Unadorned poetry

Michael Arnzen's Dying is a chapbook of poetry written as a parody of Martha Stewart Living. The concept is compelling but each of the 16 poems seems like it was going for the easiest laugh possible.

Most of the poems are under 100 words, the final poem is the longest, and all of the poems ask how a murderer who was also into crafting and home decor would consider the uses of their victims.

The poems themselves aren't bad, and there are bright spots of linguistic cleverness that make the book fun enough to read but overall I'm glad I didn't pay for this.

The best part of the chapbook is the concept, the most well executed part is the cove art. You're left wondering why someone dedicated the time and money to making this one silly idea into a 20-page reality.

It seems like it was a lot of fun to write but there's a problem when your 16-page book is tedious.

Cheers,
     - Alli

A window into someone else's pain

I need to remember that I don't like reading poetry. It's not that I hate poems, it's not that I think most poetry is bad, it's that poetry requires intense concentration and a tremendous amount of emotional literacy that I think I'm lacking.

In spite of that I did find myself enjoying Wanda Coleman's African Sleeping Sickness, and I found myself being wounded by it.

Coleman didn't write this book for me to understand. She didn't mean for this to be a collection of anecdotes for middle class suburban white feminists to fawn over and feel connected to the issues facing black women. Wanda Coleman wrote this book because she'd been hurt, badly, by the world and by people who should have been helping her instead of striking her down over and over again.

And for all that Coleman wrote of her pain I'm sure she wouldn't give half a shit for people using it as an excuse to wallow in white guilt. So instead I'll focus on what is so powerful about her poetry: she doesn't glorify, she doesn't make-pretty, she doesn't tidy up her world before sharing it. She speaks the truths she knows and some of those truths are sores. And many of those sores are weeping.

Coleman published these poems between 1972 and 1990, and it's painful that so many of them still speak ugly, relevant truths in 2016. "Emmett Till" is Coleman's mournful, furious poem about the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. Her poem was written in 1986 and thirty years later the same awful rage and loss and sadness could be applied to the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, or any of the hundreds of black boys killed by white supremacy since Coleman wrote her poem. It is wrong that these boys keep dying, it is wrong that black girls and women kept being left behind or overlooked by society, it BURNS that the kind of injustice that Coleman railed against is still so prevalent in American society.

African Sleeping Sickness was daunting to read. It demanded attention and respect, it sighed with exhaustion, it felt alternately defeated and defiant. It made me sick of a world that is sick and it made me wish that there was anything I could do to show Wanda Coleman some kind of improvement in the world - but there hasn't been much improvement in the world since Wanda Coleman wrote about it.

Coleman died young, younger than she should have at any rate. I don't think the Black Lives Matter movement would have surprised her, nor do I think she would have been overly optimistic about it, but I do think she would believe that the movement is vital. I don't want to speak over black voices, I want to use my white privilege in a white supremacist country to uphold the voices of people who need to be heard more than I do, so I'll end this post with Coleman's voice instead of mine:

BLACK AGAINST THE NIGHT

what's looked for is many bleeds ago
may never have evah

what you don't see is what you get/an unrepentant
unresplendence of abortions and too-lates
what's dangling status post lynching: the overweight, the
hanky-head, the dead on her feet (aka fat forty and
fucked up)

zero in on the left laughing eyeball, the right orb
bloated, purulent with hate

talk about reparations? hahaha

besides, there ain't cash enuff

Coleman, Wanda. African Sleeping Sickness. Black Sparrow Press. Santa Rosa: California. 1990.

Terse, touching, tiring

It almost feels like you're obligated to love the poetry of Emily Dickinson if you're an American. And much of her poetry is loveable - she writes about butterflies and birds and bees so much that sometimes she reads like a nineteenth century Lisa Frank; she has an incredible, almost overpowering grasp of grief; she was an eccentric loner with strange habits and Americans fucking LOVE it when authors are a bit odd.

For all of that I can't love Dickinson, or at least not all of her work. She has many, many poems that speak to me, but she's also got a whole lot of poems that are written in praise of/glory for her God and I just can't really share in that. Many Dickinson poems are so confident of everlasting life in the bounty and glory of God that they sort of seem to undercut the poems of hers that I love, those about loss and grief and mourning. If she was so bloody confident about an afterlife where she would join those she loved and never suffer anymore then why is so much of the rest of her poetry about the sundering of loved ones?

So I'm a bit torn on I'm nobody! Who are you?, a Scholastic Press collection meant for tweens and teens. I mean don't get me wrong, there are some really goddamned good poems in this book, and I wept while reading some of them. But I also spent a lot of my time while reading making bets with myself about how many more poems I'd read before coming across another that was all about the permanence of the soul and the helplessness of mankind before God.

I guess what I'd really like to do is make my own Dickinson collection - one that's a bit more internally consistent - a selection of poems where the focus is on how hard it can be to be human, how glorious it is to see the sun and the sea and the flight of birds, but with none of the matter of fact (and less interestingly written) poems that leave human effort and emotion behind.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Dickinson, Emily. Ed. Edric S. Mesmer. I'm nobody! Who are you? Scholastic Press.
     New York: New York. 2002. (1886).

Somewhat insipid but not worthless

This is one of my in-between-books; when I've finished with one novel but haven't decided which one to move on to next I'll read a chapter or two or even just a few pages out of an in-between-book to pass the time. I can't really remember when I started reading Poemcrazy, but I know it's been a long, mostly unpleasant, time.

I have an uncomfortable relationship with poetry. I write poetry, but I hate most of what I write. I read poetry, but I hate most of what I read. But the poetry that I've read that I don't hate is poetry that I love with a terrifying and potentially unhealthy intensity, and the poetry that I've written that I'm proud of tends to be prickly and morbid and really not very helpful to anyone in the long run.

Wooldridge's memoir/instruction manual is full of the kind of poetry that I hate (and yes, a lot of it is hers but sadly even more of the stuff that made me roll my eyes was written by children). It's crammed with exercises that seem too schlocky to take seriously but is so sincere that I've got to look at my own cynicism with a grain of salt.

I guess what really bugged me is that I don't think I'd get along with Wooldridge at all and most of this book is written in a very conversational style. Wooldridge tells you about wandering around in nature and renaming the flowers for the sheer joy of it and deciding what parts of Native American, Asian, and Indian cultures are important for her to use as writing tools - it's exactly the melange of nature-loving cuddliness and appropriation that you'd expect to find at a yoga retreat.

But, for all that Wolldridge's personality sets my teeth on edge, and for all that she spends what seems like an exhausting amount of time anthropomorphizing plants, animals, and the planet, a lot of the exercises and practice plans she has in the book are good ideas. I don't like her idea of word tickets (the cover photo includes a word ticket - a word taped to a raffle ticket that is used to help move poems along) - I think it's lazy and limiting - but making lists of words that have sounds you like, or describing the objects around you in detail, or creating alternate characters of yourself to write from are all fine ideas that I think would be very helpful to someone feeling a bit dried up at their creative fount.

So I'd probably never re-read this book again because there's a credulous description of a Ginko tree (and Wooldridge actually notes that the species is "sacred in the orient" - gag me with a fork, that's some prime '90s white western mysticism) manifesting a miracle to save herself that makes me want to get out a chainsaw and that sort of story happens every few pages, I would be willing to flip through occasionally to find exercises.

Wooldridge, Susan G. Poemcrazy. Clarkson Potter. New York: New York. 1996.