastier than Ron, we won’t abuse your email address and we won’t harass you. Would you believe it, we have better things to do.

Review of what is this thing called love (Book) by Kim Addonizio

Review of what is this thing called love by Kim Addonizio

With a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, plus a Pushcart, Ms. Addonizio’s accolades would seem to speak for themselves.  Still, since she will be selecting the poems to be included in best new poets 2009, we thought we should pick up something of hers and have a look for ourselves.  We bought our copy of what is this thing at a second-hand bookstore, so it did not come with a pistol attached as a it would have had we purchased the book new. No, this is too harsh, although Addonizio is probably the most frustrating poet we‘ve tackled so far. It’s not that her work is inaccessible; her work is readily understandable or at least rarely oblique. But whereas Hopler is vapid and Lerner is ridiculous, Addonizio is painfully narcissistic. There’s little room for the poem with her ego in the mirror. And yet some of it’s good. To put it anecdotally, this is a book that I literally threw down on the floor in disgust, but I picked it up again. In the end, you have to decide whether the bad outweighs the good or vice versa. The trouble is, I discovered, that the book is back-loaded with the cringe-making material, turning what could have been purposefully astringent into something gone sour.

But even from the beginning there is a carelessness in her writing. Take this example from “What Was”:

“Nearby, a man decants / a few notes from his tenor sax, honking his way / through a tune meant to be melancholy.”

Decant means to pour slowly for a specific purpose and connotes a certain skill or at least attentiveness.  It certainly isn’t synonymous with “dump.” And yet the man is somehow both decanting the notes and honking through them, screwing up the would-be melancholy air of the song. There is a bald amateurishness in such a mistake.

In “31-Year-Old Lover” Addonizio compares a younger lover‘s body to a stick of cold butter (anyone else have county fair butter sculptures pop into your head?) and lists the muscles that particularly appeal to her. The list includes “hip flexors,” oddly the one time that she avoids the anatomical name. But unlike the others in the list, hip flexors are not superficial muscles. Unless she’s flayed her boy toy or he’s a bona fide bodybuilder / Olympic sprinter, it would be very difficult for her to perceive fine development in these muscles. Additionally, while hip flexors can of course be strengthened,  their flexibility is more an indicator of impressive fitness. But details like this come from knowing what you’re talking about rather than glancing at a color-coded diagram at the gym. The choice to use the common parlance “hip flexors” is also interesting when juxtaposed with the decision to use “gastrocnemius” — an almost ludicrously unpoetic word for “calf.”

But far worse than the occasional technical slip up or seemingly bizarre word choice, there is a mirror-enraptured voice that pervades the book. “Ex-Boyfriends” reduces all ex-boyfriends to people traveling “familiar routes of loneliness,” because, naturally, they’ve lost the greatest thing they have ever had or could ever have — Kim. The thin veil of the second person does little to gauze-over such flagrant narcissism. “Romance” offers another obnoxious example of wonderment-at-self that becomes Addonizio’s hallmark. After semi-vulgar reminiscences about adolescent sexual experiences, she writes, “still, here you are, in middle age, stunned / to find yourself in a sushi bar in California / with a man kneeling before you.” Oh gawd. Well, while Kim’s busy being amazed with herself and her life, would anyone like some coffee? Maybe some ginger to quell the nausea? In “Augury” she’s infatuated with her daughter’s overwhelming sex appeal. Really, it never ends with some people.

But to conclude on a positive note, “You Don’t Know What Love Is” uses sex and death imagery in a novel, compelling way. “Cat Poem” has a strange voice, but the tangentiality is arresting rather than glib, and the piece succeeds in eliciting a profound feeling of sympathy. “California Street” entirely avoids the self-absorption that prevails in most of the book, which is refreshing. It hints at a sensitivity that perhaps helped her win her heap of accolades. “One Nation Under God” — what can I say other than I like it. The poem starts off a little slow but builds and builds until the accumulated energy at the end makes the final couplet hit like a ball peen hammer. No, I’m not going to give it away.

So yes, this book of poetry flooded me with passion. Three quarters of that was anger and disgust, but it was passionate anger and disgust.  Which might not be so awful, when I think about how lukewarm most poetry is these days and how often my reaction is merely a tepid “oh.”

Review of Obscurity and Regret by C.D. Wright

Review of Obscurity and Regret by C.D. Wright

Let me tell you about the first time I got drunk.  It was the summer after high school graduation and Ender was dog-sitting Lacey, a black lab with strong flanks and nice breath for a dog.  We’d bought some steaks and a case of Labatt Blue and the weather was perfect for underage drinking.  Now, Ender was a pushy drunk and had opened my second beer before I’d even finished my first, and I had trouble enough getting the bitter stuff down.  I had to keep chewing pretzels to clear my palate after each swig.

Eventually we moved inside and started playing a drinking game with the dog-owner’s vanity press poetry book, a thick volume titled Best Poems in America which included 4,000 exemplars.  Even back then we’d fallen in deep with the poets and the drinkers and we played a game where each of us would read a poem until we got to a line that was so awful, so inept, a line that failed in every way a line of poetry could fail, that we had to stop, at which point we’d drink.  This was first class garbage, real “I am the lone wolf of loneliness” crap.  Rarely, we’d get to a second or third line.  We ended up in the backyard, drifting off listening to Billy Joel, and I remember that freedom that comes from urinating outside, like in Sexism by David Lehman, and that “high August sky full of stars” has always stuck with me since that night.

So, with that completely unrelated anecdote out of the way, let’s talk about poetry in the The New Yorker.

Imagine the best poem you’ve ever written, the one that will be anthologized–even if you haven’t written the poem yet, envision it, the sweet feeling of having contributed something of lasting import to our hemorrhaging culture, to share page space with Shakespeare and Tennyson and Yeats until the very end of history (circa 2012).

And let us say that you have this poem published in The New Yorker, and even 1/1000th of its over a million subscribers reads it–you’ve probably just decupled your current audience.  Of course, it’s somewhat of a running joke that the quality of poetry in The New Yorker is more akin to a frat house keg than the craft-brewed dark malt your poem is an example of, but if anything, that should be encouraging–if only your work can ascend a slush pile resembling Vermont in mid-March, it stands a chance of being read by an actual audience, not locked into the strictly small-time ghetto of a university press or some obscure Quarterly that boasts a hundred subscriptions, if that.

Imagine an attractive law student reading your poem on the morning bus as she heads to her internship with Moribund & Stasi.  Imagine a middle-aged man in a business suit reading your poem in order to prolong his bathroom break after digesting a lengthy article on Singer’s critical reputation with which he disagreed.  Imagine a lanky high-schooler with greasy hair reading your poem as he waits in the current periodicals section of the library for his girlfriend to finish researching some guy for her German class she’s told him about twice but he’s forgotten.

Just think of all the perverse places your poem could pop into people’s lives if it was in The New Yorker, people who have no relation to poetry at all beyond the assigned texts in English classes, people who, if pressed, would probably say Robert Frost was their favorite poet because his is the only name that springs to mind when the word “poet” is mentioned.  We have no beef with Robert Frost–he deserves to be the illustration next to the word in the dictionary–but imagine if, after reading your poem, these people discovered they really enjoyed it, perhaps might enjoy reading more poetry, by you and by others.  So they turn to the next poem in The New Yorker, but find only Obscurity and Regret .

What can be made of a poem whose very title warns us like a No Trespassing sign to steer clear?  And what do we, curious delinquents, find when we disobey?

Truth in advertising, of course, and that faint shame that comes from recognizing perhaps we should have listened to authority; for indeed, within the grounds of the poem we find only the obscurity and regret promised us at the outset.

Mercifully brief, Wright’s meditation swirls a jar of caterpillars, infested apple trees, and a shoe together into a mixed drink so cloudy and noxious even Dylan Thomas would hesitate before quaffing it.  The first image–a close up of “the hand without the glove” (implying another hand with a glove) tightening the lid on a jar of caterpillars despite the fact that the apple trees are infested already raises questions which the rest of the poem does not answer.

The lack of actual characters in what, at least on the surface presents itself as a narrative, acts as a hurdle to the reader.  Why are there no people, only hands and shoes and larvae?  And the larvae themselves–from whence are they “streaming”?  The sealed jar?  This refutes causality.  The infested apple trees?  But why fore art they streaming?  Are the apple trees on fire and the poet just neglected to mention it?  If so, we can forgive such a beginner’s mistake.  Even accepting this difficult image, a stream of larvae would not be stomped by the same action as a shoe extinguishing a cigarette on a rug–these images aren’t consistent with each other.

Is this the stupid idea?  Trying to stomp a mass of caterpillar larvae while holding a sealed jar of caterpillars beneath infested apple trees?  Or is this the point where we abandon all hope of logical narrative and embrace the poet’s bigger point on the topic of obscurity and regret?

The gloriously opaque sentence which concludes the poem

It was a stupid thing to say
the thought belonging to the body says to its source
stomping on the bright-green grass as it spills its sweet guts.

while a great example of the utility of punctuation, does not fulfill the implicit bargain we make when we begin a poem, mainly, that it provide us with some thought which we might carry away once we finish it.  Of course, the ambiguity (read: intentional obscurity, since there’s really only one way to read the sentence so that the words parse correctly) could be dispersed by adding a few symbols of punctuation, such as quotation marks and commas, but that would make the glaring lack of an actual resolution more apparent.

And perhaps that was by design–to craft a poem that champions obscurity and regret in order to deliver these concepts more directly than a less bad poem would.  But any poem whose real meaning is trapped deep within the poet’s mysterious subjective meanders, or cloaked by a deliberately ambiguous (or just wrong, due to ignorance or intention) use of language is not a good example of the art.

Can you honestly say you would share this poem with anyone you know?  Can you step forward and defend it?  And yet, over a million people have it delivered to their door.  Summer is here, and I’d like to think there are young poets getting drunk for the first time somewhere in this hot, wide country–I pray they recognize this jejune swill for what it is, and not seek inspiration from it.

The poet writes “It was a stupid idea”.  What can we do but agree with her?

Bonus:  If you enjoyed this poem, you may also enjoy only the crossing counts, a more cryptic exploration of the theme of obscurity.

Review of Adjectives of Order by Alexandra Teague

Adjectives of Order by Alexandra Teague

We finally picked up best new poets 2008* [sic], which has a really sexy poetess (presumably?) bedighting the cover. Anyway, we wanted to salute one of the more successful works, Alexandra Teague’s “Adjectives of Order,” published on Slate in August 2007. Despite the glut of poetry self-consciously flirting with the English language, Teague’s poem stands out and stands up, and while the fact that that I’ve worked with ESL students might have made me more receptive to the poem, I believe it also made me stricter in my expectations of it.

First of all, the narrative structure is straightforward. By the time you finish reading the poem, you understand what has happened and the significance of the events that Teague has related. Your stock of patience remains full, making it more likely you’ll delve back into the poem to suss out its intricacies, which are masterfully softened with understatement. Returning to see what we might have glossed over, we are at once struck, “He wanted to know why the order / could not be altered.” The meaning of “order” blossoms more fully now, and we notice Teague’s choice to use forms of “know” as a refrain, keenly avoiding the word “understand.” As satisfying as the first read is, that much more fulfilling is the second. The observations about adjectival order are alternately curious and profound, (“Evaluation before size”, “nationality before religion”) and, just as importantly, these observations never become pedantic.

The last line (“Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.”) of course calls to mind Forché’s “The Colonel,” but the poem’s narrative inverts the roles, so that the subject is a victim and the poet is a teacher. In a strange, fascinating way, the reader is left in the same position at the end of both poems, and while it would be presumptuous to assert that this poem will be anthologized like “The Colonel,” I would certainly teach the two works in concert.

* Series editor Jeb Livingwood (University of Virginia) really took some liberties with his series title, best new poets, which might have benefited in the honesty department by being named some new poets.

Review of Jay Hopler’s Academic Discourse at Miami: Wallace Stevens and the Domestication of Light

Review of Jay Hopler’s Academic Discourse at Miami: Wallace Stevens and the Domestication of Light

Burrito means “little donkey” in Spanish, and conjures the image of a sturdy, stubborn beast of burden, perhaps as big as a small dog, who gets into comical situations because of his size and short-temper. His elders would call him “Little Burrito” and he’d have a few other animal friends to get into wacky misadventures with.

Now, the burrito, as everybody knows, is the best symbol for a good poem found in the natural world. Like a good poem, a burrito is complete in itself–a delicious warm tortilla wrapped around meat (or beans, if you’re a vegetarian reader), rice, lettuce, salsa, cheese (or without cheese, if you’re a vegan reader), with guacamole and sour cream as optional sides.

The notion that a volume of poetry, as opposed to an individual poem, is the restaurant to which critical evaluation should be taken is dangerous. It encourages poets to deliver not the entire burrito, but just the rice, or the cheese, or a bowl of sour cream. It presents a do-it-yourself burrito bar, where the rest of the burrito–that thing for which all lovers of poetry hunger–is located across the entire volume. “Academic…“, for instance, is clearly just flavorless shredded lettuce. It is filler, not filling. There is nothing nutritious here.

And yet we are told that such obviously lazy poems serve in providing tonal range to make the rest of the volume palatable. This is putting the burrito before the donkey. Be honest with yourself–what was the gate by which you entered into the Mystery? Where did you fall in love with Erato? Was it after stumbling through Auden’s The Shield of Achilles? Or was it after reading the poem of the same name, comprehending that chilling truth “that girls are raped, that two boys knife a third”? Who even knows what other poems The Shield of Achilles contains? It was the poem, not the book of poetry, that illuminated your future path.

Come up with your own example, but the fact is, even great poets are known by their individual poems, not their books. Critical looks at these volumes pick and choose a few individual poems that support their thesis, ignoring large amounts of weaker or irrelevant work that, when viewed in isolation, aren’t even up to the standards of Taco Bell’s menu, let alone those great burritos that inspired us all. A work should not have to be read in context with other poems by the same author–it should be able to stand alone. And a poet should be judged by the burritos he makes, not his ability to present raw ingredients.

That brings us to today’s lunch special–a bag of lettuce. Hopler even announces in the first line that he has “no beef with Wallace Stevens” before diving into a muddled reflection on the nature of Florida’s light that, like celery, probably burns more calories than it provides. He makes reference to a specific Stevens poem, “Farewell to Florida“, which he asserts would be “more essential” if Stevens had only known as much about tropical light as Hopler himself.

“Farewell to Florida” is full of the moon, clouds, and darkness–when mention is even made of the tropical light Hopler is so preoccupied with, it’s certainly not “beaming”:

…I hated the vivid blooms
Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,
The trees like bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.

Unfortunately, Hopler’s own idea of how “far more aggressive, far / more violent” light would behave (“…the light here in Florida is clanging, / Banging, rattling buildings, burning through the park’s green pelt”) isn’t particularly apt (perhaps I am not imaginative enough to picture how light could clang and bang), and certainly not an improvement over the simple, startling image that Stevens provides, a fact which Hopler unwittingly recognizes by poem’s end, as he concludes with “this never happens in a Stevens poem”.

For good reason.

Ron Slate, whose review of Green Squall can be found here, quotes “Academic…” in its entirety, but doesn’t explore the poem’s value beyond the manner in which it “services Green Squall…layering more calculation and provocation on the book’s vocal identity”. Even as Hopler refers specifically to a Stevens poem he critiques, his own poem is viewed only as a kind of support beam for a larger structure. The fact that Hopler refers to Stevens’ “summer-minded” poems is another reference to one of the Modernist’s best known works, “The Snow Man”, and again demonstrates that the manner in which people enter into poetry is through the poem, not the book.

That an entire poem should be of such little consequence is disappointing, especially considering that Green Squall won the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. How much more lettuce and pico de gallo must we consume? How shall this fatten us for winter?

What else can be said: Hopler’s poem leaves us hungry.

Review of Ben Lerner’s The Grandeur of a Parking Lot (refrain by Young)

On Ben Lerner’s The Grandeur of a Parking Lot (eventually), or If Pretense Were a Crime

In a good-natured response, Seth Abramson mentions his affinity for young persons writing “above their heads.” He might be right when it comes to his poem. You’ll notice we didn’t say it was bad — it simply escaped us. Abramson’s adroit lyricism is indisputable. In fact, a wider reading of his work hints at real promise, perhaps even significant achievement (like “I mean a real human heart.” from The State Goes First and Last) but the brilliance is scattered, diffuse. I have a pet theory that this is the unfortunate but expected consequence of producing a steady output of poetry rather than an unsteady output of poems. This is all to say that yes, we may be writing above our heads, as our elders and betters would have it, but that does not absolve them of their duty to write good poetry if they’re going to be clogging up the poetry venues, not to mention the academy. Does anyone actually think Equi’s A Start is a good poem? Really?

Well, speaking of the academy. An assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Ben Lerner (undergrad Brown, MFA Brown) is widely considered a rising star in poetry circles. Perhaps, then, you will be as baffled as we are upon reading this, one of the clearest instances of poetry-gone-wrong that we have ever come across.  Unfortunately, the Didactic Elegy is too long and awful to tackle at the moment. So instead, let’s look at The Grandeur of the Parking Lot (Refrain by Young), which will adequately demonstrate how insufferable Lerner’s poetry can be.

First things first. 27% of this poem was written by Edward Young, an 18th-century English poet. Which is an interesting choice — cribbing over a quarter of your poem from an acquaintance of Goethe’s. Though he might have been better off had he revised that figure upward, since the remainder of the poem languishes amid an acute lack of coherence. I don’t mean that there are no sinews tying the poem together — there certainly are some clever associations, juxtapositions, and so on — but the poem does not cohere. Some parts are at once meretriciously impenetrable and embarrassingly flawed. For instance:

Penalty
is not without pleasure.
Sublimity cannot be exchanged,
but sublimity can be pawned.

The relationship between the first assertion and second (if there is one) is anyone’s guess. But the second bold statement, if you stop to think about it, simply doesn’t make sense. Pawning is a form of exchange wherein one trades an object of value for a loan, i.e., B (pawning) is a subset of A (exchanging). Lerner fails to grasp this. It would be the equivalent of me writing “Sublimity cannot be consumed, / but sublimity can be eaten.” Now, while I’m no logician, I believe statements like that are referred to in the field as being “logically retarded.” The only possible corner for Lerner to hide in here is the faux Zen nook, but this isn’t born out at all by any of his other (numerous) references, which are mostly Western, nor by the general sense of the poem, however vague that might be.

Speaking of vagueness, the engine of this poem, along with many of Lerner’s other garbage-plate-intellectualisms, is ambiguity. More afraid than a butterfly of being pinned down, he doesn’t so much paint with a broad brush as dump the bucket on the floor, his ideas spreading out in an uneven, messy coat:

Since Turner’s peaks and clouds have dwarfed
the figures, the canvas is sublime,
right? I’ve only looked at it online.
Maybe you had to be there.
Maybe there’s no there there.
Burke took great pleasure in his system
of color-coded terror threat alerts.

The bulk of the third stanza offers a perfect example of what I mean. The reference to Turner’s painting is possibly the most convincing part of the poem, the most grounded. The notion of only having seen it online and the implications of this are genuinely interesting. Finally we’ve left the hyper-referential and arrived at an actual idea. Good! But about as soon as it starts, it’s over and we’re back to Burke and his “color-coded terror threat alerts.”

And I haven’t forgotten what a good line “Shahida Wafa Idris made of her body a fountain of light!” is; that is the stuff of a fine poem. But how does it fit in? And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Of course Lerner can make it all fit in — with a mallet. In the end, it feels cobbled, and that’s as good as this poem gets.

Review of Lares and Penates by Caki Wilkinson

Reader’s note: the title refers to minor Roman household deities

Caki Wilkinson’s Lares and Penates belongs in a special class of poetry, those poems containing lines particularly worth carrying with you, always, becoming part of one’s mental vade mecum. With humor and a brilliant eye for bathos, Wilkinson renders a sympathetic sketch of the domestic, of the banal, in the face of muted but ineluctable mortality. Additionally, superb aural composition (“trumps conundrums”; “ferns turned freeze-dried octopi”) and simple construction leave the reader happily holding the sense of the poem, rather than grasping for it. Though weighted with masculine rhymes, feminine rhymes salt the poem for balance and while rhyme terminates many lines, enjambment still finds a natural place. Wrought but not overwrought, Lares and Penates succeeds almost entirely, especially when it comes to capturing that maddening human condition, insomnia.

and choirs of woebegone

house sparrows whose incessant cheeping
recalls the gloomy Ubi sunt,
our soundtrack to the nightly hunt
for whatever is downstairs, beeping.
(As if the sleepless wanted some
reminder they’re not sleeping.)

The poem, though enriched by explication, does not require it, perhaps does not even invite it. Not only do I understand the work, I could send this to my mother, and she would understand it, probably, in fact, more fully than I do. In addition to understanding the poem itself, she would also understand why it was written. In all, Caki Wilkinson, Duchess of Nonce (which may sound flip, but is meant in a wholly positive way), creates a work as much of substance as of artfulness. We thank her for that.

* * *
Click here for a podcast of Wilkinson reading a selection of her works. For those accustomed to the borderline laughable manner in which many poets today read their poems, Wilkinson’s unaffected voice will probably surprise you. She sounds like she has never bothered to learn how she’s supposed to read poetry aloud. And it’s plainly delightful.

Review of Nebraska by Seth Abramson

Nebraska by Seth Abramson

Nebraska is not a treasure chest that, after disarming a poison needle trap and getting Rialto the Crafty to pick the lock, yields the fabled Crown of Command, a dozen fabulous shining sapphires and more gold and silver coins than you and your band of adventurers can carry. It is more like an ornate piece of furniture, a throne made of ivory the Dungeon Master threw in, with an overwrought description that your party wastes a half hour tinkering with until you figure out it’s just scenery and has nothing to do with the adventure. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of thing that annoys players–something that, on the surface, appears relevant, even valuable, but upon closer inspection is the equivalent of a random encounter with a dinosaur which vanishes once slain, leaving neither loot nor trophy to reward the valiant heroes who struggled against it, perhaps even losing a henchman to its terrible fanged maw.

That being said, Nebraska does do some extraordinary things. The striking use of ampersands–a full baker’s dozen worth–stands out as a puzzling but assertive decision on the part of Seth Abramson, who could just as easily have spelled out the word, but instead chose to use the logogram most often seen in text messages and the names of law firms to further his obscure aesthetic goals. Perhaps he is attempting to reclaim the ampersand from these admittedly less poetic arenas of the English language and invest it with a new resonance. Perhaps “and” just wasn’t suited for the themes in the poem, not being a “one-light town” kind of word. Or maybe his use of the ampersand is for historical accuracy–it could well be that for three days in 1981, the people in “Wahoo & Alma & Dunning”, perhaps even “a boy from Ansley”, wore penny loafers and used the ampersand in all of their correspondence.

If someone asked what this poem is about, the answer would be “three days in Nebraska, small towns, penny loafers, & possible homosexual boys singing”. While the expansive sweep of the lines:

there is love &  there is money
&  there is everything in between,
touched by both—

might tempt a reader to believe the poem concerns itself with that broad area also called “general human experience”, this wouldn’t be the case at all. When we reach the final stanza, and Seth writes “& the bigger / the sentiment, the harder it falls” it becomes apparent we have no idea what sentiment he’s talking about. Is it love? Nostalgia? Presumably we are meant to care about these small town Nebraskan boys and their footwear, but what the significance of these three days in 1981 holds–either for the reader or the author–remains an unsolved mystery by poem’s end. Ending with italicized lyrics doesn’t help matters, either, since it fails to enlighten who these pretty boys were, what their dreams were, and also abdicates the responsibility of the author to have the last word, instead allowing a vague lyric to speak for him.

This poem is vague on every level, despite being disguised with a number of unmemorable details. I challenge anyone to tell me what this poem is about–my best guess is a nostalgic look back at a youth fad in small town Nebraska, with certain word choices seeming to hint at homosexuality, i.e. “drag”, the anonymity of “first & second boy” and “dreams of the pretty”. Why this is worthy of recollection–or what an average reader unfamiliar with those particular three days in Nebraska is supposed to gain from reading it–is anybody’s guess. This is certainly not a poem for the ages, and I frankly don’t think it’s even a poem for our time. It is clearly, however, a poem for Poetry.

Review of “A Start” by Elaine Equi

Our first review will be of Elaine Equi’s A Start, published in the November issue of Poetry. The full text can be found here.

For the reader’s reference, the term “silver hour” refers to that period just before dawn, when the light from below the horizon illuminates the world with a silvery glow.

To begin, this work exemplifies what many young poets find so frustrating in the field today. Here’s the opening:

The

-    -silver

—         –_hour

drops—

.

a spider

on the mirror.

The cuteness of the spider [beat] *dropping* on the mirror is not lost on us. We get it and do not even have to think about it to get it because we have already seen this technique used too frequently at the undergraduate level by people who cannot write poetry, instead attempting to imbue an insignificant poem with import by using the poetic equivalent of techniques utilized by television shows like soap operas and 24.  The remainder of the poem is essentially a permutation of the first part, which makes us wonder what sort of grade one of Ms. Equi’s students would have received, had said student submitted a poem of this caliber. This is clearly the work of half an hour, and, had it taken longer than this, that fact would in no way bolster her case.

What makes this type of poem especially pernicious is that it isn’t bad poetry. It’s nothing; and this nothingness hints to young poets that there is a secret code they can learn, a club they may somehow gain admission to, which then excuses them from the hard work of good writing. Or even bad writing, which at least helps demonstrate where the work fails. What could even be said, upon reading A Start, except, “well, there it is.”

Can Poetry Matter?

Please take the time to read this excellent essay by Dana Gioia.

http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecpm.htm

This project may be overly ambitious, but we (Chris and Andrew) want to do what we can to make poetry matter again. And we ask for your help as well.