the world a letter

I’m a little behind on the New Yorker poems thing, so now comes two weeks worth. Can you take it?

Rosanna Warren, “From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine, VII.” I’m unfamiliar with I – VI, or if they exist, but this is lovely on its own. She shifts between abstraction and solidity satisfyingly and lightly (the poem opens: “Distance was the house in which I welcomed you./ But it was in the river/ that we became cadence, there where the current braided/ together again, after the stone stanchion parted the stream”), and her consonants follow a similar pattern, discretely repeating in an ‘organic’ burble (like the ‘r’s and ‘s’es of those just-quoted lines). Virtually the whole poem is water, and this gives her a chance for her repeat words to modify different objects, a syntactic mimesis of water moving through similar and discrete patterns (“water/ poured around us, surging up from springs” then, three lines later, more restingly and transformed from an out-around to an in-outward experience, “I am poured out like water.”) which ably involve the speaker essentially in the river as well as the relationship as well as the poem. Some precious flashes, nothing criminal (“Leonardo’s woman, ex.). Lovely ending, both satisfying and maybe a little too neat (“Sorrow/ is a liqueur. Drink deep. We will all be consumed.”) on reread. All the poem ties up in those last lines. Based on how ‘open’ you like your poems, you’ll like or not like it. Personally, I like it most first read, and feel admiration now, on reflection. Sticky topic, intentional craft, when so able. But this is a good poem. Probably the kind the New Yorker would publish more often if they were more on the ball; not a departure from their aesthetic, as I understand it, but an intensification.

Ron Slate’s “The Final Call,” a roundup of easy types who personify various end-of-the-world logics (“The pair of polite apostles,” “an economist explains,” “analysts,” “think tanks,” “The ram’s horn,” the last one, maybe, the only one which doesn’t smell like the result of a mid-80’s SNL brainstorm). Yeah. But guess what? There’s a nice poetic image to save us (“We’re called to parasail/ from hilltops . . . Ah, another soft landing.”) with another vaguely ominous nice poetic image to keep us guessing. Personally, I’d consider this a ‘political’ poem, pace the discussion going on on Victoria Chang’s blog. (I’d also consider Katha Pollitt’s poem in the next issue (below) a political poem.) (Look out, just because there's a bunch of crazies who haven't been right yet doesn't mean the world ain't dangerous.) Basically, it has a two-dimensional consciousness of the kind I get when I spend too much time reading the newspaper & political blogs &c. The challenge is to write political poetry with more than two dimensions. The reason it so infrequently happens is, I believe, simply put, that when you think in more than two dimensions, there are more interesting things to write about than politics.

I’m going to pass on Liz Rosenberg’s “1:53 A.M.” Kinnell-lite and phoned in. No water image, though.

On to the next issue (the fashion issue, btw). Elizabeth Spires, “Nightgown” (clever, no?). This poem starts off with a nice kind of uncanniness—the poets voice inhabits the nightgown, which apparently wants autonomy. The height of the unheimlich is the indented stanza “Someone is inside me./ Someone is continually dreaming/ dreams not my own/ so that I am pulled this way and that!” Unfortunately, it all unravels with that last, terribly clever, line. (The NYer seems to have a weakness for this coy-yet-serious deployment of dead idioms in superficially novel engagement with their surroundings. ) The next lines are ok, but then it descends into sentimental lyricism; shies from the frightening autonomy the poem must have dreamt of, at some point of its composition. Oh well. No water imagery unless the allusion of “the white world” to snow counts. I don’t think it does.

And Katha Pollitt’s “Cities of the Plain,” easily the flattest of the bunch. Oooh, angry god. Lonely god. Oooh. “Killing them/ made him want to kill them again—“ “Being God, he would not permit himself regrets.” oooh. Maybe I’d humor it in a workshop I was running, if it was the beginning of the semester. Pollitt does (did? I haven’t read it in a few years) a great job at The Nation, and I’ve read good poems by her in the past. This ain’t even a bad poem. &, incidentally, no water imagery, unless you count “the turquoise baths.” I’m noticing that maybe the best NYer poems are the ones heavy with water. Just a theory, an addendum to Bernstein’s thesis (disproved in these two issues, btw).

I apologize if anyone has previously enjoyed these poems; the statements made above are entirely subjective and meant only to judge the poems, not any potential readers of said poems. I mean, the NYer doesn’t even know I exist. So.