Kent Shaw's Blog, page 5

“Memory and Geography,” by Stav Poleg

How surprise unfolds like slow moving silk kerchiefs. I’m surprised. But I’m slowly surprised. Like if I was commenting on what it feels like being surprised, so it slowed “surprise” a little, I could extend how I feel about it a little bit. Not that Stav Poleg’s poem, “Memory and Geography” is slow-motion. The poem opens on a scene, or comments on what it’s like reading a book where you feel the scene open. That’s the extent of a slow down. The poem makes you think what it’s like when a book opens on a scene, how does it feel compared to that scene in a movie, or a river going past where you’re standing.

Or what about when I woke up this morning, and there was a film crew outside my window filming my favorite scene, but it wasn’t something I’d have read in a book, it just felt like it. But I still look at the main character and think of how delighted I am with the actor they cast. It’s like someone I would have imagined when I was reading a book.

What Poleg does with surprise is let it appear in a turn of phrase, and then she submerges it in another turn of phrase, and there’s all this inefficiency to these kinds of surprises. But it’s OK. It’s how the discursive feels. It’s what it feels like to me each time I open a book to read, like the prosaic is sand, and it takes so much work walking through sand, but the prose is making a world I can occupy. Poleg’s poem is what “occupied” feels like as a sensation. Each of these impressions she considers, reconsider, and counters.

Consider the rain

as two opposite lands—two possible soundtracks
for a sleepless, long week—the principle
of uncertainty—the certitude of clarity—something

in between.

from “Memory and Geography,” by Stav Poleg

The poem doesn’t just give the reader rain, it evokes two different states of rain. And it’s not so hard for me to read the two different soundtracks, and to read the two wildly variable implications into the soundtracks. The uncertainty I feel with some rain. The clarity rain can offer, and how certain I am of it. You know that song, “Rock Me, Amadeus.” I just want to change the words a little so they read, “Discurse me, Poleg.”

Because Poleg just keeps going in this poem. Turning so there’s more thinking about what I’d already thought about. Maybe part of surprise is the familiarity of it, suddenly coming on the familiar, and the delight when you see the familiar. Everything so mundane, and now here’s something I’m familiar with. And what’s the difference if your life is attentive to what might be surprising. I’m ready to be surprised, and life is so much filled with surprise. Why would T. S. Eliot say life was too much with us if there were always going to be surprises that are part of life?

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“Poem Written Under a Pseudonym,” by Daniel Borzutzky

At last, the problem with American poetry is an American poet performing the part of his own poet-ness, and another poet he’s been plagiarizing from all this time, and another poet who likes grocery shopping more than poetry, and people who like reading poetry are like, “Is that a contradiction?” Then they go to a play, and the play tells them the answer to that question. But they better catch the play when it’s performed. What would it mean if you could only see a play every 104 years, the poems asks very directly to the reader’s face. And then indirectly the poem asks, what if the country performed plays and poems only when they could afford to perform them? How many times would the country perform “austerity measures” as administrative acts of procrastinating.

Like in the days of Netflix DVDs, and you’d finally send the DVD for that one documentary back without having watched it. Part of your own austerity measures.

I’m writing about the poem written by Daniel Borzutzky in a recent issue of FENCE. And it feels like a return to the heady Borzutzky days of The Performance of Becoming Human and The Book of Interfering Bodies. Poems about contradiction, and quit telling them they’re contradictions, and the paradox around a person contradicting the possibility of saying anything if they’re just going to contradict themselves. In those books the poet was mouthing the words of oppression or putting words in the mouths of people doing the oppressing, whether they’re the ones writing the rules that are oppressive or they’re the people acting in oppressive ways at people who don’t deserve to be oppressed. That’s the contradiction.

It’s a poetry that pretends there’s not an answer to contradicting yourself. Or wait a second, is this one of those “bad” poems this poem refers to—someone wrote it using Borzutzky’s name so he could be part of the poetry conversations. After all, this particular poem was written to address the question, “What’s the problem in American Poetry right now?” And it might surprise people that many poetry conversations in America revolve around bad poems. Or, no. Poetry conversations in America always seem to refer to the existence of some bad poems doing the most annoying thing, but no one’s going to tell you which poems they’re actually referring to.

Dear Daniel Borzutzky, for the record, this poem isn’t a bad poem. You’ll have to try harder. Please try harder. I am not capable of writing a Borzutzky-sounding devotional to his work, because even his darkest poems feel like an animatronic enthusiasm inside me. Like I can feel the downward pressure of his poetic lines, the stanzas that run me, sprint me, into a contradiction. I am always feeling the truths that lie beneath each lie. And the poem’s intentions to keep piling the lies on that truth to suppress it. How I enjoy the 104-year-old actors in the play. How I enjoy the woman holding the poet responsible for how her husband read the poem. And maybe I shouldn’t be so desperate to read poems that will make me feel bad. This Daniel Borzutzky poem makes me feel so bad and also hilarious. Like a pop song that’s been running through my mind for so long. I’m sorry I can’t say anything legitimately clever about a Daniel Borzutzky poem when he’s taken all the most clever things for himself!

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“Endnotes,” by Coleman Edward Dues

What a challenge for poetry to communicate simultaneity. To enact “while,” like maybe “while” “will have been being” “while” another thing will have been happening “while” another thing and so on. I have been reading a series of very exciting poems by Coleman Edward Dues. Or more accurately I wish I could experience each of these poems “while” I was reading another of his poems, because that would be an exciting thing to experience.

You know, to be doing the method a poem is doing while I’m reading a poem that puts me in mind of doing things, like seeing a fire-breathing dragon donning a CPAP. Or the walker “will have been walking around.” Yes, you read that right! It’s so redundant! I’m afraid I’m just making Dues’s poems sound very didactic. GOOD! Because they are! And if you’re the type of reader summarily reducing descriptions like “didactic” or “formulaic” to a heap of poems you know you don’t like, then GO AWAY! The surprise in these poems is for readers who like to have fun while they’re reading.

I honestly don’t know how to distance myself from the enthusiasm I have for this poem (in FENCE 40) or the other Dues poems I read in that issue of FENCE and Denver Quarterly 57.2. I don’t know how to admit I wasn’t sure whether Dues was going to pull off all this didactic stuff. Because I think poems in this style are risky. There are many ways the underlying sentiment can get drowned out by an impulse to interconnect everything. Using -ing can be a weak present tense to rely on, and “while,” while it’s literally being simultaneous to the thing it wants to be simultaneous to, it can also tax the energy that churns in all the present-tense-ness (”present tension” I think, and laugh at how bad it sounds). Like why not link all these “while” statements to a paratactic sequence. Don’t commit entirely to the simultaneity. Frame and phrase the sequence of observations so there isn’t much grammatical or punctuated space between things. That does a pretty good job feeling simultaneous.

But Dues is like, “while” you do that, I’ll make a “while” repurposing machine. And then he calls it a poem. He exaggerates the simultaneity with a “have been [verb]-ing” maneuver, often stated as “have been being.” And it’s exciting to read! Because overstatement really isn’t supposed to be fun. Or when it is fun, it’s not as explicit what’s making it so fun. It’s like Dues is showing us the inside of the poem-machine while he’s also assembling a carnival of observations, which he “will have been being” observed with the other observations in the poem! OMG. I can feel more exclamation points coming on!! That’s the experience of Dues’s poem! And if you were thinking, “What Kent Shaw is describing is just a stunt,” I would encourage you to read the poem. Because it starts with this intransitive statement, “The heart will have been being, somewhat.” And by apposition, all I can think is these observations add up to the movement of a heart. Oh, generous movement of a heart containing multitudes like all the other idiosyncratic observations Dues pastes onto it!

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“Poisonwell Diaries: Psalms of the Ossuary,” by Shanta Lee

Accretion is a helpful term reading a poem like Lee’s Poisonwell Diaries: Psalms of the Ossuary. Just to keep track of Lee’s body in this poem—it’s everywhere. Her body is being told what it is by someone who may or may not have a vested interest in understanding who she is. But their proximity to her body makes them an expert on what their body tells them about her. On a table. At an examination. Her body is looked at. Looked at closer. The looking is circuitous. It mainly serves the looker’s interest. The poet is that part of her mom her mom recognizes so she needs to tell her what to do about her body. Because the mother had done something with her body. Or had had something done to her body.

The poem is about so much telling about what happens to a body, what she hears about her body, like Shanta Lee is kind of part of the body and she’s kind of sharing with this man what he feels like seeing her body. All these bodies populating each section. Something appears to have happened to this body, prompting an examination. And what if that was the poetic form: examination. The results of many examinations. And the poet’s sensation of being examined.

Accretion is a helpful term reading a poem like this. Because the sections are brief, just glimpses, but there’s something common enough among them that a reader might be like, “I see that.” when they start reading. Then, because of accretion, about halfway through they’ll be like, “I SEE that.” Because there are so many ways race and womanhood register in the poem. And they don’t just register one way, and they aren’t so separate from one another when they’re appearing, the poem might be saying.

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“The Thrush,” by Pergentino José

What are the gods for a thrush? And what might happen to a thrush that it would renounce whoever these gods are? And is it all five gods? All twenty of them? And was it them being negligent or careless that opened the silence where the thrush could discover “small gems of truth”? All of these are questions I wish the poem would ask. But the pleasure of reading the poem is that it knows there isn’t a need to address a reader’s questions. This poem isn’t about me. It’s about a thrush. Who’s disillusioned? Who’s merely distracted? Who’s wanting more time to consider truth, or Truth?

I would say this poem (found in FENCE 40) is aware of the expectations someone might bring into reading any poem (“tell me a Truth,” for instance). This poem is more comfortable with keeping the reader uninformed. An attitude like this spurs the poem forward and carves out empty spaces the narrative can fill in. And, I would argue, it mimetically occupies how questions can lend a certain kind of centering. Because this thrush is too busy with not knowing, or the writer’s just trying to keep up with a crisis that even the writer, Pergentino José, isn’t going to characterize for me. What is meaning for a thrush that “has lost his song, his hopes, the movement of air…” Comments like these would seem to place the thrush in a hopeless position. Maybe it is. But the poem is about stripping the thrush of abstract and concrete sensation. “He has erased himself from fears, from light, from silences…” He has stepped away from his gods and by stepping away he is more something, then he’s more diminished away from everything. And that’s how he finds himself in a chapel.

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“in the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down,” by Andrea Gibson

Andrea Gibson’s poem, “in the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice…”, runs a countercurrent between hope and skepticism, like if the phrase “realistically speaking” could be inflated, so it wasn’t only registering the skepticism about any moment in life but also what life feels like when you’re really looking at the reality with all the intentions you have. Gibson says in their “About this poem” at the Poem-a-Day page that they learned more about life when they were diagnosed with ovarian cancer. And so moments in the poem where the reader is assured, “it’s only the poet being realistic” are also about how they keep finding moments in their life that outmaneuver reality. “Remind me / all my prayers were answered // the moment I started praying / for what I already have.” What a realist, this poet!

And look at how faithful they are to God. Which is what I think a Christianity mindful of kindness encourages faithful people to do. Be grateful. See what you already have. Don’t take those things for granted. And this, for me, is how I see Gibson’s poem moving their religious views past what’s real, or investing what’s real with what’s possibly larger than reality. “How can you blow up // a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it? // I’m infinite, I know.” It’s a dearly stated perspective. Someone understanding how many directions disappointment could come from, but, then, if they keep looking at the present, they’ll see how many ways their life is constructed among those passed disappointments with sincere gratitude. “I love this life, // I whisper into my doctor’s stethoscope // so she can hear my heart.”

ADDENDUM: I can’t help but note this poem’s relationship to the heart like the previous poem I wrote about: “Not on Geological Time,” by Felicia Zamora (the link to my reading of the poem).

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“Not on Geological Time,” by Felicia Zamora

Imagine a human body that was mimicking or participating or sympathetic to geological time. The all-time of earth. A human of the earth, born on earth, with biological processes that must be cognizant of earth. Not special among the earth. But special because the earth is present inside her. While she’s looking at a lake. Felicia Zamora’s poem is called “Not on Geological Time” (published in Bennington Review, Issue 12), but she’s looking at lake in summer. Contemplating the different summers that might have visited the lake before, like her visiting the lake now. In summer. Making her heart “clench.” Then it “gapes.” “Did you know you were writing about truth?” Which is what I always want to read about truth. Not so much Truth, in the capital T sense, or maybe that Truth, but only if it’s going to lead me to the feeling of truth. The way truth must bleed through so many different moments and facts around me. MY aorta valve when it “clenches.” MY aorta valve when it soon after “gapes.” Maybe these are geological facts like they are for Zamora. Maybe rational proofs.

But the proof itself isn’t where the truth resides, it’s the momentous feeling when rationality starts gaining speed. It is arriving me to an especially salient moment in the logical proof, and the poetic, “Oh!” that is the feeling when I am bleeding in favor of truth. Zamora’s body, too, bleeding through that aortic valve. And I’m aware the valve is probably not technically bleeding. Is blood pumping bleeding? I’m glad Zamora’s poem doesn’t necessitate me asking that. Because she says it, and it’s so for me. And then she connects the body to the earth’s body, or “landscape.” Or “the silhouette of a mountain range / digs truth in geological time.” Zamora says. Everything’s connected. And these natural facts blend or blur or interlock so naturally, I imagine the blood. The poet’s thinking of her blood. Tracing its circulation. Among all the naturals of nature that she stands among. In summer. Looking out at a summer lake.

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“Beauty, Gaze Unaverted,” by Anna Sandy-Elrod

I’m not really sure if “new lyric” is even a thing anymore. Like in 2013 I found out in 2008 people were trying to get a handle on that satisfying middle ground between lyric poem and personal essay, and I thought, this is where I want to be. I want to read poems that are personal essays being poetic or appreciating the role lyric and story and disclosure could take on when they’re in that mimesis trance state, that state of mind state, that thinking and reading process bound together state. I want to read things that lure me into thinking like the writer was thinking while they wrote the piece. Not because I’m empathetic, or I aspire to extreme empathy, but because I find thinking to be a satisfying state of mind. And reading puts me in the mind of thinking anyway. But with work that I would call “New Lyric,” I feel like I’m really feeling the writer. We’re considering the subject together, even if it’s the writer actually doing the work on the page.

So even as Anna Sandy-Elrod’s essay, Beauty, Gaze Unaverted (from Pleiades 42.2 & 43.1) considers what feels like a concrete subject involving womanhood, using these very concrete angles to bring a reader like me into that subject, so I feel involved with the subject, maybe I’d even say I feel framed within the subject (though it’s not my lived experience), I also get the pleasure of reading the text. I like how her essay establishes a common ground with me by opening with an observation about Medusa. We all know of Medusa, and we might have varying knowledge about the gorgon’s backstory. And don’t worry. Sandy-Elrod is going to elaborate that common ground so she and her reader occupy similar spaces. I like how texts do that. Inform me and teach me.

And then, with Sandy-Elrod’s essay, how the informational is implicitly tied to her private life. And also tied to her understanding of life as it’s lived by a young woman growing up in a patriarchal church. Little did a reader of her essay know, this life can relate to the story of Medusa, or be felt by the writer so it’s resembling Meudsa. I’m not entirely sure how to articulate the nature of Sandy-Elrod tying her life to Medusa. It might be more a congruity with that isolation Medusa had imposed on her as a result of her monstrosity. And it’s the nature of the writer’s private information, or her sexuality that feels like a secret now folded into the lyric essay form that, I would argue if it’s still relevant to argue something is or isn’t an example of New Lyric, sets Sandy-Elrod’s piece in that between lyric-and-prose space. Taking advantage of the unique ways lyric can engage a reader with its subject, then exploit the lyric fragment so reading is an intentional search for the next relevant point, engaging, say, with a paragraph’s ending. So when the reader is piled onto an entirely new subject they are looking for the implicit that lives in the gap between two paragraphs to serve the essay.

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“Study of Two Figures (Pasiphäe / Sado),” by Monica Youn

What draws me into Monica Youn’s poem, “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphäe / Sado),” is the variety of “containers” fashioned in the poem. A container formed by the concept of race. A literal container each story’s main character has to fit themselves inside of. The poem itself as a container that juxtaposes two stories—stories that likely hadn’t been considered in relation to each other, but then, by virtue of the poet, who has positioned herself as a part of the poem container, everything gets contained together. And then, like in a shell game, the poem keeps moving the containers around, so what was one juxtaposition gets re-viewed and reconsidered as something else. Put directly, the poem complicates the idea of setting things in a container, showing that even someone opposed to the biases containers can bear in the general culture, they can’t avoid the meaning a container imposes. So, for instance, if Asianness exists as a container, and that immediately signals the poet’s identity as Asian, there is no escape for the poem from an Asian American category. And yet, not everyone in this Asian American poem will be read as Asian. The figures identified as “tourists” or an “artist” depicting the container (smaller containers in the poem), those people will likely be read as White. All these containers are so complicated!

And the poem only complicates this further by having so many “hot button” containers, like race, which makes the poem’s other “hot button” issues more present and considerable. And, from my perspective as a reader, it fashions the poet in an authoritative position that bears itself out through the remainder of Youn’s book, From From.

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“Study of Two Figures (Pasiphäe / Sado),” by Monica Young

What draws me into Monica Youn’s poem, “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphäe / Sado),” is the variety of “containers” fashioned in the poem. A container formed by the concept of race. A literal container each story’s main character has to fit themselves inside of. The poem itself as a container that juxtaposes two stories—stories that likely hadn’t been considered in relation to each other, but then, by virtue of the poet, who has positioned herself as a part of the poem container, everything gets contained together. And then, like in a shell game, the poem keeps moving the containers around, so what was one juxtaposition gets re-viewed and reconsidered as something else. Put directly, the poem complicates the idea of setting things in a container, showing that even someone opposed to the biases containers can bear in the general culture, they can’t avoid the meaning a container imposes. So, for instance, if Asianness exists as a container, and that immediately signals the poet’s identity as Asian, there is no escape for the poem from an Asian American category. And yet, not everyone in this Asian American poem will be read as Asian. The figures identified as “tourists” or an “artist” depicting the container (smaller containers in the poem), those people will likely be read as White. All these containers are so complicated!

And the poem only complicates this further by having so many “hot button” containers, like race, which makes the poem’s other “hot button” issues more present and considerable. And, from my perspective as a reader, it fashions the poet in an authoritative position that bears itself out through the remainder of Youn’s book, From From.

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