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Moments Without Names: New and Selected Prose Poems
Sixty-five new poems take their place beside forty-five poems published in Marcus’s previous two books. Employing and many times parodying the structures of discourse by which we have communicated our sense of the world through the ages, Marcus re-examines the notions on which the human species has understood its place in the universe. In the process, he has created his own cosmology—a cosmology by turns humorous, satirical, poignant, and always compassionate in revealing our beliefs, foibles, hopes, and contradictory actions. Morton Marcus is the author of seven books of poetry and one novel, The Brezhvev Memo . A film historian and critic as well as a poet, Marcus taught film and literature at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, until his retirement.
176 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2002
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March 24, 2020
This book was even more disappointing given how much I liked the Amazon sample. In the first three poems, there's a nearly perfect mixture of metaphysical speculation, wordplay and imagination. After that, with the notable exception of his cycle of poems on the subject of fire, it's all downhill or unmentionable at best.
This book features some of the most awkward concepts and embarrassing writing I've ever encountered.
The first line of "Into the New Millennium": "Like a surfer expecting the years will build to a wave and the wave will crest into the next century, I feel the long pull of time catapult me toward shore on my coffin-lid board, forcing me to walk my individual plank with the weight of history, like a pirate ship, behind me."
You can find sleeker figures of speech in the famously verbose epic similes of Dante and Homer. Here, Mort Marcus makes a bad idea worse with very cluttered though amusingly awkward writing.
This excerpt comes from "Journeys": " Everything we undertake is a journey. Frying an egg, sipping a beer at a party, or making a bank deposit, we are on a journey as great as the ones undertaken to Troy, Mecca Mt. Meru, or to Cathay along the silk road."
Now I know there's a fine tradition in American literature about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. But here, I get the sense Marcus' imagination had simply failed, and he did not have the sense to just put the damn pen down. When he starts to write about an egg as a volcano and refers to the kitchen as a "landscape of crockery and glass," I had to turn the page.
And when, further along, Marcus writes that, " the Eternal Mystery is as mysterious as a dog asleep on a porch...," I had to put the damn book down; another piece about the so-called Eternal Mystery involves a night when a man walks down a darkened corridor toward an ominous stranger who ends up being--you guessed it!--a mirror reflection.
Where Marcus is not terribly clichéd, he's often devising unintentionally awkward arrangements of images, ideas and words. And when he's not awkward or clichéd, he's most likely trying to write a meta-fictional piece like "The Mussorgsky Question," which dully meanders around a potentially clever idea but never gets to a compelling point.
The only reasons why I haven't given this one star is that pieces such as "Fire" and a few others have some decent phrases and Marcus liked the works of Russell Edson (a far more enthralling prose poet). As well, I did get some laughs out of the most awkward sentences all while looking at Marcus' wise (or merely wizened) gaze on the back cover. So this must count for something, cheap as the purchase was.
This book features some of the most awkward concepts and embarrassing writing I've ever encountered.
The first line of "Into the New Millennium": "Like a surfer expecting the years will build to a wave and the wave will crest into the next century, I feel the long pull of time catapult me toward shore on my coffin-lid board, forcing me to walk my individual plank with the weight of history, like a pirate ship, behind me."
You can find sleeker figures of speech in the famously verbose epic similes of Dante and Homer. Here, Mort Marcus makes a bad idea worse with very cluttered though amusingly awkward writing.
This excerpt comes from "Journeys": " Everything we undertake is a journey. Frying an egg, sipping a beer at a party, or making a bank deposit, we are on a journey as great as the ones undertaken to Troy, Mecca Mt. Meru, or to Cathay along the silk road."
Now I know there's a fine tradition in American literature about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. But here, I get the sense Marcus' imagination had simply failed, and he did not have the sense to just put the damn pen down. When he starts to write about an egg as a volcano and refers to the kitchen as a "landscape of crockery and glass," I had to turn the page.
And when, further along, Marcus writes that, " the Eternal Mystery is as mysterious as a dog asleep on a porch...," I had to put the damn book down; another piece about the so-called Eternal Mystery involves a night when a man walks down a darkened corridor toward an ominous stranger who ends up being--you guessed it!--a mirror reflection.
Where Marcus is not terribly clichéd, he's often devising unintentionally awkward arrangements of images, ideas and words. And when he's not awkward or clichéd, he's most likely trying to write a meta-fictional piece like "The Mussorgsky Question," which dully meanders around a potentially clever idea but never gets to a compelling point.
The only reasons why I haven't given this one star is that pieces such as "Fire" and a few others have some decent phrases and Marcus liked the works of Russell Edson (a far more enthralling prose poet). As well, I did get some laughs out of the most awkward sentences all while looking at Marcus' wise (or merely wizened) gaze on the back cover. So this must count for something, cheap as the purchase was.
Displaying 1 of 1 review