Category Archives: I Like

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”

A.E. Stallings’ Olives

A.E. Stallings writes lovely poems. Lovely poems that are also of the gritty real, but they look at the world through clear, feeling but not crying, eyes. A classicist by training, she works in rhyme-and-meter forms (with the sort of deft touch that kind of makes all this free verse emphasis feel silly), and she’s won a number of awards, including a MacArthur “Genius” grant. Her poems tend to balance as equally well the demands of emotion and intellect as they do form and content.

Olives, published in 2012, has poems about ancient Greece, poems about daily life, poems about motherhood and children, poems about arguments and olives and telephones. When one, as one does, starts to talk about “the state of contemporary poetry,” her books should be part of the argument for a strong state of contemporary poetry, full as they are of both fine craft and thought.

Her poems are also often funny (it’s really tempting here to make some sort of joke about an archaic smile, but I won’t). The first section of “Four Fibs” (the form of which uses the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of syllables per line) for instance, goes,Continue reading “A.E. Stallings’ Olives”

Theory of Beauty (Grackles on Montrose)

February’s Animal Poem: “Theory of Beauty (Grackles on Montrose)” by Mark Doty, from the new section in Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (2009).

“Theory of Beauty (Grackles on Montrose)” is a thoroughly satisfying descriptive poem (it is of course redundant to say Doty poem and great description in the same sentence), full of sounds. Not all that many poems have a lot of noises, necessarily. Car horns and dog snoring and through-the-wall radio ads and all the rest — it’s noticeable when a poem really pays attention to them.

“Theory of Beauty (Grackles on Montrose)” begins with a place-setting, “Eight o’clock, warm Houston night /  and in the parking lot the grackles / hold forth royally, in thick trees.” (This, by the way, is what a grackle looks like.) Three lines and the scene is set, complete with the beginning of the birds’ characterization, with “hold forth royally.”

The main delight of this poem is, of course, Continue reading “Theory of Beauty (Grackles on Montrose)”

White / Arthur / Willis

Brief reviews of The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White (1982), Charms Against Lightning by James Arthur (2012), and Blood Sisters of the Republic by Wendy Willis (2012).

James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies is a gorgeous book full of beautiful, difficult longing. Its artful passion is simply excellent. The poems are both explicit and humble, (“Sometimes I’m their first. / Sweet, sweet men. / I light candles, burn the best incense. / Make them think it’s some kind of temple / and it rather is.”) and the general passion and exquisite human feeling speaks through them all (“In this joyous season I know my heart won’t die / as you and the milk pods open their centers / like a first snow in its perfection of light. // Good love is like this. / Even the smell of baked bread won’t make it better, / this being out of myself for a while.”).  Continue reading “White / Arthur / Willis”

“Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo”

For this inaugural monthly Animal Poem post, a look at “Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo” by William Matthews.

It’s a gorgeous poem from his 1973 Rising and Falling collection, which is one of my “desert island” books. The immediate beauty is of course in the largest metaphor — the snow leopards “jump / down and jump up, water being / poured,” a visual image of their physicality that is reinforced, with a heavy emphasis on the endangered aspect of the snow leopard, in the last three lines of the poem (the “them” refers to his children): “I save them whatever I can keep / and I pour it from hand to hand.” But in between that introductory image and the end, man what a lot happens in this 18-line poem.Continue reading ““Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo””

Beasley / Biespiel / Jensen / Friebert

A short look at: Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia  (2012), David Biespiel’s Wild Civility (2003), Laura Jensen’s Memory (1982) and Stuart Friebert’s Funeral Pie (1996).

One of the (oh so many) things that drives me nuts about statements like, “I don’t like poetry” or “I could just never get into poetry” is the underlying idea there that poetry is a single thing. It’s like saying, “I don’t like movies” or “I don’t like food.” Just because I can’t stand beets (I really can’t stand beets) doesn’t mean I’m going to write off all red foods, or all food. You could say a strawberry and a beet look sorta the same, couldn’t you? But the taste?

One of the things that struck me reading these four collections (all of which I like) is how vastly different their use of language is, what a nice spectrum of diction they represent. Friebert and Jensen all use very everyday vocabulary. In “Pocket Gopher,” Stuart Friebert writes, Continue reading “Beasley / Biespiel / Jensen / Friebert”

2012: A Short Look Back at What I Watched

I’m such a huge fan of movies, and taking a look now, boy did I see a lot of ’em this year! Here’s a sampling of the best and worst I watched this year:

Best 2012 Movie: (bearing in mind that I haven’t seen Lincoln or Beasts of the Southern Wild yet) A neck-and-neck tie between Moonrise Kingdom and Silver Linings Playbook. Moonrise Kingdom is such an immersive, total world, a world you want to live in, with all its quirky quixotic romantic characters, and its nostalgic colors and its delicious soundtrack. But Silver Linings Playbook, which I just saw today, is such an alive movie, and it moves you from laughing hard to nearly crying without jerking you around, or feeling contrived or unrealistic. So the tieContinue reading “2012: A Short Look Back at What I Watched”

2012: A Short Look Back At What I Read

Before the look back, a quick look forward. Coming soon (or eventually) in 2013:

  • Reviews of collections by James Arthur, Bruce Beasley, David Biespiel, Stuart Friebert, Laura Jensen, A. E. Stallings, and Wendy Willis
  • Posts about William Matthews’ and Christian Wiman’s poetry
  • The afore-mentioned monthly look at an animal poem (replacing 2012’s Months posts)
  • Some more extensive film reviews on occasion, in addition to the short ones you can always find, frequently updated, on the Film page

Now for the requisite (and for all it’s cliché to do so, enjoyable) quick look back at the reading I did this year. (I stuck the Worst in the middle, because I didn’t want to end on a low note).Continue reading “2012: A Short Look Back At What I Read”

Most Vivid Reads #5

This is the final installment of my “Most Vivid Reads” series. (See below for the full list of books).

The Book of Nightmares — Galway Kinnell

I loved this poetry collection when I read it in college, and I still do. It’s melodramatic, its images are overwrought and its underlying emotion is morbid. It talks madness, birth and death, and how mortality underlies everything, speaking alternately straight up and with a bemused chaser, and that’s exactly why I love it. It hits that youthful ‘but life leads to death, death, death’ phase we all go through (especially (?) us artsy types), but it’s such well-written morbid angst. It’s like the best part of revisiting your youthful darkness-obsessed phase, because Kinnell has such a great control of language. I don’t find it amazingly profound or deeply moving in its mysticism, which is what some claim about The Book of Nightmares. But I do love it.Continue reading “Most Vivid Reads #5”