A Fiction

“It takes one to know one,” she said,and I had knowingly taken several of them,so when it came time to talk to the cops,I took the initiative to tell themwhere to find Franco (God rest him).And now it occurs to methat we were guests in Franco’s streets,once the sun went down, our citybecame Franco’s house,so slick and shiny with sin.With a narcotic swipeof a midnight hand down inthe crowded park, Franco sharedhis jive with us; our greedy redeyes wide with wild wonder.But Franco was selfish too,and when our little economygot tanked, he disappeared.The night lost its shine;fear slid into our situation.But how unafraid we wereto look like fools. We quiveredwith every question, the brightflashing lights mocked us; theyhighlighted our fading highness.I don’t think myself a fink,but when an action’s time has come,I’ll take it; sorry Franco for everything;now it’s hello sleepless nights. Hellorest of my life. Good night Franco.Shafer Hall is author of the collection Never Cry Woof from No Tell Press. He’s a senior poetry editor for Painted Bride Quarterly and a poetry curator and host at the Frequency Reading Series in Manhattan. His solo poems have appeared in Octopus, Lit, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and others. He's online at shaferhall.blogspot.com.Join the Open Letters facebook page!Return to the Main Page

Romanticism

Romanticism April BernardW.W. Norton, 2009Most of the poems in this collection, the fourth from April Bernard (whom W.S. Merwin deems “brilliant” on the flap copy, a poet of “power and ambition”) are rather lovely—and at their weakest, merely innocuous. A few are knockouts.Romanticism derives a lot of its content and emotional thrust from music. For example, the unassumingly titled “Beagle or Something,” the book’s fifth poem and one of its best:

The composer’s name was Beagle or something,one of those Brits who make the world wistfulwith chorales and canticles and this piece,a tone poem or what-have-you,chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one

—for one feeling a little vulnerable, she goes on to say, and the lyric moment is a sort of epiphany of sadness brought on by the silly music and the vision of a shaking tree seen through the windshield. Few things are more annoying that a forced poetic epiphany, but I like Bernard’s epiphany for being humble and self-effacing and taking place among the “telephone wires and dogs […] along Orange Street”; I picture her—or me—driving and crying down the Orange Street in my neighborhood. Because a dumb song does make you cry when primed for crying.Plus, the epiphanies are few and far between in this collection. Many of the poems are spare, mysterious six-liners, such as:

In a Stolen Boat,push off what seemed safe: The fishing dock,pitch pines, children glazed to sheenby ruthless summers. Pastthe jetty, past the past, to open sea—all violet and green, that choppy path between doom and luck—Put your back into it, and row.

Another high point is the book’s lone prose poem, “Underneath,” one part of a brief sequence titled “Concerning Romanticism.” “Underneath” is a poem I will read again and again for gorgeous, open lines like “Do you know what it means to be ‘under erasure,’ that lovely post-structural notion, your words and deeds red-lined-through by some revisionist, who may be guiding your hand so that you are complicit in the silencing?” I wished every poem in the book was as lush and layered.The third section of the book is the most overtly musical and was the least interesting to me initially—a number are based, according to their epigraphs, on various opera. These struck me as amusing but rather low-risk. Then I discovered the end notes where Bernard discloses that the cited arias, composers, etc., are her own invention. The risk in these poems, then, is that a reader may not get to the note. Being in on the fakery instantly imbued the poems with more intrigue. Which is to say, Romanticism is a rare book I’m inclined to read twice.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney is Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found in Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.

Poemland

Poemlandby Chelsey MinnisWave Books, 2008Chelsey Minnis is something of a poet’s poet, and to certain readers her third book, Poemland, will come off as undisciplined, even ridiculous. But to readers who want to be in on the joke, that is exactly the point. And it is, the book itself professes, “a very expensive joke,” but it is also “a fistfight in the rain under a held umbrella” … “a chance to tell the truth” … “crap coming toward you on a conveyor belt” … “a regretted regret” and “double everything!” Poemland is a book-length definition of what poetry is and what it does, a description through over-the-top metaphor (“This is meat colored candy”) of what being a poet is like. So those who hate poems about poems need not apply: “This is a long boring attack,” she writes. But for a reader like me, who dislikes description and similes in their usual context, this book is anything but boring.Minnis’ trademark is the forbidden punctuation of ellipses and exclamation points:

You must have some sort of agenda to promote in poetry!Such as self-sympathy or vengeance…You must seduce and counter-seduce…And glow with extreme sensual grievance…Like an undeserved sunset…

This is part of the poet’s self-announcing form of subversion. Her poems are subversive, but they’re delivered in the voice of a naughty little girl who defies “god’s wish” by passing out on the “sticky floor” at “catholic school.” (This girly yet grotesque aesthetic helped spur Arielle Greenberg to coin the term “Gurlesque” in 2002.) It’s the voice of a girl who indulges in funeral daydreams: “If you die everyone tells a sad story about you! […] Do not die or everyone will continue to care only about themselves and not you!” This adolescent logic is later echoed in a snide dig at every grownup writer’s fantasy of living on after death through writing: “Death will come to end swinishness… // But my swinishness will continue in my poems…!” This is what Minnis excels at—teetering in perfect balance between the childishly vapid and the ultimately truthful. To write poetry, Poemland claims, is “to enchant someone meaninglessly.” And the book enchants with a long attack of self-contradicting truisms and glittering images of a bad girlhood.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney isDon’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found inColorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.

The King

The KingRebecca WolffNorton, 2009Being pregnant, giving birth, and raising a child is both the most mundane of processes and the most miraculous. In the hands of the wrong poet, it is a subject that can be reduced to some pretty self-important drivel. Luckily, Rebecca Wolff seems well-aware of this danger, so much so, in fact, that she acknowledges it in the collection’s opening poem, “Tonal Pattern”:

Mothers to be on the floorin a ringA ring of mothers to beunembarrassedsinging a progression.But taking her own tailup the assmight interfere with the fetus.

But by no means does Wolff avoid the challenges presented by her subject matter. In the first of the sections titled THE BABY, she bravely notes the god-like power a mother, by definition, possesses: “There’s something ineffable I do / to make the baby grow / a day older.” She does, however, wisely temper such observations, in this case by naming the poem “Excitations of the Banal,” balancing the earthly and divine aspects of being a mother.At times, though, Wolff refuses to mute her treatment of the darker moments of motherhood. In “The Letdown,” she fearlessly admits, “it’s like I lost the baby / it’s not like I lost the baby / at the beginning I wished / sometimes I’d lost the baby.” Instead of building ethos with self-awareness, here Wolff does so through an honesty that we arrive at through her formal control. Her line breaks and lack of capitalization and punctuation act together to create at once a sense of reluctance and inevitability— a realization towards which we wish we weren’t falling.Because of her expert treatment of a difficult topic, and because of her subtle and surprising formal decisions, Wolff’s The King feels like a major work by a major poet, owing and living up to its lineage: Plath, Rich, and Glück.

– Chris Tonelli

Satellite Convulsions

Satellite ConvulsionsTin House Books2008In Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, Portland’s Tin House Books has released an enticing anthology of contemporary poetry: It’s got one of those nice paperback covers with page-marking flaps, proclaiming contents by hip young poets like Matthea Harvey and hip old poets like James Tate. A flip through the TOC reveals many more of the former (the Dickmans, Alex Lemon) and latter (Rae Armantrout, Lorca).It’s a “diverse” mix of contributors, across age, gender, and country of origin — but are the poems themselves wide-ranging, in style and tone? Not exactly. I love many of the poems included here, but if I have a complaint about the book — and this of course is to be expected from a collection of poems chosen by an editorial staff with a unified vision — it’s that most of the poets have very similar sensibilities. They write first-person lyrics that make emotional appeals and tonally exhibit a kind of exuberance which is often pleasing but, after too many poems in a row, a little annoying. If I have two complaints, my other is that Satellite Convulsions feels a bit overproduced, almost smug in its slickness — much like Tin House itself. As in, where do they get off with their huge budgets?But surely this second is a complaint only an editor of a less well-endowed journal would make, and as a reviewer, I tend to search for potential faults. Approaching the anthology as a reader I find it highly likable. I’m happy to have in my possession Olena Kalytiak Davis’s wonderful, sex-drenched sonnets that first appeared in Tin House in 2006 (this from “Francesca Can Too Stop Thinking about Sex, Reflect upon Her Position in Poetry, Write a Real Sonnet.”):

i apologize, i offer no excuse:but, poet, though you have right to scoldit was high-souled you who made my mouth holdwhat it held and tell what it told: a truce …

Another inclusion that mixes high and low language to delightful effect is Darcie Dennigan’s “City of Gods,” which opens with the line “Thistly Augustine, disser of the shy world, I cannot consider your city” and ends thusly:

Hey god in the window, god of loneliness, god of smelly spacesstacked with newspapers, god of walks home from the L before the light ends,if I ask you to please turn my sooty camisole into wingsand me into an industrial moth, I am asking to be man-made—I don’t want to be this girl anymore.

Other highlights in the collection include Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Long Queen” and Bruce Smith’s “Devotion: Medea.”If a few of Tin House’s selections bore or irritate (like Sharon Olds’ line “I feel as if I’m like / a teenage boy in love” — seriously?) most are well worth reading and reading again.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney isDon’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found inColorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.