Modernist poetry tends to eschew ambiguity for particular obscurity. This can create an interesting aesthetic effect, like in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. It can also create 824 pages of unreadable diarrhea like the Cantos. Ezra Pound once said that bad art must have an efficient cause. It does: Ezra Pound.
It feels like a bit of a platitude to insist that Denise Duhamel is the colorectal cancer of English language poetry, so instead of reviewing her I thought we could do a Denise Duhamel Madlib. Hopefully, you will find this exercise instructional.
Hello everyone. My name is Professor Theodor X. La Merciere and I will be the new poetry reviewer on your little website. Please do not misconstrue the heretofore light tone of this post as an invitation for undue familiarity. I expect to be addressed as Professor Theodor X. La Merciere, Professor La Merciere, or Professor. I have taught adjunct at some of the finest community colleges in the state of Alabama and you will treat me with the respect due a man in my position. I hope this introduction has been sufficient.
All Over Coffee is a comic strip published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It consists of short, poem like text often dealing with people and their difficulties interacting with others juxtaposed with barren images of a cityscape in which all the people and vehicles have been removed. There is one hardcover collection that is moving, beautiful, and often funny, but you can also check out the weekly strip by following this link. I can't believe somebody put together comics and poetry so successfully. It's almost like it was custom made for me. Now if only Paul Madonna could find some way to write in Captain Kirk and Darkhawk, I'd be set.
If I'm not mistaken, this book was originally released as the text to a big photography book in which Wright wrote the accompanying text to photographs Deborah Luster took of Louisiana state prison inmates, but then Wright decided to publish just the text so that poor poetry aficionados like myself could afford it. Anyway, it's gripping, and Wright does a fantastic job of weaving all of these voices together (a large part of it is created from actual words of the prisoners, so the voices float and repeat like a ghostly chorus throughout the book), and by the end I was feeling pretty terrified and philosophical about life and/or society. Look, justice is broken, but what does this book say about it? I guess it isn't poetry's place to judge, anyway, or take sides. One problem I do have with this book, though, is that Wright often seems to embody these prisoners, and writes in poor or abbreviated vernacular, and uses their "words" to manipulate the emotional being of the reader, but where does this white broad from high society get the right to come on down to the lowest class of citizens, those stripped of rights, and embody their voices like this? It's just that she is no folklorist, so the times when she writes in colloquialisms seems disingenuine and somewhat racist, but whatever she's C.D. Wright and I'm just some guy who watched four Batman movies in 24 hours this weekend.
Well it's about goddamn time I read a book of poetry I loved since I started this review blog. I mean, I've read some good books (even the last two I read I liked ok), but I don't think I've read one great book since the beginning of the year. Anyway, this is a terrrific (extra 'r' added for emphasis) book of poetry by Canadian poet Suzanne Buffam. The speaker in these poems is desperately searching for something that is missing in her world, but love, language, self, and the world are incapable of completing that gap. The reality and linearity of the poems is constantly shifting, the speaker changing directions like a magician and her magic cards. And boy oh boy can she write a last line! To sum up, go buy this book and read it already, or if you live in Houston and know me you can just borrow it I guess.
I have to stop getting excited about books of poetry before I read them. When I bought this one, I flipped through and read a couple of poems and was all like "Damn!" as in "This poetry book looks mighty fine, my good sir." So as it was sitting on my desk I was totally pumped. But then the whole first section was a letdown. I mean, the poems in there demonstrate terrific craft, but Ford so directly and specifically deals with Hurricane Katrina that at times it felt almost pedantic, especially three years later after we've experienced and reexperienced the heartbreak and terror that it was. But, luckily, the rest of the book was pretty goddamn awesome. And I don't understand it - I mean, in the final section Ford deftly deals with Katrina on an implicit level, analyzing our place as a society in the larger more dreadful scheme of the planet's chronology by metaphorizing the Colosseum (and a society that glorified destruction, etc, look, I like to keep these short), but why couldn't she employ this inference in the first section? Anyway, it was definitely a good book of poetry, but it could have been one of the fucking great books of poetry with a bit more care which makes it a little more disappointing. PS - Sorry if all my profanity is uncalled for, Tipper Gore.
That behemoth of a book crushing my head is Alice Notley's 2007 book of poetry In The Pines, in case you can't read the entry heading. I don't know how many poets can get away with something like this, but I guess she must be some kind of big wig because a) she's on Penguin, and b) she decides to open her 130 page book (too long by 60 pages in my opinion for a poetry book) with a 65 page fucking multi-voiced prose poem. No thanks! Well, it's kind of interesting, although extremely tedious. Then the second section of her book is more boring prose. In fact, I skipped over most of it, which I never do with poetry books, but this book has also been a readbump (books I feel like I must read before I get to other more interesting books) for the past 4 months, so give me a break. Anyway, I read the last section which I was glad about because it was FUCKING TITS. I mean, it was good. A lot of interesting dissection of the ideas of form, the body (specifically female body, so maybe by using the slang term tits to describe something good I was being a bit disrespectful my bad Oprah), and how we classify ourselves in the physical world. So in conclusion this could have been the best 30 page chapbook I'd ever read if it wasn't for the other incredibly tedious 100 pages leading up to it.
I have to be honest and admit that this book is by a friend of mine, so I would feel a little weird giving it a percentage rating. But I am being totally honest when I say that it is a fantastic book of poetry and you should buy it now. I have read few books more like an intricately woven map in which landscape, faith, and love are dissected through phrasal leitmotifs in a way that is completely satisfying, natural, and moving. Cities jut against fields against vast bodies of water in this book, manipulated by a speaker who is internally wrestling with faith and attempting to turn that struggle into something representatively external. Only the vast can deal with such metaphysical concerns, but rather than losing control of the environment created, he deftly controls it and allows us to exist within it which is great and I'm out of sentences so buy it like I said.
Sorry this pic is so small, but it's the best I could find. Anyway, I just read this book for a class, and I have to say it's pretty great. Denise Newman emotionally navigates the boundaries between birth and death, and the religious implications of good living. The most powerful section is the second section, in which she uses the chapters of an old monastic guide as poem titles, and questions the emotional ramifications of the finite. It's imaginatively powerful, and you should buy it right now why don't ya.
No, that's not the book cover, but the book is way out of print so I couldn't find a picture of the cover on the internet and I am also inept with my camera and couldn't take a decent picture of it. Anyway, this book is by Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuna, and it's pretty decent for about 70 pages, which is how long a poetry book should be so I can't fault her for that. But unfortunately the book is 156 pages long and it kind of starts repeating itself (although perhaps with the recurrent theme of weaving and language moving in circles this is intentional?). The questioning of the origins of language are really engaging in the book, and I'm usually kind of resistant to poems that deal solely with the idea of language/object relation. But this is good.
Jordan's first book of poetry is a fairly amazing debut firmly set in the tradition of Southern verse. That isn't to say it is invested in linearity for ole time's sake, but the location of the south in a physical sense is paramount to the personal devastation that is explored. But linearity is also subverted, as Jordan raises questions regarding the nature of memory - and perhaps the responsibility of memory to the dead. So check it out if you like the south or if you like poetry why don't you.
This is a really terrific book of prose poems/lyric essays. Sandy Florian dissects meaning and translates definitions of seemingly unrelated words into a really personal exploration. It's set up semi-alphabetically, and reads almost like a dictionary. It's meaning that is paramount to be disassembled here, and the halting language is fantastically engaging.
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