MUSEUM POETICA: ANVIL AND ROSE

Obit by Victoria Chang. Copper Canyon Press, 2020 ($17.00)

Who would ever think of the obituary, with its flat, informational prose, as a poetic form?  Victoria Chang has, and she transforms the obit into rectangular prose poems that are often disturbing in their confrontations with mortality, focusing primarily on the illness of her father and death of her mother.  Each poem opens with a particular death, beginning with “My Father’s Frontal Lobe.”  Only an interlude called “I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue.” feels indulgent, with words floating across the page (for 12 pages), with lines like “Everyone wanted   poems     with an emperor    head.”  But thankfully the book gets back to the obits.  At their best, the obits stay focused, but also shift and startle: “I love so many things I / have never touched: the moon, a shiver, / my mother’s heart.”  And “a speck of someone / else’s dead mother blows into my eye.”  Copper Canyon (for once) has given readers a poet who is innovative and fearless.   

Robert Schuman Is Mad Again by Norman Dubie. Copper Canyon Press, 2019 ($16.00)

Poetry and madness have long been considered kissing cousins, often incestual lovers, pushed together by a pseudo-rational society that all too often uses “Madness” to describe the artist.  Thus Dubie’s promising title called for investigation.  But disappointment quickly set in.  For example, take “Ode,” a one-line poem: “What is it about the train’s passing . . .  what is it?” So the joke is that this poem called an “ode” is a non-ode.  Cue the laugh track.  Cleverness, rather than madness, would be a better description of the drive found in this book.  The ending of “Nimrod & the Flying Pig” tells us, “Oh, and / the pig’s name was Protobus. // Protobus is an anagram / of hamlet.  Thelma is an anagram of Hamlet.  Pity the poor pig. / Pity all of us.”  That last sentiment sums up this inspector’s view of poetry after reading this not-ever-really-mad-enough book. O Robert Schuman, if only you were truly and madly mad again.    

Ombligo / Intaglio by Vör Götte. Ricochet Editions, 2018 ($15.00)

It’s not often that the investigative bureau comes across a poetic specimen that confounds and intrigues, but this book does just that.  Vör Götte, a.k.a. Megan Jeanne Gette, opens the book thus: “Can you speak / w/o yr tongue / snapping off in the throat of another?”  How could a modest poetry investigator resist?  Short, enigmatic sections alternate with long, margin-to-margin sections that offer statements like “As I crawl out of the fig by swallowing the fruit flesh I call my condition I have no place to shit” and “A dissected frog is an example of a poet, to teenage scientists.”  There is a delightfully unnatural obsession with a prehistoric frozen corpse called “Iceman,” with much probing of the corpse to learn his innermost secrets.  Interwoven with Vör Götte’s own probing of the personal “I.”  For readers who enjoy a strong dose of the genuinely strange, open a copy of Ombligo / Intaglio. 

Forage by Rose McLarney. Penguin, 2019 ($20.00)

Climate chaos deserves our attention, and poets feel this call.  Understandable, and even admirable.  McLarney deserves credit for taking on this complex topic in Forage, but too often things go awry.  The cat in “Pet,” for example, which we see in the opening, “The way the cat walked, / stalking – Each step” takes me to W. C. Williams’ “Poem (As the cat),” which begins: “As the cat /climbed over / the top of // the jamcloset.”  Yes, this may be an unintended allusion to the Williams poem, but still.  It’s hard to unsee it once you see it.  And while McLarney’s cat poem ends with strong lines, “He would slaughter // his way back to solitude,” this reader can’t help but be “in the pit / of the empty / flowerpot” with W. C. Williams’ cat, in the better poem.  “Fresh Tracks” tells us of the coywolf, that creature part-coyote and part-wolf.  The note at the bottom of the poem, “(after Philip Levine),” reminds the reader that the structure of this poem, with “Out of survival, out of desire for it, out of dogs past being pets,” imitates Levine’s “They Feed They Lion.”  But then, once again, the original poem overwhelms McLarney’s foraged imitation.  Yes, poets must borrow and steal.  But the act of thievery must be done with no telling bloodstains on the hands of the thief.

The Best American Poetry 2020, ed. Paisley Rekdal, series ed. David Lehman. Scribner, 2020  ($20.00)

Like the annual flagellation of the bulls in Pamplona, the BAP anthropological ritual continues. The agonizing over “best” and “American” and “poetry.” The tortured arguments over the included and the excluded (and the banished and the executed). Yet this reviewer cannot resist visiting the scene of the crime. As usual, regardless of the editor, the same names seem to appear: Julia Alvarez, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jorie Graham, Tony Hoagland, Ilya Kaminsky, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Stanley Plumley, Kevin Prufer, Arthur Sze, James Tate, Matthew Zapruder. Will we find out one day that Lehman uses an AI program to select the “best” poetry and has a different “guest editor” write the introduction each year as part of the con? Where are the poets who would surprise or (God forbid) shock the reader? Where are the poems of Karen Head, the official poet laureate of Waffle House? Where is Michael Dickman's "Scholls Ferry Rd.," the poem that was accepted and then condemned by Poetry, causing Editor-in-Chief Don Share to resign? Both Lehman and Rekdal remind readers that we poets might toss juicy rotten tomatoes at BAP, “but everyone wants to be in it,” to quote Lehman. On that let us, sadly, agree.