Juliet's review
Modern Life: Poems
by Matthea Harvey (Goodreads author!)
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Overall, this book fluctuated between two stars and three and one half stars for me.
One more pro: a few of the poems at the end made me envision rather quirkily charming Amelie-esque scenes.
One more con: What kind of a poem is this?
YOU HAVE MY EYES
Give them back.
(And that's the entire poem. Seriously, what the heck is that? It's silly, stupid, and annoying.)
*************************************************************
I am still not quite finshed with this book, but after reading more of it, I have changed my rating from 2 stars up to 3 stars and have a few more thoughts on the matter:
My feelings about the content of this book fluctuate a lot as I read along, but they're little fluctuations not extreme fluctations. They're more like indecision than mood swings. (And obviously, I do understand that many of my feelings are rooted in aesthetic subjectivity and personal bias.)
At times, I find it rather quirkily charming.
At other times, I find it rat...more
Overall, this book fluctuated between two stars and three and one half stars for me.
One more pro: a few of the poems at the end made me envision rather quirkily charming Amelie-esque scenes.
One more con: What kind of a poem is this?
YOU HAVE MY EYES
Give them back.
(And that's the entire poem. Seriously, what the heck is that? It's silly, stupid, and annoying.)
*************************************************************
I am still not quite finshed with this book, but after reading more of it, I have changed my rating from 2 stars up to 3 stars and have a few more thoughts on the matter:
My feelings about the content of this book fluctuate a lot as I read along, but they're little fluctuations not extreme fluctations. They're more like indecision than mood swings. (And obviously, I do understand that many of my feelings are rooted in aesthetic subjectivity and personal bias.)
At times, I find it rather quirkily charming.
At other times, I find it rather flatly clever.
Like a quirky crossword puzzle.
And I don't really like crossword puzzles--not even quirky ones--in my mind, crossword puzzles exist in a completely different realm than poetry.
One very good aspect to this book is that it tends to be very specifically imaginative--and so even if some of the particular imaginings fall flat for me personally, I have to give it credit for not being generic.
Overall, it is still falling a little more on the miss side rather than the hit side for me personally, but it's at the very least a semi-interesting read and seems to be kind of growing on me, so maybe I should give it another chance and read it again after I finish reading it for the first time.
**********************************************************
Only 2 stars so far, although I feel moderately optimisitic that my review may improve as I read more, but here's the thing:
I'm currently in the midst of reading her sequence of poems 'The Future of Terror' and I don't understand why she is working through the alphabet chronologically within each of these poems.
Each of these poems starts with multiple words that begin with the letter 'g' and ends with multiple words that begin with the letter 's' and in between are multiple words that start with the other alphabetically chornological letters--and why?
Mind you, I am certainly not anti-experimental when it comes to poetry, but I guess I would like the experiment to mean something or do something or...something.
But this particular experiment does not convey anything to me except that I can't help but to be overly aware of it while reading these poems, which distracts me from other details of the poems and makes me feel as if I'm reading the published results of some sort of annoying writing excercise (i.e. I could understand self-conducting some sort of writing excercise in which ones forces herself to use a bunch of g words and then a bunch of h words and then a bunch of i words etc..., in order to possibly generate some unexpected and potentially interesting results, but I don't necessarily want to read the results of that excercise with the words still in order). Maybe I'm missing something.
I remember having some similar reactions to some of the techniques used in Harvey's first collection--techniques that seemed experimental for experiment's sake, but without achieving much greater effect (which just serves to make the experiment seem relatively pointless to me).
But then I quite liked much of her second collection.
So I'm hoping once I get past this 'The Future of Terror' sequence, I will encounter something that strikes me as more impressive and/or resonant, but we shall see.
So far it's distracting and eh.
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message 1:
by
W.
(last edited 06/02/2008 04:41PM)
06/02/2008 04:40PM
I thought Matthea Harvey was a rock star.
Oh wait, that's P.J. Harvey.
Which one wrote "Man-Sized?"
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The cover is almost pretty.
Are those blueberry flavored dominoes?
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P.J. Harvey wrote 'Man-Sized'.
P.J. Harvey I love!
I did enjoy Matthea Harvey's second collection, 'Sad Little Breathing Machine'--but this one isn't doing much for me, at least not yet.
I browsed some other ratings and reviews and as is not unusual, I seem to be in some sort of minority with my little assessment. Alas.
She designed the cover herself. 'Tis neat.
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I appreciate that you're not in the sugarpop sucking club. I hate that club.
Their reviews always suck because they are always one flavor. And thuperthuper excited.
I hate reviews where you can hear the rustle of pom-poms.
I never believe those people really know how to read. They are just recognizing the author's photo and where the head goes on the totem pole.
Later the totem pole is lost or burned.
The name "Matthea" is a cool name.
I might adopt it in some future incarnation on this planet. Like maybe in the year 2398.
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Yes, Robert. That video used to get all my straight friends worked up. I remember when it debuted on MTV's late great 120 Minutes.
I love that last album she did with "Grow, Grow, Grow" on it. The title eludes me now, though I've listened to it pretty constantly.
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That's funny, I've read a few poems in that sequence, and somehow I didn't notice this pattern. But isn't it just a kind of poetic constraint, like rhyme? Isn't that also an "exercise" that allows one to write a poem that would not have gotten written without it?
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Yes, you're right, it is a kind of poetic constraint--and certainly poetic constraints can sometimes produce highly interesting and worthwhile results--but like I said, in this case, I had a hard time getting past my awareness of 'ok here comes all the g words and now it's all the h words and now it's all the i words' etc..., which made for a distracting reading experience for me personally.
Since writing the beginning of my assessment,though, I did flip to the end of the book, to Harvey's notes section, where she explains that "The poems 'The Future of Terror' and 'Terror of the Future' were inspired by making lists of the words in the dictionary between 'future' and 'terror'. They are not strict abecedarian poems because they are not acrostics, but they do mimic the abecedarius's alphabetical footsteps."
Perhaps this explanation will make the technique seem more interesting to some readers. I guess it makes it seem a little less random to me, but still sort of random and I still don't really get the point.
Not that everything must have some definitive point, by any means, so maybe I'm just speaking from a place of personal bias. It's true I've never been a big fan of the abecedarian form. Forms like that tend to remind me of crossword puzzles.
In any case, I've also now read more of her book and have slightly reconsidered my review or at least have some more thoughts to add to it, so I'll be doing so shortly.
As to P.J. Harvey, she is hot and I'd get it on with her in a heartbeat--and I imagine that my husband would approve.
Not that she's propositioning me or anything.
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Agreed. The hotness of P.J. Harvey has been well documented in some of our most esteemed scientific journals.
I never thought I liked abecedarians either, until I wrote one. I gave myself the additional constraint of using exactly three words per line. It is random, but random is fun (for me). The poem that happened wasn't too bad.
Something else I did recently was to take a bad poem I wrote and rearrange the lines alphabetically (except it's not quite an abecedarian since, naturally, some letters are repeated, and some are left out). The poem I ended up with is a lot better. I might start doing something like that with every bad poem I write.
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Those semi-random techniques do sound fun, especially the second one.
I use some semi-random techniques or odd writing excercises sometimes, too--but then oftentimes, in the process of revision, most of the vestiges of the original technique or excercise end up getting edited out, but of course it just depends...
Sometimes I replace every third noun in the poem with the word 'circus peanut'.
Okay, I'm kidding--but circus peanuts DO amuse me--and my last poem WAS about circus peanuts that aren't really circus peanuts and ever since writing that poem, I have stuck in my head the phrase 'CIRCUS PEANUT CRUSH PORN'.
Fortunately, none of that has anything to do with P.J. Harvey. Or does it?
It would also be fun to invent a new poetic form with the word 'corset' in its name. The corsetina? The corset-toum? The corsetilicious-vilann--(elle)?
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Juliet, you have dibs on the corsetina if I can steal your circus peanut idea.
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The circus peanuts are mine all mine, but maybe you could try Hubba Bubba.
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Is that also something you find at the circus?
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It's gum along the lines of Bubble Yum and Bazooka.
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I largely gave up on gum when I could no longer find Big League Chew.
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Ha! My grandpa used to chew that!
He also used to chew tobacco and spit the brown juices into a sawed-off milk carton next to his L-Z-Boy recliner.
Due to this memory, old men and grasshoppers are inextricably linked in my mind.
The toothless chewing, the brown spittle...
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message 16:
by
W.
(last edited 06/04/2008 08:44AM)
06/04/2008 08:40AM
Juliet, I meant to say yesterday that I usually hate the abecedarian poem/book, but an exception for me was Marcella Durand's fine poems in that one issue of The Germ. The poems had great characters (like The Little Goblin King) who were doing weird Grimm Bros. like things. It was a strange fairy tale fugue that really worked for me. I wanted to see a full book of those. Hell, she could go through the alphabet twice. And there was great art interspersed. She's here on Goodreads. I want to get some books by her.
THE GERM was a really good mag. I'm not sure if it's ongoing or not, but all issues are worth collecting...the same as with O.blek mag. I think those were two of the best poetry mags in the last twenty years.
I was looking at the new SPD catalogue that came yesterday, and as usual there were a lot of intriguing new titles...Sharon Mesmer's ANNOYING DIABETIC BITCH looks intriguing, as does her other new title. Her cover art on ADB (which is textual circus-like weird freakish statements and phrases) is nonpareil.
Oh, and now I just remembered in Rachel Blau-DuPlessis' TORQUES (best book I've read in the past year) there is an abecedarian poem that runs through the alphabet twice that also works quite well.
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Sharon Mesmer's ANNOYING DIABETIC BITCH
is absolutely hilarious and great. Don't hesitate to buy it right away.
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That Marcella Durand material sounds especially interesting.
Thank you for the juicy details.
XO.
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Thanks for the endorsement, Matt.
I don't know her work at all...I guess I have something off the wall to look forward to...
Another person who's exploding all over who looked really intriguing in there (3 new titles??) was Johannes Goranson...not sure if I'm spelling his name correctly...
That's another one whose books I want....
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I have 'Annoying Diabetic Bitch' amongst my hundreds of to-read books already.
Johannes Goransen is associated with ACTION YES, which published one of my favorite books of recent years, 'The Hounds of No' by Lara Glenum.
I read a chapbook length piece by him that was recently published by DOS Press in an edition that also included Michelle Detorie and another man whose name I can't remember at the moment. His piece was pretty interesting.
Just a sec...
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It was this:
http://www.etsy.com/view_listi...
No wonder I couldn't remember what Goransson's piece was entitled.
His name is spelled Johannes Goransson, but also includes that little symbol with two dots above one of the letters.
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umlaut!
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Oh thank you!
I like that word!
That might be another nifty one to replace every third noun with.
Golly, I am such an office slacker this week.
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Thanks for the link, Juliet. I love the design of those books as well.
When I was still publishing books under my LOGODAEDALUS press, I issued some books cut in that size...makes everything look and feel like ephemera...
I'm hungry for calamari and fried broccoli with dipping sauces suddenly. And I don't think it's in the vending machines here.
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I'm hungry for dumplings served upon one of those silver lidded platters.
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