Lesley Yalen: Four Poems from BETTER, issue four
To my mind, young love is a dangerous topic for poetry. It’s explosive. It’s foolish. And it’s immature. That makes two out of three reasons you should write about young love. But if that third reason takes up too much space, and it’s not aware of how silly immaturity can be, then it can truly sabotage everything else in the poem. Yalen’s first poem, “Goodnight Again” risks all that young love. Of course, in this case, it’s not really a risk. Yalen’s speaker is fascinating. She is explosive and foolish. She is so imaginative. But down-to-earth and nostalgic, too. “My family was still / asleep when I returned and the apartment / quivered like a feather on a grave.” appears in the same poem (“The Air Force Plans for Peace”) as “There was a military plane inexplicably / hovering over me and I hid from it.”
I got asked once at a one-night workshop what criteria I use when accepting a poem. It would be very easy if there was some single silver bullet that made a poem “Yes!” versus “Um. No.” Yalen’s poems felt like Yes! echoing in my brain. And for me it’s something about how the imaginative part percolates from among that down-to-earth-ness. It’s two different registers I’m not sure I expected to see.
