View from a Temporary Window

by Joanie Mackowski

“Joanie Mackowski's hypnotizing View from a Temporary Window is filled with Kafka-like transformations and metamorphoses and haunted by a sense of the body's strangeness. She writes in a relaxed and lucid manner that pays scrupulous attention to both the imaginary and the real, and to what is uncanny in each.”―John L. Koethe

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published February 14, 2010

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Modern poetry just isn't for me. I've enjoyed some Tennyson and Browning (many of his dramatic monologues especially), most Poe, some Whitman and Dickinson, and even a few Frost pieces to come one century closer to our time. But modern poetry just leaves me flat.

Mackowski's poems have the virtue of containing more meaning that can be determined than most modern poets allow. However, not all of them do. "Lingerie Department," for instance, is a confused mess about lady parts, I think--good word choices, but no plot or event.

The feature I like least about her poetry are Mackowski's line breaks. They seem arbitrary. It's as if she wrote out her poetry in prose two or three lines total in length and then decided to chop them up for poem lines every eight words or so.

Those who can better appreciate modern poetry will probably get more out of this collection than I did.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reflections in a Spinning Palladium Ball

Not unlike the flickering fragments of reflections and distortions cast by a rotating Disco Ball, Joanie Mackowski manages to dangle elements of real and fictitious bits of information before the reader's eye, challenging minds to assimilate the ideas she has so meticulously birthed into poems that scatter in the imagination like both old memories and bizarre new conundrums. In VIEW FROM A TEMPORARY WINDOW she offers twenty eight poems that vary from insights into experiences she has had to fantasias on imagined concepts that could only come from dream stimuli. Example: in '1,080 Photographs of My Nose' (subtitled a CT scan of my sinuses) she writes

They slide me under the humming arch,
where a moon orbits my head, and they watch;

on a screen, mercurial onion pages
flutter. Crows circle down form their perches

in the oaks while frame after frame uproots
another black-wrapped bulb from the riot

of my skull; eels coil my calcareous seas the fade
with the buckled floor, the flooded

and crumbling isthmus, the bone spurs
like cabbage moths folded up on a cow parsnip-

and it's fine. The doctor will prune and tame.
The horizon swells with new diminishing.

Or this ingenious poet can approach the love sonnet with a series like 'Conversation Pieces' and offer

Digression

In the tradition of love sonnets it doesn't
matter who you are, for here you're just an excuse, and ecstatic ur,
a trebled shape, shape troubled, you are static - hour
after hour in my imaginary mouth. Forty million dozen
reasons not to remember your name sing like gold
crickets about your head in an irregular
halo: hello, this has nothing to do with you. In every color
I am you, you breathing here, your wrinkled
sleeves, the row of tiny suns that fastens
your shirt, and I'll eat each sun until your days veer
eclipsed by my tongue. I'm your muscle, your mind, I'm your
penis walking here, tall as you, smiling at you, the loveliest
lily of yourself blossoming from this valley
where I come before I turn and walk away.

Magic leaps form every page of this collection of poems. In 'Case Studies in Metamorphosis' she weaves tales (are we to believe these?) and pauses to polish a poem called 'How Self-Conception Adapts, or Fails to Adapt, to Changed Material.' Joanie Mackowski jumps further toward the bangles of imagined lights, high in the sky of inspiration, than most any poet we will encounter. This is a very special poet.

Grady Harp

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mackowski came to town to read last year, and I thought, well, I can't make heads or tails of these poems, but they sure sound interesting. I finally got around to checking out the book she'd published around the time she came, and I'm still not sure about the poems, though I can be a little more articulate about why....

It's in part that I'm not sure they are about anything, or at least about any one thing, aside from the sound-- I think that there are ideas here, and groups of lines that go someplace, but I'm not sure they come together as poems with singular focuses. Instead, I really think this is a sonic, rather than a sensing experience.

Which I don't think is a bad thing, and Mackowski's got a great vocabulary and a good ear; she's got a brisk sense of rhythm that I think, on occasion, makes her poems dance faster than I wanted, so that I was dragged through lines I felt like I didn't understand, propelled by the sound-- like, to slow down and think about where the poem was going would be to miss the music of it, if that makes sense.

I really wanted to like this more than I did, and I'd read more from this poet-- I've enjoyed some of what I read from her previous collection a good deal-- but this didn't quite work for me, despite the occasional thrills parts of it gave me.

[Xan · Rating 3 out of 5]

My days of reading, (and at times even writing), poetry, are decades in the past. I snagged this book because the author will be making an appearance locally and it was the only title by her that was available, I'm glad I took the plunge. I found Mackowski's prose to be both sophisticated yet approachable. Her topics range from the everyday mundane to a series of Kafka like metamorphoses. All in all a most satisfying read, the impact of whose words I find much less temporary than the window of the title. I would recommend this to fans of more modern poetry, and I myself look forward to meeting the author.