Here's my take on some of the poems
that spoke to me in the April Verse-Virtual... Everything in this issue so
wonderfully seems to evoke the world we loved, or worried over, or had various
issues with while also delighting in the countless wonders of being alive, even
the most quotidian... all of this written before, of course, our world changed
so radically.
So,
maybe in light of the more narrowed existences we are all experiencing, I am
particularly aware of the presence of wonder in these poems.
In
Steve Klepetar's "My Father Quotes Goethe at the Restaurant," when the
recitation begins -- "something about golden apples" -- an ordinary
hour suddenly became extraordinary.
"... The waiter walked by and
stopped to listen.
Soon all the waiters were gathered
there
as my father went on through several
scenes.
One had tears in his eyes, another
stared at us in wonder."
I
love poems when some kind of special experience breaks away, organically or not,
from the facts at hand and lifts us all, at least a little ways, out of
ourselves.
I
found a similar pleasure in his poem about the "Magic Girls," who one
moment are simply cousins, making Halloween decorations, and then -- wonderfully
-- achieve poetic lift-off:
"How talented they were, those
magic girls
who sang like wild angels and
climbed trees
and brought home trophies every
week."
Other poems bring home these trophies
at well. It's the madness of spring, perhaps, an idea I take from David
Graham's poem "First Day of Open Windows." The speaker is watching
the truck traffic on a state road when the spirit of Walt Whitman, bard of the
open road and "Song of Myself" inhabits the moment: "in exactly
the American tune
full of stink
and clank, two men on a loading dock
sharing a cigarette and talking
shit..."
Others
share the tune, such as "the lone cardinal," narrating the tale, the
poem tells us, in his own understanding.
The American open road tells a tale,
called an "omen" here, in William Greenway's "Black Pick-up":
"and so I pictured,
just for a moment, me, migrant,
squatting in the empty bed,
my hair blowing backwards,
on the way to some green field
of sweet watermelon manna..."
Read
the rest of the poem to see where the omen leads.
The elevated moment takes place in
the mind of the speaker of the poem in Martin Levinson's poem "Making
Contact," a kind of classic demonstration of the extended metaphor. A
marital conversation turns into a sort of 'inside baseball':
"I haven’t decided what pitch
to fling to the catcher sitting in
my skull, who’s motioning for a
fast ball, which may not be the
best idea,"
... because, as the speaker tells
us, the batter might be expecting just that. We know how important those
'expectations are.' Just ask the Houston Astros.
On the theme of memorable moments --
the unexpected kind -- Penelope Moffet's complex, beautifully written poem
"Trust" has a big cat in its tank.
"By a creek in the woods
a flicker of movement
and there she is,
upwind of me,
fifteen feet away, cougar
I’ve been seeking for decades.
She doesn’t see me
as she comes my way.
Only when I stand and shout
does she lift her head
to stare into my eyes."
This
poems is about as close as I've come to being stared at by any comparable
creature. "Trust" delivers a complex vision of animals and, especially,
people, some of whom, its ending suggests, you shouldn't trust very far.
Mary Makofske's poem "Ask
Her" depicts the state of mind of a student who resists the pull of a
poem's word magic. To the poem's 'her,' an older student, the poem in question is
a flight from responsibility.
"She fought the current,
built
a dam against the poem’s seduction.
It was clear she’d had enough
comings
and goings, alibis, evasions."
Well
told, the poem is a tale with a persuasive conclusion.
Robert Wexelblatt's
"Bolting" isn't about wonder, but it is one. Too big for a brief
description, the poem's rhymed stanzas, alternating with the free verse
passages, provide a kind of commentary: "Her hair’s fragrance is so sweet
yet his liberty’s so dear;
tonight he’ll kiss her feet—
tomorrow he’s not here."
And
I can't help quoting the stanza that's like an entire ballad in itself,
implying the frame of the tale and providing the perfect, down-through-the-ages
refrain:
"Consolation is the pleasure of
soothed pain.
They were sometimes one: a May
night in the rain
when they got drunk and laughed
like they’d gone insane;
when she crooked her finger saying,
Do that again.
Consolation is the pleasure of
soothed pain."
Wonder is dreamlike in Michael
Gessner's "Irving's Piazza," the Hudson River retreat from which one
of the first 'name' American writers found the components of his reveries. The
poem's speaker finds his own inspiration in a Southwestern setting, where
"the moon’s lost
delirium embraces the memory
of casual sylphs, enchanted
poets..."
Find the rest of this poem, and so
many others at http://www.verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html
No comments:
Post a Comment