Briefly Reviewed: Hicok, Estes, Kasischke

Brief reviews of Elegy Owed by Bob Hicok, Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke, and Tryst by Angie Estes.

Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed

I really like Hicok’s sensibility in this new collection, the diction mix, the word play, the self-consciousness, and the honesty that holds it all together. Many of the poems have sentences that run on a long time, over many lines (or the entire poem is one sentence) and the best of them unspool through subject after subject, turning sometimes on word play, sometimes on dark humor, sometimes on metaphor, loose in the sense athletes or musicians talk about being loose when they’re at their best. Continue reading “Briefly Reviewed: Hicok, Estes, Kasischke”

Counting Sheep

In Laura Jensen’s poem “Sleep in the Heat” — which begins “I switch on the light” because of course one can’t sleep in the heat — the speaker says, after lovely insomniac descriptions of the clock, crickets, and dizzy dark,

I try to balance — one sheep fills me,
one is a shapeless chance,
one disobedience, one regard.
They feel I do not deserve them;
they are sleepy and kept up all night.Continue reading “Counting Sheep”

“The Bear”

One of the ways the world can be divided is into people who love Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” and people who hate it. It seems to be one of those poems that sparks little middle-ground reaction. The first time I read it I found it so very gripping, and moved with the poem. Occasionally on re-reads I admit I get mostly just the intellectual tickle of satisfaction from the last couple of lines, the transformation of the hunter’s transformation into metaphor, but other times, particularly hearing or reading it aloud, the whole thing still works wonders on me.

If you haven’t read it before, please do, and see which camp you fall into. Feel free to comment below. It’s available both in print and this video from 1973 of Kinnell reading it aloud.

“The Sparrows of Iowa” — Laura Jensen

One of the many pleasures possible in poetry is seeing something you’ve seen your whole life in a new way. Such is one of the gifts of Laura Jensen’s  “The Sparrows of Iowa,” published in her amazing (and hard to get ahold of) 1977 book Bad Boats.  From the second of three stanzas:

[…] for the sparrows
of Iowa, listed as if no more exist.
They have long been with all of us,
chattering the bushes, ponderous,
and never been vermin. Their legs
are the dry bit you snip absently
from a houseplant — […]

How exactly perfect is that for a bird’s leg, “the dry bit you snip absently from a houseplant”! This is one of those poems that I won’t be able to avoid thinking of when I see a sparrow hopping about from now on.

Later on in the poem (which is three stanzas, 21 lines total), Continue reading ““The Sparrows of Iowa” — Laura Jensen”

Technology

One of the many reasons I admire A.E. Stallings’ “Sestina: Like” and Bruce Beasley’s “Year’s End Paradoxography” so much is that the modern technology/modern world is integrated in those two poems in the way farmland or city streets or the human body are in so many other poems — thoroughly, and as metaphor, and amongst other topics, and not called out per se, and in ways that feel (though only time will tell on this point) like the poems will survive with their strengths intact even after the technology they engage with has moved into obsolescence.

Based on my admittedly totally unscientific general sense of the poetry I myself read, a flip through the Best American 2012 anthology, and some poking about this week in the searchable online poem databases of the Poetry Foundation and The Academy of American Poets, I feel I can say (until proven otherwise — please feel free to bring my attention to other poems in the comments box below) that current-day technology doesn’t show up as much in contemporary poems as you’d think it would.Continue reading “Technology”

Beatdom #13 & The Attic Recommends

Just a quick note about two other places you can find me —

My poem “The Drunken Helicopter” is hot off the press in Beatdom #13 (The Drinking Issue) which is available on Amazon in hard copy or for Kindle. It’s a Rambo-era take on Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat.” A taste:

Up through the veils, gravity’s fingers
slipped from my runners and then nothing
but the Poem of the Universe
uncorked with a wet squeak […]

And I am delighted to be editing The Attic Institute’s new monthly “The Attic Recommends, a Hot Sheet for Writers” which spotlights new and interesting work in all genres, plus publication news, contest opportunities, and updates on the doings of Attic alums.

p.s. I also pop in to Twitter and say something or (or, you know, retweet something cool someone else said) every once in a while too…

“Look, you have milk”

Whoops! So there went June I guess.

But now back to it — here’s this month’s Animal poem, “Sister Cat” by Frances Mayes (on that Poetry 180 project site Billy Collins did during his Poet Laureate tenure — I recommend exploring, lots of good poems there).

This is one of those enclosed poems, a type of poem that I frequently resist — I tend to like it less when a metaphor’s expansion is too fully explained. But I like it here, I think because such a cat’s cries are both familiar enough to me and strange enough in themselves to carry the burden of such explanations/abstractions.

The human’s firm reaction to the finicky cat, “Look, you have milk. / I clink my fingernail / Against the rim. Milk.” is spot-on, and I like the progression of analogous movements, “the light on / when it is on,” the other Frances, then back to the cat with those lovely short sentences so evocative of a cat’s movement, “She stalks / The room. She wants.” And the ending, back to the cat’s, and therefore ours too, otherworldly and impossible desires, “Milk / Beyond milk. World beyond / This one, she cries.”

That ending, by the way, is a good example of the power of word order. Switched around, “She cries / World beyond this one” just has nothing going for it. The tension of the line break “World beyond / This one” brings the emphasis to both “beyond” and “this one,” and it works so much better to end with the focus back on the physical cat rather than the abstract idea.

From Word to Poem

As I mentioned before, I’m teaching a workshop at the Attic Institute in Portland this summer, June 30-July 28. Here’s little insight into the word-to-poem process, and a sample of some of the kind of fun we’ll have with words in the workshop (for which you can register here — would love to have some of you in class!).

I was flipping through my Dictionary of Contrasting Pairs this morning, because the radio keeps playing a song that says, “The opposite of love’s indifference,” which has me thinking about opposites, traditional and re-defined. And I came across the entry for “austral/septentrional,” which I now know are rareish equivalents of north and south when used adjectivally (so a ‘septentrional state’ is a northern country, an ‘austral wind’ a south wind).

Which is cool, if pretty obscure, but the entry also had this tidbit about Australia: Continue reading “From Word to Poem”

Dennis Schmitz’s “The California Phrasebook”

Dennis Schmitz’s poem “The California Phrasebook” has one of those similes in the first stanza that will make you forever look at an everyday object differently, in this case stop lights:

West of the Sierras where
the Central Valley drifts on its crusts of almond
orchards, the fields
die in a holiday accident,
the freeways snapping
back in the dust like severed
arteries while the accomplished
doctor of silence stitches the evening
closed with stoplights which
never hold.

The doctor of silence; stoplights which never hold; the fields dying in a holiday accident — I mean, wow! And this opening California-as-corporeal image is only the beginning of a whole string of images which illuminate how you can look at something regular from another perspective, a perspective expanded, made both immediately recognizable and strange, and complicated.

Schmitz’s poems, at least in the collection I have (which is About Night, his 1993 Selected and New collection) consistently serve up an thoroughly vivid image and then swerve with it to somewhere not weird exactly, not gothic exactly, but somewhere that borders all the dark and twisty places. The line breaks are caesuras of a big breath to finish out the thought, of emphasis in the rhythm of a master storyteller who’s telling the story by looking at what you’d say are all the wrong/tangential details, but there the whole scene anyway, the whole main point of the story told anyway.

Continue reading “Dennis Schmitz’s “The California Phrasebook””

I Still Love My Wicked Wicked Ways

Sandra Cisneros’s 1991 books My Wicked Wicked Ways was one of the first collections I read seriously as poetry outside of class. This was early high school — at about the same time Carl Sandburg, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath were big for me. (Cisneros is of course the author of The House on Mango Street, which I also love and think everyone should read.)

I picked it up My Wicked Wicked Ways again recently and I still love some of these poems, just love. You always have these vague ideas, early on, about who poets are, what kind of person a poet can be, should be. I don’t know if this was true for everyone but for me Sexton and Plath, the crazy suicidal confessionists, or Dickinson the recluse in a white dress were sort of the readily available models when I was first getting going in poetry seriously, in terms of how to be a female poet. Sexton, Plath, Dickinson — or Sandra Cisneros, precise and beautiful and sometimes sad but also always so alive and full of beautiful images and style. Continue reading “I Still Love My Wicked Wicked Ways”