Category Archives: Contemporary Poetry

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”

Warhorses and The Porcine Canticles, Briefly Reviewed

Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa and The Porcine Canticles by David Lee

Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa (2008)

Yusef Komunyakaa is, as previously mentioned, one of my all-time favorite poets. He’s a very deft writer, who can amaze, and blaze images and words into your head. Or sometimes he can be just deft. This isn’t my favorite of Komunyakaa’s work, but it’s not like he’s become a terrible writer here. It is and isn’t a criticism of Warhorses to say that it’s a collection that does something together (it’s a lyric meditation on war (so of course love too), touching on conflicts historic through present-day (it was published in 2008)), but it’s not a collection of individually great poems. (The third section is the exception — “Autobiography of my Alter Ego,” Continue reading “Warhorses and The Porcine Canticles, Briefly Reviewed”

Most Vivid Reads #2

Happy Thanksgiving! To state the no-doubt-obvious, one of the many things I’m thankful for is great books. This is the second installment of my serial post detailing my list of Most Vivid Reads (those books that stick out the most in my mind when I think about books).

Post #1, which covered Mr. Bridge & Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, Doomsday Book, Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis, and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, can be found here.

To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee

Two paragraphs into this novel, which is the end of the first page in the edition I have, you are IN this book. You are IN Scout’s head, you are IN this town and this world, and you are in it for the duration. And it is in you forever after reading it. The header on the blurb page says “Unequaled praise from everywhere for a unique bestseller.”Continue reading “Most Vivid Reads #2”

Three Collections, Briefly Reviewed

Woman in the Painting by Andrew Hollander Budy, Troubled Tongues by Crystal Williams, and Things That Happen Once by Rodney Jones.

Woman in the Painting by Andrea Hollander Budy

Andrea Hollander Budy is a recent transplant to Portland from the Ozarks. I heard her read at one of the Mountain Writers series readings at the Press Club (a nice little bar in SE Portland; all the crepes and sandwiches are named after writers). This collection, full of well-made poems, is from 2006. I second Maxine Kumin’s blurb about Budy’s “impeccable conversational diction” and Stephen Dunn’s nod to her “subtly registered emotional world.”Continue reading “Three Collections, Briefly Reviewed”

Superheroes

In anticipation celebration of The Avengers (whoohoo! I hope, anyway), let’s look briefly at A. Van Jordan’s collection Quantum Lyrics, which puts comic book superheroes and heroes of physics together, among other topics, in quite nice poems. (I’m not at all scientifically inclined, as I’ve mentioned before, but I do like the general ideas of physics, the ideas I can almost understand for a moment at a time, anyway, and what’s not to be intrigued by about superheroes?)

Albert Einstein’s personal life, his wives and his civil rights involvement, gets a lot of attention in the collection as well. Sample poem titles: “The Flash Reverses Time,” “The Green Lantern Unlocks the Secrets of Black Body Theory,” “Marian Anderson,” “The Atom and Hawkman Discuss Metaphysics,” “Sculpting the Head of Miles Davis.”

The Einstein poems use a lot of filmic conventions, “FADE IN” and “CUT TO:” and “INSERT SHOT” and so forth, that section adding up to a sort of documentary film made out of poems. In the prose poem “Einstein Defining Special Relativity,” the scientist’s notebook Continue reading “Superheroes”

Mark Doty

Mark Doty is frequently lauded as one of the best American poets writing today, and I certainly concur. His manner of looking at the world is that of regard, an intellectual gaze that insists on detail and beauty, and taking the time to examine. He’s prolific, with about seven is it? eight? volumes of poetry, not including his award-winning New and Selected (which is a great place to start). And three books of memoir (centering around the death of his partner from AIDS, growing up gay, and dogs and loss, respectively). And a meditation about art history. And a little poetics book too (one of Graywolf Press’s lovely “Art Of” series). And an occasional blog.

When Doty annoys, which can happen every once in a while, it’s because of an overdosing of description, a too-mannered-ness. “Dammit, too much elegance!” one perhaps wants to yell on occasion. Or maybe, sometimes, “Cut to the chase!” But mostly he’s wonderful.

My Alexandria was my introduction to Doty (his third, I think, collection, published in 1993). The first poem in it has been one of my favorites since I read it (freshman or sophomore year of college), “Demolition,” which watches a building being taken down by a backhoe, its shy metal scoop, “a Japanese monster tilling its yellow head / and considering what to topple next.” That poem has one of my favorite poet-profound lines, “We love disasters that have nothing to do / with us.”Continue reading “Mark Doty”

The Lichtenberg Figures

Ben Lerner‘s 2003 Hayden Carruth Award-winning collection The Lichtenberg Figures is one of those that illuminates, for me, the difference between well-written and good.

The poems, all untitled, are almost all 14 lines, nominally sonnets. Like a lot of other folks these days, Lerner uses collage, repetition, puns, mash-ups of language (erudite & slang, high-falutin’ & jargon, academic & plain), juxtaposition, and rapid shifts throughout.

For instance,

The thinkable goes sobbing door-to-door
in search of predicates accessible by foot.
But sense is much shorter in person
and retreats from chamber to antechamber to text.

How then to restructure a premise like a promise?

Continue reading “The Lichtenberg Figures”

The Thorn Merchant’s Family

In screenplays, characters are introduced with a 1-2 sentence description, something short but vivid enough to paint a picture. For instance, from the Out of Sight screenplay, “a guard, PUPKO (“PUP”), heavy-set, dumb as dirt.” Or from Pulp Fiction, ” LANCE, late 20s, is a young man with a wild and woolly appearance that goes hand-in-hand with his wild and woolly personality.”

Yusef Komunyakaa‘s poem “The Thorn Merchant” begins,

There are teeth marks
on everything he loves.

What a character intro! The poem is entirely a character description, slowly and beautifully building a portrait of a trafficker of harm. The language is a taut mix of straightforward images (“The ink on contracts disappears,” “Another stool pigeon leans/over a wrought-iron balcony,” “shadow of a crow over a lake”) and language that imparts more tone than explicable information. “There are teeth marks/on everything he loves” isn’t too (forgive me) thorny — things dogs have chewed, things rats have gnawed, or even a pencil that has been absentmindedly chewed. But what about “In the brain’s shooting gallery/he goes down real slow.” What does that mean?Continue reading “The Thorn Merchant’s Family”

Vanitas Motel with a bad cold

Had a bad cold this week, so I reread Jon Loomis’ 1998 collection Vanitas Motel since it contains “Watching Wings of Desire With a Bad Cold,” one of those awesome you’ll-always-remember (and wish you wrote!) titles. And poem, for that matter. (Quick definition of vanitas painting, as I know not everyone’s parents were art history majors.)

Loomis’ poetry is tough, its situations blunt.

From “Divorce”:

Half-moon. Squidlight. Fog hung like a bedsheet
20 yards out. It’s a long walk across the breakwater—
gulls doze on the flats, hoping you’ll die. […]

From “Illness”:

Late December, dawn spreads like a rash
above the parking lot. Venus smokes itself down,
stubs itself out. The house is a whistle only I can hear—

From “Aubade at Your Hospital Window,” “Tuesday’s snow still with us, old pair/of underpants.”

Not tough-guy tough or down-and-out tough. Sure, there’s swearing, Continue reading “Vanitas Motel with a bad cold”

A really good 9/11 Poem

A successful last line is as necessary for a poem to work as a successful any other line, but some poems have one of those fabulously unexpected and (often) devastating/uplifting last lines. The kind of line that kind of ka-pows you even as it lands softly.

“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” by James Wright and Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” are the two classic examples.

“Photograph from September 11” by Wislawa Szymborska is another one of those poems with a perfect, an unexpected and exactly right, last line.  And it’s one of the few really excellent 9/11 poems I’ve come across.