So I recently took a very interesting class on poetry and literary publishing, and started a Wordpress blog to go along with it. I'm going to "migrate" my posts from that blog back here because after using WP for a time, I decided that I like Blogger's interface (and the look & personality of this blog in particular) somewhat better. So, if you're a friend or classmate who saw them in their original form, don't get too excited at the possibility of a new Disaffected post, because I'm just reposting my favorite bits from WP so I don't lose them. This is the first of those from Jan 29, 2013:
This post is an assignment. The assignment is to find one poem by
Charmi Keranen and one by Cynthia Cruz, copy it here and briefly say why
I liked it. Well, I went a little on the long side. I feel like I
need to put extra effort into this since I ordered my copy of Cruz like a
month ago, and haven’t gotten it yet. I hate that.
And What of the Moss
The couple you saw
lying deep inside themselves
their backs pressed into
that tall blue field
their hands touching
the grass and its sway
There was a stolen bicycle chained
to a crucifix
The Born Again don’t bleed
or pedal – really
I looked, once, into
those gray polished stones
The woman’s lips were moving
The man was closing his eyes
- from The Afterlife is a Dry County by Charmi Keranen (Big Wonderful Press, Brooklyn)
I
like this poem because it gives me a language buzz. I don’t know what
the difference is between actually punctuating the sentences comprising
the lines of this poem, and leaving end punctuation off like she does,
but it does something and I like it. I don’t know what exactly the
difference is between coupleting uniformly, or spacing the lines to one
another in some way besides the way she’s doing it. But the staggered
coupling of lines and injection of white space at uneven intervals
pushes the musicality of composition forward. In this poem I hear, not
only the words, maybe, but the lines themselves ringing off of one
another in space as well as in meaning. I could not have understood
this even ten years ago. It’s taken me until this season of my life to
not necessarily apprehend how a poem works, because I won’t pretend to
know that. But I think sometimes I can feel what a poem is doing when
it does work. I love the image of chaining up a bicycle (stolen, no
less) to a cross, and the sly ambiguity of hanging that one line, their hands touching,
so far away from what follows, so that in that white space surrounding
the line you have the opportunity to digest the image and form a web of
associations around it, which are then frustrated when you then land on the grass and its sway. I
love the sense of isolation in the first couplet, ennui perhaps and the
untouchability (to one another) of the couple lying side by side.
Finally I enjoy not only the image of the crucifix-bound bicycle, but
any poem that seems to take a poke at Christianity gets at least a
slight nod from me, just because I think that religion, our relation to
it, is an evolving entanglement which never stops changing throughout
life (and beyond, if you buy the hype).
And, because my copy of The Glimmering Room
still hasn’t come yet, and I’m ready to slam my own goddamn head in a
car door out of frustration, I’m willing to try another one from
Charmi’s Dry County.
Late Cretaceous
1.
Say the hummingbird’s a home wrecker
Spider-cropped or furious
How else to account for
The missing orbs
The white fields of porches
Heather filling the salvage yard
2.
My landlord is dying
The man in love with the idea
of being loved
Is building an igloo
Sewing morning glory into the seams
Such timing!
3.
The City of God segues into
The half-life of urban decay
100,000 years out from the homeland
We’re still dreaming
Of a mother tongue or a passport
Something personal
To touch against our skin
It’s
tempting to read this as a tryptich, but if that’s the intent I haven’t
put the images together yet to form any comprehensive narrative out of
them, or even anything compelling. I mostly glossed the first and third
sections, but what arrested me the first time through this poem, and
every subsequent time, was the line sewing morning glory into the seams. Out loud, it’s almost anthemic in my ear, and suggests just a hint of Battle Hymn of the Republic (which I can’t explain why I’m drawn to), with that one word glory.
And how dying is related to building an igloo (house of ice, analog to
the grave); construction of a sepulchral structure while still living.
That resonates, but why then is morning glory going into the seams?
Maybe it is anthemic, or has some religious meaning I can’t place. I
want to know why this man is doing the work of building his own tomb,
and I’m not getting enough clues from the remainder of the poem about
it. Nobody’s stopping me from guessing, though.
Then there’s A mother tongue or a passport/…/to touch against our skin.
(post
update 5 Feb)Finally, my copy of Cynthia Cruz arrived. I like her
work, but even though it's a pretty slim volume, I find I need to take
pretty frequent breaks when reading it. That's probably wise when
dealing with poetry of any kind, I think, but I also think it is
especially so when dealing with Cruz. The poems in the Glimmering Room
have this bleak sort of power, an undeniable appeal, but too many of
them, taken too close together, end up simply burying me under their
unrelenting waves, drowning me in her misery. And there's more to her
work than just misery; there is beauty, as the Talmudic Gentleman says,
among the garbage and the flowers. You end up looking at the garbage
end of things a lot more often than the flowers, in the case of this
book, though. I'm not complaining. I'm saying that this poetry is
strong-ass medicine and you need to treat it with respect or it'll hurt
you.
Strange Gospels (p.21)
Hotel Leukemia, rooster with a black
Cockscomb walks in circles
In the fuzzed-out TV screen.
Walls caked in black mold and floors
Pooled in sewage. Water main breaks.
A baby's body ties to a slab of wood.
Turn off the TV set, get up
Off the filthy pink shag.
Light a spoon and watch
The tiny tar muscle shrivel and melt.
Let its armies of death
Come into me.
- from The Glimmering Room, by Cynthia Cruz (2012 Four Way Books, New York)
Here's
the thing: I've talked about substance abuse in fiction, and a little
in poetry, and the image of the heroin cooking down in the spoon is
really powerful for me. I don't condone indulging in controlled
substances, but I think of what she's doing here as more of an extended
metaphor for embracing your demons, no matter what they are. I think
there are days, and I think that these days come more to the "artsy
set," poets included, than for other types of people, when you just want
to throw open the gates of your own personal defenses, defeat
everything designed to keep you safe (from whatever), and invite the
"armies of death" to just come on in. An old friend of mine calls this
"having a scorching case of the fuckits." The fact that she calls the
lump of tar a "muscle" also speaks to me in an etymological way as well
visually, ekphrastically. "Heroin" comes into English from German Heroisch
meaning "this crap makes you feel like superman." Cruz speaks in other
poems about spending some time in Europe, Germany included, and I feel
that she must have known this, or maybe it's all a coincidence but at
any rate it's one more thing which makes the poem work for me.
