Poems of the Day - 12

The end of week 2. I’ve decided to take two weeks off doing this and then return for a further two weeks. Just so I have time to do a few things that need done and to blog about a few things that are on my mind.

What loves, takes away by Eleanor Wilmer is this morning’s offering at Poetry Daily. Another gloomy one. The premise is that love “takes away what it aims/ to preserve.” Resistance against the inevitable is futile according to the final stanza, although I suppose there is a glimpse of hope in the brief “brilliance and heat” the sparks can create before they turn to ash. The poem takes the form of a meticulously structured argument. The poet knows what she wants to say and makes the poem say it. The strongest part for me was the bridge between the penultimate and final stanzas:

..........................................unable
to do more than wear down the marble
steps to the altar, smother the fire
we would keep from the wind's extinction,
..................................................or if, afraid
of our fear, we lift the lid from the embers…

Whether we smother or lift (“afraid of our fear” is very good), things end up the same. However (and this may be a matter of taste?), I found this poem very clinical. Its use of “we”, positing a truth that includes myself, the reader, produced only resistance within me. I also had a serious problem with the use of the mother-and-baby imagery juxtaposed between the mythological Venus and the art image. The dreadful human tragedy of a mother inadvertently causing the death of a baby is equal in terms of argument to a smile being wiped off a painting! The images all contribute to the poem’s argument, as if that’s their only use.

The phrase “here is the place to fall/ silent” (nice line-break) effects a sense of poignancy, but what place? There is no context here at all, as if the reader is being kept at a remove. I’m sure the writer was attempting to convey an authentic emotion, but there’s no sense of real human suffering in this at all, just a theory of suffering – an “if” poem. The concluding image of ash is surely a tired cliché. The editors of Poetry obviously didn’t agree with my assessment, as they published it. So, if you want to be published in Poetry, ignore me! 2/6

Interesting one from Micki Myers at No Tell Motel. The two stanzas of New Spectacles, 1727 both parallel and contrast one another. It’s clever stuff, and the imagery in both stanzas is effective, illustrating the potential beauty and ugliness involved in ‘seeing’. The final phrases in both poems give a particularly strong sense of contrast. A strong end to the week for Micki Myers, whose poems I have found quite enjoyable and well-structured. 3½/6

Poems of the Day - 11

Two poems again from Poetry Daily, this time by Susan Stewart. I have an immediate prejudice against cat poems, but I can overcome this if they are any good. The first one is a cat poem, but is well written with close attention to sound and the short lines give the impression of hesitant, but deliberate, movement, both physical and intellectual. The poem asks the question as to what we mean when we think of ignorance as bliss, and what we overlook. It’s fairly well done, I think, although I tend to feel suspicious of poems that finish with a key question. In this case, I suppose a few answers are suggested in the body of the poem. It’s a domestic poem, but the issues raised are global. I’m not really convinced that the issues are raised with sufficient complexity here. Her second poem, Three Geese, seems fairly unremarkable. But for the first one, I’d give 3/6.

No Tell Motel gives us another poem by Micki Myers. The Death of Venus: Florence, 1476 concerns Simonetta Vespucci, modelling as Venus for Botticelli. There are a few moving, bittersweet touches in this poem – the cough “shaking her/ like a sapling in the breeze,” (not exactly original though – that kind of image goes right back to Isaiah 42) the pathos of “for now, at least, she’s his,” and Botticelli's request to be buried at her feet, which was indeed honoured. The sadness of the final line is subtly prepared throughout the poem. I wondered if “blonde bombshell” might have been replaced by something more specific: a real 20th/21st century woman who died too young – unless Micki Myers is gambling on readers thinking straightaway of Marilyn Monroe (if so, mind you, her gamble might be a good one). I had doubts over the switch of Point-of-View towards the end, from Botticelli’s inner world to the observation:

She wipes the blood of her hand
on the back of the pink cloth

where he can’t see.

Like most of Micki Myers’s poems so far, I enjoyed the read, without feeling particularly taken aback. 3/6

Poems of the Day - 10

Simon Armitage has two poems, both titled Sympathy, at Poetry Daily today. Both reflect on the limitations of the justice system and, in northern vernacular, suggest ways in which guilty parties might be brought to account for their crimes. Simon Armitage is unpopular in some quarters, mainly because he has been commercially successful, but I like a fair bit of his material. I’m not really into these poems though, despite the presence of a few great details – the “burnt-out Vauxhall Nova/ for a garden shed, one dead cooker on t’lawn” and “outrunning a dark belt of summer rain/ in his soft-top Merc with the roof rolled down.” The idea of getting people to face up to the reality of their crimes is good, but the narratives in these poems, while they had their twists, didn’t make for particularly striking poetry. 2½/6

Aelgifu of Northampton Falls for The Leader of the Pack, 1016 is Micki Myers’s offering at No Tell Motel. The real Aelgifu was King Canute’s wife. Here she’s recast as a sixties chick who falls for the Leader of the Pack from the Shangi-Las song. It’s a great idea of course. Not sure if Micki Myers really pulls it off, especially at the close where the tears blurring the name on the slate seems rather unlikely, and I couldn’t see how they could turn Cnut into Canute in any case. This poem didn’t grip me or make me laugh and the images it used seemed fairly ordinary, other than the “F in Norwegian” line, which I liked. 2/6

Poems of the Day - 9

Much stronger start from Poetry Daily this week! The Fatal Shore by William Logan is gloomy but the images are imaginative and thought-provoking, not easily summed up. The final image of the Myrmidons plays on the fact that they were Achilles’ fiercest, most disciplined warriors. However, the word over time became synonymous with robotic behaviour, activity without creativity. “Myrmidons out of work” takes a little unpacking, but it works really well as an ending. Everything in the poem tends towards death and intimation of mortality. I didn’t think the “cracked jam-jar” added anything to the picture and wasn’t a particularly striking simile. I’ll have to think further about the “lost Renaissance studies with a sepia cast” image – no more time at the moment – but I thought this poem was good work. 4½/6

At No Tell Motel, Micki Myers gives us OMG! What Hath God Wrought! Aboard the Sully, 1832. I enjoyed this one too. The first ever coded message sent out by Samuel Morse was “What God hath wrought.” The poem concerns the subconscious events that might have led Morse to the invention of his code. My favourite was the imprint of the canvas chair. I wondered if there might have been a better way to deal with the material than the repeated “if only” phrases? Easy for me to suggest that, of course! Not so easy to find alternatives. 3½/6

Poems of the Day - 8

I missed out the weekend, days 6 and 7, but I'm back again for a new week of poems. On Poetry Daily, there’s Springs by Philip Levine. I really like his poetry. I associate him with plain diction and narrative, but it’s less straightforward than it looks and what he says usually feels authentic rather than merely clever (although it often is clever too). In this poem, I find a sense of nostalgia, an interplay between earth and heaven, time and eternity, and slightly surreal tree and plant images – the elm and the rose – which are echoed towards the end when:

That world stamped into separate
but equal steel leaves we called
springs…

So much for “the music of eternity”, which reveals itself as only the mundane agendas of the presses. There are plenty of subtle undercurrents in this poem if you look for them. I’m not too sure about the ending. Like in Floyd Skloot’s poem featured last Friday, it’s important that Levine avoids making some big statement or fake epiphany, but this poem just stopped, as if it didn’t quite know what else to do. 3½/6

No Tell Motel starts a new week with Micki Myers’s Hedy Lamarr, Liz Taylor, and Elizabeth II Meet in the Ladies Room. Judging by the author’s statement, the poems will all be about people from different historical periods meeting up in unlikely contemporary surroundings, which sounds to me like a good idea.

The quote above today’s poem, from Hedy Lamarr, is so good that it would be hard to write a poem to match it:

“Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

The women check out each other and make their judgements in silence – husbands, beauty, jewels – then there’s Hedy Lamarr’s regret at riches lost. But she remembers she is dead and communication becomes impossible. The irony is that she introduced the possibility of this communication technology. It’s quite a chatty tone, but the undertone is that of weighing up life’s achievements, possessions and glamour, and assessing them in the context of what lies after. But from that after, nothing can be communicated. The poem is an enjoyable read. I liked the first lines, and thought “their nerve” was a good choice in L6. I felt that the first few lines of S2 entered just too enthusiastically into prose territory, and wasn’t really bowled over by the conclusion, although it’s effective enough, I suppose. 3/6

Poems of the Day - 5

The Ensemble by Floyd Skloot is today’s offering from Poetry Daily. It’s about a theatre troupe rehearsing an amateur production of Hamlet. Skloot employs quite a tight iambic pentameter but skilfully varies the rhythm from line to line – the poem never succumbs to a ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum monotony. The tone is informal and humorous but not ironic. The foibles of the characters are celebrated rather than made fun of. Skloot succeeds both in sticking to his rhyme scheme without anything seeming forced into the pattern and also in using the line-breaks to create various effects – often of surprise e.g. “inner/ hothead”, “together/ tomorrow”. I loved the lines:

Meanwhile, the Gertrude whispering her way
through another chest cold still does not know
her speech from Act Three, saying No more sweets,
Hamlet! instead of No more, sweet Hamlet!

Skloot captures the seriousness, humour, attitudes, fears, and hopes that run through a cast like that, and makes it simply an object of celebration in the final lines. Perhaps he could have done a little more at the end? Maybe, but I don’t think he wanted to, and at least he resisted the temptation to leap for some fake epiphany. The poem isn't aiming to be cutting-edge stuff, but it is enjoyable, authentic and very well written. 4/6

A strong finish for Kim Gek Lin Short at No Tell Motel with Death Certificate. She succeeds in combining motifs from plastic surgery, religion and magic in what appears to be a scene of death and rebirth. The death certificate, presumably, is the “coiled piece of paper torn from a soup can” and Harlan, the bugman, is “induced,” a word that might admit more than one interpretation. There’s a constant juxtaposition of the sacred and profane throughout the narrative - plastic surgery is compared to the Sunday church service, the configuration of the heavens gives way to an image borrowed from a typical TV magician. So well handled shifts of imagery, a sense of mystery, and good writing. Kim Gek Lin Short’s best of the week, I think. 4/6

No Tell Motel doesn’t post poems over weekends and, even though Poetry Daily still continues, I think I’ll make these posts a weekday-only thing. I’ve made the marks out of 6 rather than out of 5 on the all the posts – just to give me a little more room for manoeuvre.

Poems of the Day - 4

The thing about Poetry Daily is that you never know what’s coming next. Every day is a surprise. But I didn’t expect this!

Today’s poem is Afternoon Nap by James W. Wood. I know James. His chapbook, The Theory of Everything, is on HappenStance Press, as is mine. I’ve read with James before and I’ll be reading with him next month. In November, he’s reading at Poetry at the Great Grog, which I organise. So, potentially awkward! If I say I love the poem, people will suspect bias. If I say I hate it, well…

Anyway, I read it and was relieved to find I didn’t hate it. He’s a good writer so that didn’t surprise me. It’s not one of my favourites of his, but I also know he’s not the kind of person to object to critical remarks. The poem concerns a man sleeping and, metaphorically, a man who has slept through life. He used to run miles round a track in school, but now he dozes off over a “picture of a scoring hero.” The irony of this is cemented by the desperate sadness of:

What would he now say he had missed? Nothing.

This is less self-satisfaction than complete apathy, as we see by the final stanza. I felt a little tightening wouldn’t have gone amiss at times – e.g. “What was it that he had wanted…” is surely better as “What had he wanted…” and "He felt weak" seems unnecessary... It’s a very sad portrait, which is fair enough, but I’m not sure what to take from it. Don’t end up like this guy? Keep your eyes open? The awful thing is that the eyes continue to stare into the garden even when they’re closed off to everything - a sinister touch. 3/6

Kim Gek Lin Short’s poem, Clone at No Tell Motel immediately piqued my interest with:

Later I win a diminutive version of myself in a contest I did not mean to enter.

I also liked the black-paint-eating maquette. The imagery and narrative is lively enough, but… I don’t know… today’s offering lacks a bit of spark. Poems in this vein work because of gratuitous surprise, humour, and often a heavy edge of irony or satire. This poem contains all three and it’s enjoyable enough without - as we say here - setting the heather alight. 2½/6

Poems of the Day - 3

Linda Gregg’s It Is the Rising I Love, from Poetry Daily, begins like an ars poetica:

As long as I struggle to float above the ground
and fail, there is reason for this poetry.

There’s something unfortunately comic about this picture of attempted levitation. The heart of the poem (and easily the best bit) comes in the closing five lines, her sense that we are grounded in the world and can’t rise above it – suffering, desire, mortality. So what difference does poetry make? Perhaps the reason for the poetry is simply as a witness to the struggle, and as an expression of longing to rise above it? However, the poem itself suggests that’s a forlorn hope. Perhaps the failure to rise is meant as an antidote to the sentimentality of a Maya Angelou (“Leaving behind nights of terror and fear/ I rise/ Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear/ I rise” – from ‘Still I Rise’ by Maya Angelou). The Venus birth narrative is a reasonable illustration – divinity may rise, but not us mere mortals – but the whole section on rising “bathed in light and air” seems tired and hackneyed and nearly blinded me to the poem’s strengths. I asked myself (and feel unsure) whether a revamped version of the first two lines, along with the final five lines (from “I get on my knees…”), might have been more effective than the poem as it stands. 2/6

The good news is that I liked Kim Gek Lin Short’s offering, Glacier, down at No Tell Motel. I enjoyed the absurdist humour of the “papier-maché ducts” (that male psychology, trying to help, trying to do something, however fruitless), the glacier which “floats on the cement floor” and, especially, the spinning penguins. The strange detail of the "footed flannel jammies" makes sense by the end of the poem – the glacier’s “chilly discipline of silver” becomes an imaginative symbol of the father’s imminence. The tension exerted between humour and fear is well executed. 3½/6

Poems of the Day - 2

At Poetry Daily, we find two new poems by Billy Collins, 'January in Paris', and 'Divorce'. The second of these is barely worth mentioning, playing on every cliché in the marriage/divorce book. The first poem is typical Collins, but not Collins at his best. He has a great idea: Valéry’s abandoned poems roam the early morning streets of Paris, and along comes a writer… The best section comes in stanzas 5-7 but, as often happens with Collins poems these days, the build-up is too long (and in this case not particularly funny or imaginative). After S8 we get a pointless (and no doubt unfair) description of Valéry, and the poem rumbles to an entirely predictable conclusion - whatever the appearances, Valéry is proved correct (is the 'completion' of the "gorgeous orphan" also the death of her? - the cigarette as smoking gun, together with the 'bed', 'head' and unspoken 'dead' rhyme - or is it just a post-coital cigarette?. Either way, the narrator is smug about it, as smug as Collins depicts Valéry, come to think of it). Collins is well capable of surprising a reader, even those critical of him, but not with this poem. A shame really, because I feel he could have done far better with his idea. 1½/6.

Over at No Tell Motel, Kim Gek Lin Short continues her angel’s datebook with Ms. Chatterley. The angel tells us about her loss of faith, her attempts to cover up what felt unacceptable, her efforts to tame herself into following the party line (all that symbolism about cutting wild strands of hair etc). So she no longer has spiritual aspirations. And she’s an angel! Oh, the postmodern irony… The problem with all of this is that the poem is a giant cliché – child brought up to believe denies her true self until finally the light dawns and she becomes a free secular woman. The image of the mirror and the back-story regarding the father are left for the reader to interpret, but form no meaningful context. How do they relate to spiritual aspirations? – you, dear reader, must do the guesswork. The final phrase about spelling out words for the dead is intriguing – but what words? That’s where you come in again, dear reader. Your job is to fill the gaps. As a reader, I don’t mind bringing my imagination to a poem, but the poem must have resonance within itself for that encounter to become more than an exercise. Here, despite the funny line about parking cars on a Sunday and the superficial oddity of some of the images, the poem follows a predictable path. 1½/6.

I have a wide and varied taste in poetry. I often like stuff posted at these sites. Maybe tomorrow…

Poems of the Day - 1

I thought I’d try waking up to two new poems every day this September – at Poetry Daily and No Tell Motel. Then I thought I’d try blogging about them.

This isn’t an original idea. A while back, Julie Carter did it, as did various others, although I think they commented on three. Anyway, here’s my first day’s reflections:

Poetry Daily offers A Farm in Virginia near the North Carolina Boundary by Kelly Cherry. It’s a ‘time moves slowly and nothing changes despite huge activity’ kind of poem, spelled out (unnecessarily, I thought) in the “it’s busy here; a lot is going on/ most of the time” line. There’s plenty of description certainly, but I didn’t feel that much was going on in this poem. No surprises at the level of vocabulary, imagery or metaphor. The need to rhyme results in fair bit of waffle (that’s an argument against waffle, not against rhyme, incidentally). Perhaps this one is just not my kind of thing. 2/6.

No Tell Motel offers a week’s worth of poems by the same poet. Kim Gek Lin Short explains in her helpful poetic statement that her poems are entries in an angel’s datebook. This first one, Potlatch, is a prose poem about the angel’s sixteenth year. The title stems from a Native American winter festival, but can be used to refer to any feast or gift, linked in the poem to “the wear in my panties,” which links to the previous sentence. I’d interpret sexual activity here. She’s been granted freedom by the elders, but that freedom seems fairly nominal by the end of the poem. She’s consumed by self-disgust (the meat)? The ending, those last three lines or so, is chillingly effective. I’m not so convinced by the first half. It’s trying too hard to be weird, but the attitudes seem entirely conventional in a 21st century secular milieu. Also, “Simple at first, I…” forced me into thinking of the “I” as initially simple, even though I suspect that isn’t what’s intended. I’m underwhelmed by this one, but nevertheless intrigued to read more. 2½/6.