The Garden of Verse: How Should We Talk About Our Lives in Our Poems? Frankly? Not At All?

  

    How do we talk about our lives in poems? Should we? How frankly? Alan Walowitz 'goes there' in poems about his wife and a therapist. A poem with an arresting title, "My wife says fuck in the middle of the night" combines intimate detail with quotidian annoyance to yield ironic theology.  We go from sexual dysfunction and hot flashes to the annoyingly petty demands of the cat --

"It is the middle of the night.
Nothing is wrong.
Something is always wrong."

 -- to a semi-ironic proof of the non-existence of God. The poem's last line is classic 'attitude.'

            In a second poem, "Truly," a poem about being late for a therapy appointment, personal difficulties are both revealed and mocked. The therapist's nod, the speaker tells us, "says/
she’s working hard to think well of me
but is afraid our time is up." If I had to come up with a term for what is so good here, I think I'd say 'voice.' These poems have a winning voice.

            We could look at Marilyn Taylor's brilliant, funny "At the Cocktail Party as a confessional poem as well, if we weren't enjoying it so much. The poem appears to bemoan the speaker's tendency to choose the wrong partners:

"And yet I’m always heading for
those characters I should ignore—
the ones with habits I deplore:.."

            But what we're experiencing is the poem's joy in answering the implicit challenge of 'how can I continue link all these rhyming end-words together while keeping readers (and myself) interested and amused'?

            The solution is this rambunctiously clever poem.

            The three "Harry" poems by Michael Newell have the fraught, complex, emotional weight of confessional persons, but the weight lies on the shoulders of a created character, a literary device. In "HARRY TELLS HIS DAUGHTER GOODBYE" we are told

"it is a big step, one that looms without pity
before her, and old Harry, tired Harry,
ready to be alone Harry, fears for her, yet
he does not know how to allay fears, hers

or his, and awkwardly pats her shoulder
as she boards the train taking her
to a future where they will seldom see
one another..."

The heavy mood is less redolent of sending-your-kid-off-to-college separation anxiety -- "they will seldom see/ one another" --?! -- and more like a divorce. The effect is both moving and unsettling. These poems make me want to hear the rest of the story. What happens to these people? How does the story resolve?

            There's a strong emotional weight in Steve Klepetar's three January poem, their subjects a shockingly disturbing nightmare, dementia, and a visit by three ghosts who "squeeze through the wall into our living room."

          All three poems have a dream-like quality that feels more convincing than realism -- in the way we can wake from a dream and believe that something in our mind is trying to tell us something important about our lives. More compelling, that is, than an account of an ordinary afternoon, say, in which we are not visited by three ghosts who demand wine and behave like shady characters who drop in from a film noir to mess with your life. In "Wine in the Afternoon" we read:

"We are all tipsy now, and a little sleepy.
The woman has climbed onto her lover’s lap,
and the other man eyes you hungrily.
I light a candle, recite a verse I keep in reserve
for such occasions, Ozymandias, king of kings."

            These poems are compelling, disturbing, and possess the power of an enigma.

          Michael Minassian's THE MARRIED COUPLE’S POSTCARD, a poem that appears to lament the passage of time, recalls a boat ride down a river:

"Gertrude claimed a plant named
dead man’s fingers could pull lovers down,
but it is the weight of our own lives
that brings too much water."

            While this may not be confessional, since circumstances not spelled out, the poem's sad nostalgia for time lost and unretrieveable is one of poetry's great universal subjects.

         Joe Cottonwood's poem "Measure, Mark, Measure" is pretty frank with the details. A carpenter on a job he tells his employer, a grandmother, that she doesn’t look a day over 35." Then we read -- wondering sort of 'measuring' are we about here? --
"Measure, mark, measure. Saw, hammer.
She removes her top. Are we okay?
I tell her we’re fine.
She stares at me hard. Do I still look 35?
Yes, I say. (I want my pay.)"

           The poem leaves with the dilemma of how to respond. We think 'thanks for sharing.'

           As in Taylor's rhyming poem, formal qualities move Penelope Moffat's "Bakery Girl" satisfyingly forward. Using three-line stanzas and the repeated refrain "I couldn't see" -- a phrase that brings us closer to what we can and ultimately will see -- the poem's structure slowly pushes forward the telltale descriptive, the man "in soiled white smock and sly mustachio."

            Her poem "Caught Between" sketches a fraught family system in taut mysterious lines. It holds us like an enchantment, a spell.

            John Stanizzi's poems take on a different sort of formal challenge in his "POND" project, flowing from his resolution to visit the same pond each day and record his impressions. The four daily contributions presented here are dense, tightly written, 4-line poems with sharply observed detail and a satisfying fullness. And, oh yes, the other formal challenge is the first words of each line will begin, in sequence, with the letters "P. O. N. D."

And yet there's no sense of forced artificiality in quatrains such as this:

"Piety arrives with a female evening grosbeak.
Offed by chill wind, the leaves cover the wet forest ground.
Nearby, the sound of running water
dazzles like a miniature Topajos, miniature Amazon."

          Laurel Peterson's "WHAT WE SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT" -- a title that makes me think, oh, no, we don' t have worries enough already? -- connects the big picture, the cosmic questions, with those here-and-now problems we probably are at least vaguely aware of but don't want to think about. You could call this a confessional poem by the universe, which raises the possibility of getting 'Hale-Bopped' by a wholly unpredictable disaster. A marvelously packed and put together poem.

            Robert Wexelblatt's excellent contribution to the January issue "Advertisement for A Poem " answers all our questions about what to put in a poem:
"This is going to be precisely the sort
of poem you relish most.  The subject
will be one dear to your heart, the diction
not merely memorable but downright
non-biodegradable."

            Like its purported subject, the ideal publishable poem, "Advertisement" is subtle, superior, its mildly acerbic tone just the right corrective to the saccharine tendencies found in those poems whose diction is too familiar, their subjects too mundane -- like lemon cutting through the honey in the herbal tea you're drinking for your cold and sore throat. The content is "subtle, but not esoteric." It finds the middle way "between the cozily
familiar and the jarringly unforeseen"  It doesn't "have too many allusions and
they won’t be insultingly obvious
or tiresomely recherché."

            The entire poem, brilliantly detailed, is a treat to read from start to finish, a wholly effective and credible parody. Possibly, like me, other poets will find some of their own tendencies specified within.

            And readers will find all these amid many other fine poems in January's verse virtual. http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html