Kent Shaw's Blog

“Excerpt from Clown Crown[ed],” by Sreshtha Sen

I’m torn about whether Sreshtha Sen’s sonnet crown is relating the life of one clown, or a clown among clowns. Because I feel like clowns travel in groups (or troupes). Or that’s one of the dynamics I read into their poem, ”Excerpt from Clown Crown[ed]”. Where the poet is “in on the joke,” whatever the circumstance. They can see the ridiculousness in each situation. When they’re identifying whether the Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan should be seen as a clown, and they say, “[the clowning] is only fun only camp if it’s / in on the joke,” there’s a reveal about what it takes being a clown. Yes, the clown played by Sen, but they’ve widened the clown identity, so it includes everyone in a “community” or a polycule or a military unit dressed in fatigues or whoever it is that’s in the car you just bummed a ride from. Wherever two are gathered in my name, you might say, there’s clowning afoot.

But what I wonder is whether there’s a difference between the clown and the fool. Not that Sen proposes this distinction. But there’s something about how they can perceive the construction of any group, the ridiculous performances necessary to be both inside the group and outside it observing group dynamics. What does this say about clowning? And how might it contrast to the fool? I think the fool is often beholden to someone more powerful than them. But where the fool lacks agency, they still summon a knowledgeable position. They’re the one who’s wise to what everyone’s saying in the group chat, and maybe they themselves are instigators to move things along. The power often given the trickster, or the fool when he appears in Shakespeare, flourishing rhetoric so people admit what they hadn’t expected to admit.

What might not be clear in Sen’s poem is how much others know of the clown’s knowledge of the moment. And that restraint might be one form of power. But the clown at the center of this poem is typically the one holding a bunch of whatever’s left, and they know it. They’re along for the ride. They are the one who has to beg their friends for a ride to the grocery store, they find more security in a polycule binding them to their cat than to a basket of sexual activity. This is the power dynamic that pushes me to read for some relationship between “clown” and “fool,” I know. Because however pathetic their position, it’s funny, and the poet knows it is. And should that humor signal a role that’s “more powerful” or is it simply exaggerating the poet’s “powerlessness.” And the poem only complicates this further because it operates under the duress of formal poetics. In a sonnet crown, there’s only 14 lines before the poet has to pivot to their next subject. And even that next subject is bound to whatever the last line from the previous sonnet has said. Ironically, in a poem so conspicuously aware of the poet’s powerlessness, these pivots are where Sen asserts the most control. They pivot from an ethical consideration of trolleys as lethal instruments to trolley as method of transportation. Or another pivot from road trip into the desert to a review of the Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan’s oeuvre, where he’s his most clown, and why.

These transitions are ridiculous in nature but assured in their execution. And so, again, I wonder whether to cast Sen as the clown or the fool wanting to pass themselves as a clown. A fool might be judged competent to their actions. A clown could be conspicuously clowning. And where the poem steps into a more serious occasion, like submitting a visa petition, it’s unclear what to write in. “I can clown,” the poem says, like that’s what a country is, a bunch of people clowning together. Or what if the verb clown was worded better?

Excerpt from Clown Crown – NOTESDownload

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Let’s expansive the mundane!

A review of John Ashbery’s Can You Hear, Bird (FSG, 1995). In fact, I have a long ago review at goodreads. I’ve elaborated on it further here.

One of the things I like about Mike Kelley’s art work is the commonness of his stuffed animals. I mean, yes, the stuffed animals are complicated because it’s a grown man handling them, and his handling makes them into an art. But just think of how everywhere stuffed animals are. Especially the real ones, that have been used, and “loved,” and worn down. Like there’s something so easy about a “cute face” or a cuteness that’s getting rubbed away. Like cute embraces mundane, and what’s that supposed to make you feel? I’d compare Can You Hear, Bird book with that feeling Kelley brings to his art. A feeling that’s about LOTS, like he uses LOTS of stuffed animals, so his art is populated by LOTS. Ashbery’s poems, on the other hand, don’t have stuffed animals. Just LOTS of objects and memories, and potential memories, and street names, and possibilities. Which he often resignedly accepts as a reality, whatever that reality is, ironically noting how much reality can be seen as LOTS, and then this poem can settle on a mere nod acknowledging LOTS. “There’s LOTS to contend with in the world, but I couldn’t fit that much of the LOTS in this poem.” That’s the general resignation of the poet here.

Living is like a long collection of mundane objects and memories. They’re tender distractions, or people willingly entertain themselves with them. Or there’s just this way that attention is paid to LOTS of only mildly interesting moments. They seem so important, or perhaps, moments like this are vaguely aware they’re detaining us from Philosophy or Abstract Ideas. And that can call into question what a meaningful life really is, then. I’d argue this is a running question for Ashbery’s book. But to say there’s a running question in the book mischaracterizes the nature of the poems. A “running question” would admit to a philosophy. And many of the poems are generally distracted by the moment they’re in the midst of. Read “Tuesday Evening” (a full use case for a poem where details overwhelm whatever might be for cohesion).

One of the challenges to life is knowing how to treat the mundane like it’s meaningless. Which is why I would say Ashbery is resigned to letting LOTS just be his life. These poems are very invested in it. Is it possible to out-mundane the mundane? Especially given other poetry from the 1990s (when this book was published), that was obsessed with giving meaning to the mundane. Make it a poetic hope. Make it a big reveal at the end of the poem. What I read in Can You Hear, Bird is an over-inventory of these mundane objects and moments just sitting on shelves waiting to be called up by poems. And in that Ashbery resignedness, there’s an implicit, “So why choose?” at play.

And as the book progresses, I find this inventory of poetic material expanding so it’s not just objects or memories from the poet’s life, it’s all the impressions that exist around him, everything he can imagine in his life or others, and there’s a running complication of that “why choose?” sentiment. Maybe the poet feels like he should choose, because of who he was with, or he was in London, and anyone would tell him he should be choosing from London. And I don’t think it’s a great revelation to relate Ashbery’s poems to Affect Theory, but I will here. But specifically in that way affect influenced whatever might populate poems in Mary Jo Bang’s Louise in Love (Grove, 2001) or Brenda Shaughnessy’s Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999). Like both those books feel like chronicles of excess, the poet subjected to so much excess (excessive sensuality, excessive social possibilities), and how is there supposed to be a language that simultaneously navigates it and articulates it? And, for emphasis, add one more question mark to that previous statement. That’s how I hear Bang and Shaughnessy working this out. Ashbery, however, is always so observant, or observational, and resigned. Like reading his poems, I feel like he knew he’d be subjected to this excess all along. Maybe he struggled with it in the past. But now that he’s got around to writing a poem about, he can occupy this “why choose?” sentiment.

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“Genealogy,” by Rodney Gomez

What I am most struck by in Rodney Gomez’s poem, Genealogy, is how it fashions itself as both family portrait and political argument. Like reading it feels like looking at an actual family tree listing the types of people the poet counts as ancestors. Though they’re the types people might not normally mention. Gomez’s family tree is a roll call of “braggarts” and “mop heads.” They’re the ones who you’d find on their bellies, dragging themselves from fence post to fence post. Gomez even includes a devil. But these notorious characters, if read only as a list, would mark a one-dimensional reading of the poem. In fact, the “genealogy” here, as a “study” of his family, reveals not only the people who are part of Gomez’s ancestry, but also what it feels like to have others judge him based on what they’ve made his family’s reputation into. Like the poem depicts a racism the poet is dealing with in his personal day-to-day life, as well as the racism that revises history so his ancestors appear in the most unfavorable light. And, as the poem makes clear, the town clutches to that revised history so it can justify taking the town away from the people who’d originally built it.

This is the political argument playing out alongside the poem’s roster of characters. Like what exactly are the consequences when a town diminishes these people who have always been part of the town. It tilts the town, so some people would feel it one way, and others would feel it as a lopsided power dynamic. A town that could be “a city of identical trees police mark as thieves.”

Gomez’s pacing is swift, and I think that swiftness makes the poem’s politics a little more subtle. I was recently teaching Eliot’s “The Three Voices of Poetry,” and I think distinguishing between what Eliot calls “First Voice” versus “Second Voice” can provide a helpful lens for reading for this piece. In the Eliot, “First Voice” is the voice associated with most first-person lyric poems. It’s the imagined situation where a poet is reading to themself, or “reading to themself,” because they’re secretly hoping there’s an audience outside the door listening in. That person at the door is you, the actual reader! To extend this metaphor further, this lyric mode is usually portrayed as the most authentic, because the poet isn’t sure whether they’re performing for an audience or not. I wouldn’t really attach that kind of private performance to Gomez’s poem, though. The poem, to me, feels more conscious of its political argument.

Eliot’s “Second Voice” is somewhere between the character in a dramatic play (which is the “Third Voice”) and that private “First Voice.” In this case, I think about the performative side to Gomez’s poem. Like I could see him coming on stage dressed in solidarity with the people who are part of this “tree.” Where this additional note could emphasize the unjust classism. I could see Gomez reading the poem as a “Second Voice” monologue. Where it’s still performed as a direct statement to his audience, but Gomez’s staged presence would be in contrast to what the town has associated with him and his ancestors. This contrast would highlight the injustice when a town tells you who you are or must be, because that’s where you’re from.

Ultimately, I don’t know that the poem concretely sets my reading in either of those directions, but I’m drawn into the poet’s circumstance, and I sense a theatrical flourish in the surreal frame he draws around it. There is an ambiguity that sharpens the poem’s imagery. Like the image of the identical trees I mentioned above. Or the city skyline balanced on the ancestors’ mouths. Such an efficient and pointed analogy!

Genealogy – NOTES PDFDownload

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“Hawking Rabbit Feet in the Age of Disbelief,” by Abigail Chabitnoy

I like how it takes me a while to figure out what Abigail Chabitnoy‘s Hawking Rabbit Feet in the Age of Disbelief might be about. Like it takes some time to move from its opening on birds to, about two-thirds through, its thoughts on climate change—especially the disaster that’s impending. And I appreciate the surprise nature of the shift. Because the argument on climate change isn’t all that subtle. I mean, it sneaks up on the reader. There are clues the poem might be dealing with more than just birds when the ark appears in the second section. But the birds are so evocative at the opening. And so I’m mostly reading for the connection between the birds in the church from section 1 to the birds being denied a space in the ark in section 2. And I’m wondering how the “new love” from section 1 might have advanced to the ark setting.

But that’s not how this poem is going to work. Birds are assuredly one of the vehicles. The repeated reference to birds is like a language or a grammar for the poem. And accepting the terms of this vehicle is especially important when my reading reaches section 5, where the poem shifts from birds to “white plastic bags flutter treetops.” Because the image of birds hung from a church ceiling, birds clinging to a boat’s rigging, birds on an island feeding on the cast-off from tourists, these birds anchor the poem. And the abrupt appearance of the white plastic bags easily transforms them for me into limp, plastic sculptures I might see fluttering at the top of a tree. That image merged with the kites that use plastic to build their nests, it sets the entirety of section 5 to a commentary on nature’s adaptations. Nature’s desperate reach even as climate change worsens. These pivots from one section to the next, that lead my reading to the poet’s dismal statement about the future, makes me feel like the poem is taking its time, AND the poem is uncovering its own logic. So even amidst what could be described as a series of minimalist impressions, the poem operates in an excess of sense. It can install the ocean as a secondary vehicle (as a common setting where many of these birds can be found). It can touch on the irony that makes Kentucky a suitable site for the “Ark Encounter,” where tourists eager to see a scale model of Noah’s ark can be satisfied. All these seemingly extraneous considerations ultimately tuck into an incisive statement about climate. And I like that the poem takes its time to get there.

This poem’s running reference to birds reminds me a lot of the salmon from Chabitnoy’s first book, How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), where the image of salmon elaborates on itself, thinking to the very edges of itself. In “Hawing Rabbit Feet in the Age of Disbelief,” the birds participate with belief, or hope. Constituting the complex sentiment the salmon revisit each time they’re mentioned in Chabitnoy’s book. In the opening of this poem it feels as though they could evoke or symbolize sentiment, though I don’t think the birds are given enough space to fully elaborate on what that sentiment might mean for the poet. They have been hung from something inside the church. Or they are merely the birds’ wings dried out. The poem’s opening considers these gestures in light of the poet being newly in love. The poem seems to highlight that fatalistic worry that can overtake new love, or that can lurk at the edges of new love, like the body wondering aloud to itself, “Why this now?” Should she have seen whatever this is all along, given the birds only gave “the illusion of flight”? Are these birds like the rabbit foot you can find in souvenir shops (possibly at the “Ark Encounter,” where I think their appearance could be read for its morbid truth). Birds evoking new love, but then life shows how complicated birds can be to any landscape. So that by the end of section 5 whatever otherworldly sensation these birds should have represented splinters the poet’s grammar with en-dash and slashes. What is belief or hope in the face of climate change, fated to a life of swimming, and/or to nothing at all?

Hawking Rabbit Feet in the Age of Disbelief – NOTESDownload

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“Wreck,” by Stefania Gomez

There is this line in the middle of Stefania Gomez’s poem, Wreck. She’s referring to these firemen who were at the scene of her car wreck, and she says they couldn’t manage fear. I think this speaks to the heart of her poem. Where it negotiates between crisis and hilarity. Between life reckoning and straight-up weirdness. Because what’s really horrible about horribleness? To what degree can crisis be congruent with the ridiculous? It’s hard to say in Gomez’s poem, because it’s hard to determine the poem’s tone. Like when Ellen Bryant Voigt explains in her essay, “On Tone” (from The Flexible Lyric (University of Georgia Press, 1999)) that she can often tell what a poem is about by listening to its tone, but what do you do if the poem isn’t even sure what tone is appropriate? I’m not clear how I would personally ground Gomez’s poem. Is there a crisis? Is this all a big joke?

I like how this makes the poem strange to me. And I think the ridiculous might actually be providing a more reliable version of events. The poet’s been in a car crash that requires firefighters to cut her out of the car. But when they reach in to pull her out, they find themselves with handfuls of confetti and rubber chickens! WTF? You might be thinking. And the poem delights in that feeling. Like there’s a stability that comes with an incredulous reading.

Isn’t a car wreck supposed to be horrible? So why has the poet tilted her account of this one into nonsense? There are ducks actually moaning in this poem. The mast of a tall ship appears. But then the firefighters are suddenly pulling out the poet’s youth. And it all gets silent. It’s this switch-up that I find most interesting. Because it indicates there might be a purpose to all the ridiculousness from before. Maybe she feels people don’t take her seriously. Maybe in the midst of her personal disaster, people just laugh at her.

Then [the firemen] pulled out my youth,
at which point they became self-conscious
about their prior merriment and silence fell.

This moment turns the poem from silly-ish to somber-ish. Without committing wholly to the somber note that would possibly explain all the silliness away. Or it’s hard to take the joke out of the formal diction I hear in “prior merriment,” even as the poem has such a solid landing on its silence.

Personally, I don’t want the silliness explained away. I don’t want it tidied up so I understand why the poem opens onto it. I like the indeterminate feeling of solitude that closes the poem, and I like how that indeterminacy is made even more open-ended by all that fluff at the opening. Maybe the poet is describing the different extraneous parts of her relationship with this boyfriend, who could only shrug when he was pulled from the wreck. Maybe the poet is relieved to be alone, whether that means broken up from the boyfriend, or just apart from him long enough to feel her own space. And she’s realizing she’d wanted to be alone for a long time, but now she’s actually alone. And that sensation can be sometimes good and sometimes it can only serve a small reprieve. And sometimes it’s unclear how to fill the absences created by solitude.

Whatever sentiment the poet found when she ended the poem, it’s complex. Like what good emotions are. And the poem signals this complexity in a surprising way. Via the superfluous parts of the car wreck. Via the stable lens of silliness. Via the tonal shift lying in wait in the last third of the poem, and how that shift runs so strongly against the outrageousness directing the poem’s narrative. It’s the meaning of all these together that, for me, deliver an emotional complexity.

Wreck – NOTESDownload

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Sorrow, Framed: A book review for Emily Lee Luan’s Return

I have an initial review of Emily Lee Luan’s Return at goodreads. But I’ve thought to further elaborate on it after my close reading of the book’s final poem, “From weeping into weeping.”

Return (Nightboat Books, 2023)

Emily Lee Luan’s book is like a framed picture. Where the book’s opening poems explain the picture’s frame. Which is sorrow. A deep family sadness rooted in Taiwan, which the poet will not escape, or the book won’t let her escape it. And, for me, this choice is one of the book’s biggest risks. Because sorrow is intense, and it is by its very nature a sentiment that overwhelms. A poem whose frame prepares the reader to be overwhelmed could easily not overwhelm the reader, because they’re just waiting for the affect. It turns out, however, Luan’s sorrow is saturating and pervasive. Which the poems direct me to read as the experience of generational trauma. It’s like water around her, or it’s her as water, or it’s what happens if you’re the main character in a story, and you jump into a well, and all you can do is explain the color of that water around you. And the character in the well? That’s sorrow. And all these are images used by Luan to elaborate on the source of sorrow, and to express its presence in her life, to fill the frame proposed at the opening with sorrow, to exhibit each poem like a portion of a Sorrow collage, a family bracketing the poet’s life with sadness, the poet always aware of the sadness that had built her life.

Many of the poems rely on a structure that orients the reader to this sorrow, and it works to always push sadness to the edge of entirety. For instance, many poems fold Chinese in, and it’s poetic structure that helps me navigate my English-only reading of those poems. The poem on page 27, about the poet’s mother, ends with the last three lines using the same set of Chinese characters. In a situation like that I might not be able to read the characters, but I can read the poetic gesture to refine through repetition and apposition. In my close reading of Return’s final poem, “From weeping into weeping,” there is a narrative structure that clearly describes the poet’s anticipation of sadness. How it will literally Return to her. And yet, I find my reading overwhelmed by each of the images, leading me to read closely using simultaneous lenses. These gestures to poetic structure are present throughout the book, whether it’s the Chinese displacing the English in a poem, or it’s form itself (with circular lines of text, for instance). It leaves the impression that Luan’s sorrow is indecipherable. Like Return is set to frame sorrow, and to express it. But there is still something inexpressible about sorrow.

Still, I don’t think this obviates the risk when a book sustains a thematic or tonal point as conventionally poetic as sadness. This is in no way a comment on how the poet has experienced this in her life. I’m mindful of a book giving voice to this subject and sustaining it. If a book proposes to center itself on sorrow, how much will the book’s frame lead the poems versus how much sorrow will be present because it can’t not appear. It’s like elegy and mourning in Marie Howe’s What the Living Do (W. W. Norton 1998). Every poem is grounds for Howe to revisit this horrible tragedy. And, for me, every poem in that book sustains the sentiment, because each circumstance feels like a fresh consideration of life, which is what the living must do after someone else has died. Like each poem shows the poet struggling with life in the face of what she knows about a horrible death.

In this book, Luan opens with sorrow as an immediate presence. Like the present tense of presence, and each poem is an expression of what the poet was encumbered with. As the book progresses into the middle sections, sorrow feels more like sadness, and maybe it’s the sadness of growing past childhood. A point that further complicates the presence of sorrow. Because an elaboration of growing into a young adult, where the clash of previous personhood as a child and teen rooted in a family structure contrasts and reshapes the sorrow carried by the new adult personhood borne out of separation. Part of reading the book, for me, is matching the sadness of someone living through their 20s with the sorrow described in the beginning of Luan’s book.

And then Luan closes with family legends based on a great-grandfather as a young adult, and a grandfather as a young adult, and a father, before he had met her mother. And I see what the poet has to reckon with as she lives through the transition to her adulthood. What is a story? What exactly is the sorrow these ancestors encountered, and how might her experiences in the United States be told in a legend?

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“From weeping into weeping,” by Emily Lee Luan

What surprises me about Emily Lee Luan’s poem ”From weeping into weeping” (found in her book Return (Nightboat, 2023)) is how sadness is present for the poet. Like the poem is definitely sad, and it proposes a kind of physical being to it, but that figure is not physically with the poet. Sadness is remembered. And anticipated. The poet waits for what’s inevitable. Which is one of the ironies of the poem. Is an anticipated sadness any less sad? Is someone who knows they will again be possessed by sadness not already in mourning?

This conspicuous irony in the opening is so interesting to me, because there is so much of the poem operating on the poem’s poemness. Poetic irony. Poetic structure. Where the poet tells us sadness is absent, and then she addresses it like it were a lost lover. “When you come back for me, I’ll be among / the cornfields” And in sadness’s role as apostrophe, the poet imprints onto it what would make her saddest of all. To feel so alone, the horizon will seem like it doesn’t even exist. To feel so vulnerable, she’ll be naked and “swallowed by mosquitos” so her chest looks like a constellation radiating out from her nipples.

But even in these concrete gestural moments, I find I’m overwhelmed by the impressions from each sad moment. It’s an impressionism that washes through the poetic structure. Like I misplace the referent for the “you” about midway through the poem. It was clearly defined as sadness in the poem’s opening. But at the line, “Is it true what they say, that the best lovers / are always already inside of you.” I see the “you” differently. I should rely on the poem’s structural logic, making it where “you” indicates all lovers reside inside sadness. But I’m so taken by the expressive moment in the language I shift to think maybe Luan, in making sadness her lover, is saying sadness, as one of her best lovers, was always inside her.

What I’m trying to say here is that my continued reading of the poem leans, on one hand, on the poem’s narrative-based structure. The story of someone who anticipates sadness and feels its presence in the final image of dark smoke. On the other hand, I read the poem as a wash of impressionistic moments that saturate the poet with a sadness, even as she claims she’s still waiting for sadness to arrive. Sadness that will turn her into a lake, so she can “reflect wildly.” Sadness buckling in the poet’s body like history? Sadness as old as a moth. Luan’s imaginative reach for sadness is extensive in this poem, and I appreciate how it speaks to the deep cuts sadness would make. Which then feeds back to the story structure where the poet waits for sadness’s return. Perhaps it’s sadness’s elusive presence in the story aspect of the poem that sharpens what feels so real.

From weeping into weeping – NOTESDownload

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A Movie’s Affect: A book review of Alisha Dietzman’s Sweet Movie

I have an initial review of Sweet Movie at goodreads. But after posting about Dietzman’s poem, “Yet,” I thought it would be interesting to elaborate further on what I’d originally said.

Sweet Movie (Beacon, 2023)

There is a space between narrative and antinarrative where Alisha Dietzman, as poet, can recognize her life resembling a narrative, her life inevitably told through narrative, and the immediacy of a present moment not even thinking about narrative. I’m not familiar with the movie, Sweet Movie, by Dušan Makavejev. And I don’t think I need to know it to enjoy the book. Because where I find pleasure in these poems is the poet referencing some larger thing, and it feels like an artistic thing, and it also feels like a God thing. What’s notable is that whatever this artistic reference point is, it has a doubling authority for the poet. Like, on one hand, whatever the art said to Dietzman, it opened her to a bigger language. The Marlene Dumas poems that can’t just be poems, because there is a poetic commentary adding to the poet’s sensibility. On the other hand, Dietzman reveals herself to be the poet who actively seeks for these artistic influences. She’s the one who knows to seek something even bigger than herself.

I would say the book hinges on the reader reading for this point of influence. Because in Dietzman’s reference to this larger thing, she positions her speaker as conduit between source material and whatever part of her life she might be reminiscing on, or she’s just stuck in the middle of, or it feels like being stuck in the middle of something to be reminiscing on it. Like reading the poems you can feel both these angles (source material vs. what’s happening in Dietzman’s life) in a tense relationship with one another. And sometimes the poems speak directly from the artistic source and sometimes with only the most oblique references to the poet’s life. Sometimes it’s the other way around.

Maybe this is one way to understand how Dietzman’s statements stand together. There’s this disjunction that she confidently handles. So confidently, in fact, the disjunction can appear in a prose poem, it can appear in a list poem, it can appear as single lines down the middle of a page. Whatever form these statements use for their binding, they feel like they’re being operated by some master mechanism in the background. This larger artistic authority thing I can’t shake when I’m reading the poems. If I were to set it to a grammar, it might be the same grammar organizing the movies Dietzman is often referencing. A grammar that’s not a running description of the scenes, but some sensibility that explains the jump cuts propelling the movie forward. I tried arranging these disjunctive cuts into something that felt sensible in my close reading of Sweet Movie’s “Yet.” Where I characterized it as a process of thought that was always at least a step and a half ahead of what I thought I was making sense of. I like reading poetry that challenges me to keep up.

Which would fit with the multiple references to ending-as-foregone-concluding-of-the-moment in the second half of the book. Like what do you do when you’re talking about this life that was happening then knowing the whole thing is supposed to end. And thinking, as Dietzman does, that this will be what it feels like being in a movie that is more than just plot or absorption in visual imagery. The movie is a statement, like language makes a statement. But, in the case of Dietzman’s version of Sweet Movie, it’s not a movie, it’s language fashioning the position a movie takes toward people describing what’s going on with them. And to write into that, to resemble the affect of a movie that possesses this knowing quality towards the characters, where they’ll end, and also make the reader feel that movie-isolation from others who couldn’t possibly know what this ending will feel like like how this main character knows it.

It’s this swirl of affect, what it feels like watching a movie like that, that’s where Dietzman’s book is so successful. Where it speaks from the knowing POV—the one that knows all this disjunction is saying something about this moment the poet sees for herself. And, for me, to have the pleasure of the intensely involved poems like “The Margin of a Floating Structure.” And sometimes to merely tantalize me with the affect, like the “Holy Sonnets.”

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“oscillating,” by Jeff Stonic

There is a certain kind of quiet in Jeff Stonic’s poem, “Oscillating” (published in a previous issue of Denver Quarterly). Which, yes, might be because he’s at home, and everyone is asleep. And he describes a literal quiet. Or at least the kind of quiet where each person enjoys the mechanical noises of their choice. But for my reading there’s something more than just a literal quiet in this apartment. It’s something that settles into the flow of my reading. Like in Theory of the Lyric (Havard University Press, 2015), when Jonathan Culler contrasts iambic pentameter and iambic tetrameter, and suddenly, in the space of two syllables, he shows me the subtle, meditative mode of a poem. This is what the expanded domestic space feels like for me in Stonic’s poem. But rather than a five-foot line, Stonic’s expansion comes with his extravagant sentences. Like a long sentence provides mimetic access to the poet’s personal comfort, a personal quiet, and then what he might do with all that. This is a different quiet from what I think Ron Silliman describes with his Quietism. I don’t know if I’m clear on what that exact quiet is. My understanding, however, is that Silliman is critical of those poems that reach for quiet. Or that culminate in some revelatory moment marking when the poet really understands quiet. Stonic’s “oscillating” might end on that note, but it concludes a poem occupied by a flat quiet. The quiet when you can finally think. Or maybe the significant difference I see between Silliman’s “Quietism” quiet and the quiet I hear occupying Stonic’s poem is what quiet means to Stonic’s poetic thinking. His poem is not structured to land on quiet perplexity, it kneads quiet from and into the domestic setting.

It’s something similar to the quiet poems I admire. These are not poems whose main move is to suddenly shine a light on quiet entering the poet’s world. And by main move I pretty much mean only move. Those poems can feel formulaic at best and “poetic” at worst. Like “quiet” equals “poetic.” What I prefer is work where the poet’s quiet voice seemingly absorbs the page. Marie Howe or Brigit Pegeen Kelly or Carl Phillips or Jane Mead. Maybe Silliman would say these are examples of Quietism? I can’t find where he coined the term, so I don’t know. Personally, I find these poets quiet in the best way. Like they’ve discovered a rhetorical mode that dampens out any concern except for what’s immediately concerning the poet as they write their poem. These poets have pressed a quiet grain into their poetry; their poems are a complex articulation that has shut out other distractions.

Stonic’s “oscillating,” like recent poems I’ve read by Phillips and by Howe, uses quiet as a means. What distinguishes Stonic’s poem, for me, is its quiet domesticity. The poem occupies the space and makes you feel what it feels like for someone to be inside his home. His longer lined sentences create space for this quiet. They mark a kind of rhythm where language elaborates automatically and impulsively into a complexity. I’ve been reading Mutlu Blasing’s Lyric Poetry (Princeton University Press, 2007), where she argues poetic language springs from an infant’s relationship with acquiring language. The phrasing and diction in Stonic feel like a synthesis between the semiotics of language acquisition and a mature rhetoric, where the sentence is aware of the rhythms that register age and the careful perspective that can come with that.

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“Brutal Fiction,” by Stephanie Cawley

There is insight to be found in horribleness. Or the horrible feelings that follow you around while you’re waiting to get past whatever it is your X means to you. And there are methods for reducing the sense that everything is horrible but you can still recognize how horrible it all is in Stephanie Cawley’s “Brutal Fiction” (from Bennington Review: 13). There’s a way I read it where it feels like the poet has been dealing with a horrible life event, taken a pill that would assure something horrible in her was addressed, and then it did just enough. Or I’m being optimistic. Because what’s supposed to be the course of action involving an X, where the particular desires to be around them range from physical intimacy to simple familiarity when they’re physical around.

The bruises faded
and I considered whether I cared
enough to get them
back. Simple progression
of chords, the way a wrist
bends. I don’t read
you a poem from across
the room and then I do. I do
desire, what exactly? God?

Like life could be a series of adjustments. Pills at each juncture. A puzzle where you see all the pieces coming together. But that’s not the together you wanted. The poem is indeterminate in that most delicious way. Where the poet feels like they’re realizing they’ll never finally realize what they need to, and the poem has opted to voluntarily “lose” some of the pieces. It’s so good. Don’t go looking for any happy, revealing moments. Sometimes, the poem asserts, it’s good enough to see life isn’t necessarily getting worse. It’s elaborating. A low level dissatisfaction, elaborated upon. Sense of life you’ve lived so far sounding in, and that’s why the present tense is a grammatical form. That’s exactly how present you are to life. And what if that’s what it will ever be?

Is it viable to live life in a state that passes between “that’s it!” and “that’s it?” A poetry of simply dealing with things. A poetry of doldrums that pulls back on the pronunciation of its d sounds so they’re not as heavy as someone would expect. I remember my lover. I want to go back to my lover. But I know that’s a meaningless statement. I like poems like this, because they carry the tone I feel when I’m “ruminating,” where I have no drive to lift myself out of a mood. Cawley’s poem is kind of a steady-state. Asking amid its dissatisfaction if this really needs to be or should be or could be what steadiness is.

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