Museum Poetica: Anvil and Rose

Nota bene: Caesura hereby launches Museum Poetica.

This Museum shall be composed of four regular monthly galleries. These shall be as follows:

1) “Anvil and Rose,” being a gallery of fortnightly columns of five lightning-reviews on recent publications of poetry, alternately written by two witty, sometimes spiky, flâneurs: Inspector Watt, and Herman van den Reek. 

2) “Translucine,” being a monthly gallery of work, in bilingual offering, from a great and too-little known poet writing in a language other than English, introduced by the translator, and curated by Jorges Lewis Borge.

3) “Skáld,” being a monthly gallery featuring the work of an important living poet writing in English, whom the general coordinator of the Museum Poetica (Frederick Wyatt) deems worthy of a great deal more consideration; this gallery shall carry a text of appreciation from an invited poet-scholar, as well as a capacious photo essay focused upon the Skáld and his, her, or their informal and poetic history, personally curated and captioned by said Skáld. 

4) “Neglectorinos,” being a monthly gallery that highlights a selection of work by a poet in English no longer living, and who is judged to be alarmingly neglected and in urgent need of more attentions, introduced by an invited poet-scholar, and curated by W.B. Ozymandias. 

We welcome you now to our first installment of “Anvil and Rose” in Museum Poetica. Thank you for your presence, and please continue to keep us company. Surprises await, poets, five times a month.

—Frederick Wyatt

[Cle Elum, Washington, November 1, 2020]

Woodlanders by Bob Arnold. Longhouse Publishers, 2019, $15.95.

In the age of the tweet, you’d think there’d be a renaissance of the short-short poem. Yet there’s no sign of this, except for Bob Arnold. For decades he’s been creating evocative short poems, in the tradition of Cid Corman and Lorine Niedecker, making use of every word as only someone who works with wood or stone can do. And yet for decades he’s been ignored by the poetry cognoscenti, who all reviewers must bow down to three times a day. In this poem, even the title is put to use as if it were the first line: “I Saw Her Snow Tracks // from earlier in the day-- / I followed them to / where I am today.” In fifty years, if the planet survives, some scholar will “discover” the poetry of Bob Arnold.

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The Tradition by Jericho Brown. Copper Canyon Press, 2019, $17.

 Who writes the promotional text on the back of poetry books? The publisher? The poet? An intern with an MBA in marketing? On the back of this book the reader will find an anonymous promoter going on about this book revealing “the evil that pollutes the everyday.” Evil as dirty air? Really? Wait, there’s more: “each emergency in the garden of the body.” The body is a garden in a book that deals with HIV? Here’s a wild idea for poetry publishers.  Just go with a poem from the book. The back cover does include “Duplex,” which has this startling line: “I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.” (So much for the “garden of the body.”) How about that poem, in a larger font, standing alone on the back cover? Let the poem speak for the book, instead of Copper Canyon hype.

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In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché. Penguin Press, 2020, $24. 

Be ye comforted, for even unto the lateness of this ever more late world, even with unnamed wars and unspecified massacres, we have the poem, which offers such spiritual solace as: “In a still mirror, in a blue within / where this earthly journey dreaming / itself begins.” And “you have yourself within you / yourself.” This book offers poems “full of ghosts calling out,” desperate for more poems with spiritual solace: “to speak is not yet to have spoken.” Poems “with their infinite paths to God.” With all the victims rendered anonymous (“you”), with all historical specifics removed, Forché gives us witnessing with no personal action required, no personal responsibility of any kind needed. Only the lovely, spiritual poems. The perfect consumer item in the lateness of the capitalistic world.   

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Hemming Flames by Patricia Colleen Murphy. Utah State University Press, 2016, $16.95.

You’ve got to admit this is a great line: “First I look at some Eliot, which puts me / straight to sleep . . . .” And even better: “Like trying to read Eliot, blah blah blah.” But these lines offer a dangerous temptation to the reader of this book of neo-neo-confessional poems (“Dad screamed, / I’m a better driver drunk than you ever will be sober. / When he passed out in the snow I grabbed the keys” and “You learned to masturbate when I learned / to menstruate”). To which a reader might say: “Blah blah blah.”  And be forgiven. “But this book was chosen,” you could argue, “for the May Swenson Poetry Award Series by Stephen Dunn.” And that’s the problem, right there. A poetry-prize system with a big-name poetry judge giving us yet another prize-winning book of yet more neo-poems.

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The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Jeronimo Pizzaro and Patricio Ferrari. New Directions, 2020. $18.95. 

Ignore the awful cover — bolts of colored lines cutting through a staid black and white photo of Pessoa, trying to make him look hip. In poems dated from 1914-1922, the voice of Alberto Caeiro, with his punchy, direct statements, sounds as if he were alive today: “I find it so natural not to think / That I sometimes laugh to myself” and “Truth, lies, certainty, uncertainty . . . / That blind man out in the street knows these words too.” Can you imagine a poet in any MFA workshop writing lines like this? How long would it be before the long knives slipped out? These remarkable poems, in a supple translation, will make you think Whitman had a hand in Caeiro’s work, and Caeiro had a hand in Whitman’s work. While all the time Pessoa is besieged with loud bolts of color that keep pestering him. //