Final Post – Poetry in the 21st Century

Take a look at this video: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8610524.stm

Karla Kelsey - Knowledge, Forms, The Aviary

This book is filled with beautiful phrases, but I'm not sure what it's point is beyond that. The images that Kelsey uses certainly strike me– "and the birds, here, unnatural, hovering, over this blood-letting", "the gun firing out orange blossom into the flock held captive, sparks or bullets becoming the progeny of birds burst into the shadow of coined knowledge", etc. However, I'm not sure what Kelsey's point is with this book except to have it be beautiful. I'm also not entirely sure it needs such a defined purpose. Flynn and Greenfield were deconstructing their tortured pasts, Bradfield was telling the story of the Artic explorers and sending a message of conservationism, Mullen was playing with words and the struggle of races, Magee was playing with Dickinson, and on and on. I can't quite pick out Kelsey's "goal" with this book. She just seems to pick up Plato/ Aristotle's idea of a mind being like an aviary and fly with it (no pun intended). She uses this idea in conjunction with the camera and the idea of seeing the same things through different lenses to explore how the mind works in various given situations.

The one thing that did bother me a little bit about Kelsey's book was the abundant use of asterisks. While it's not nearly as profuse as Minnis's ellipses, I also did not find them nearly as useful. They seemed to break up what seemed like a natural rhythm flowing through her poems. The asterisks seemed like they were there more because they were a pretty symbol, rather than being there to indicate a "filled silence" like in Minnis's book. I really liked the rhythms that Kelsey creates on her own through repetition and rhyme, and I felt like poems that had asterisks all over the place distracted from that. For example, I liked these asterisk-free poems:

Flood/Fold - Aperture 3

Halting into the mouth I thought

the image of the bird would sing but it wouldn’t

though the mouth says I am content now with domestic things

the sound of the broom on the floor body moving

the way a woman’s body has been seen moving

a simpler song and more sweet some would say when heard or read

as the birds wake and there is no reason for waking oneself

on a day like this beginning in curtain light and oranges.

and

Movements
We are the ones
who are held and hold,
for the travelers all aspire to this passage,
we among them, and only two

passing, a tolling of bells
as if in a medieval city,
crier, town spire—this
burgeoned from the personal day,

signing the contract, contracting
so tightly that I out at the edges—
the breath—the song let loose—

And so unto the electrical bells, sing,
washing over bones to heaven,
heart to earth. Not any other way
to do it, though the hand aches
from holding and
elemental of the heart: hooded.

Fence Magazine - Catherine Wagner

Wagner's poetry caught my eye because I found the most entertaining. Although they seemed overly constructed, they were still clever. I especially liked her poem "Coming and I did not Run Away". I liked how she started with real German words and then progressed rapidly to imitations of them. I also liked the use of self-awareness in the poems. I thought it worked well in "Among the Orders". Wagner comments on how whatever happens in a poem, it happens mainly because the poet wants to find out what would happen if two things are thrown together.

The one thing that bothered me about the poems were that they seemed very... constructed. I wish I had a better word for this, but I can't think of one. What I mean is, I get the sense in some of the lines that things are being thrown in there just because the poet knows they will catch attention, and she is deliberately trying to be "edgy". One example of this is the vulgarity. I don't have a problem with vulgarity in poems, but here it just seems unnecessary. Like the two homeless people could easily have been doing something besides "fucking". I think Wagner even comments on this herself in "Coming and I did not Run Away". After she randomly throws in the uterus, she even says "I saw the 'usual turn of phrase'/ coming and I did not run away/ I lay around". It sounds to me like she was writing a perfectly good poem, then some random line popped into her head and she just put it down, even though it had nothing to do with the poem. It just felt lazy to me.

Michael Magee - My Angie Dickinson (03/08/2010)

Whoa. This book is such a trip. Reading this book makes me feel like I'm in some sort of whirlwind, falling through the rabbit hole. There are all these objects and people that are known in normal life, but the phrases that link them together make no sense. It's like the Mad Hatter. Like the caterpillar smoking up. A little bit psychotic. Not that that's necessarily bad.

The book takes you down a path you think you know- poems built from stanzas, numbered and spaced with dashes like Emily Dickinson's work- but then hits you over the head with the amount of chaos that's happening. You read a poem, thinking you've recognized things (Margaret Thatcher & the Sphinx, for example) and will now be able to deconstruct it, only to realize you really have no clue what it's about. You're left with the feeling that Magee has taken a little bit of Dickinson and made it something wicked.

Take this excerpt from #102, for example:

Her wound apologizes —
In public — Like a Sailor —
Permeating the postwar years
“Like a” throbbing — Hangover —

At first glance, the it looks like a Dickinsonian verse. It's short, has several dashes, and has quick but lasting phrases that make it up. On second glance, the poem makes no sense. How does a wound apologize and what does that have to do with war or hangovers? At third glance, the poem is so naughty! Sailors (notoriously unmannered and brash) permeating something.... a woman's "wound" perhaps? Makes my mind go straight to the gutter.

Another thing that caught my eye was how in some poems, it seems like Magee is writing from a more feminine point of view. He really seems to be stepping into Dickinson's shoes here. For example:

#77
I’ll never sit on pleather again!
Miguel would never — — have dared pretend
It took a Real Cowboy to pull it — —

My innermost feelings — — Can Be — — like Mike — —
But if the Future is Matrix — — like — —
I can’t wait to do some “bullet”!

It doesn't seem especially manly to be worried about where one is going to sit or talk about one's "innermost feelings". Another example of this is #29:

I dressed, ran toward some nearby woods
with booklet and nice
something — “About” — the mourning dove’s —
low note’s Excuse —

Running into the woods with a booklet (perhaps a novel or a diary) and commenting on the birds seems like something a girl would do, like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or Anne of Green Gables. It is also reminiscent of Dickinson, in the way that she commented on nature and and wrote about things she noticed in her garden.

All in all, I'm not sure if this collection is an ode to Dickinson or just an opportunity to poke fun at her style. I think it might be a combination of both.

In the spirit of "Sleeping with the Dictionary"...

Alphabet Poem:

Ay, boy, calm down. Easy.

Free girls have it. Just, kind lovers

meaning no other passion. Quest rests south.

Tucked under various wardrobes – Xanadu!

Yours,

Zaaraa

Harryette Mullen - Sleeping with the Dictionary (03/01/2010)

The poems in "Sleeping With The Dictionary" came off as very witty and funny. It definitely seemed like Mullen enjoyed writing the poems, whether they be her long prose exposés or her nonsensical babbles. I enjoyed them too, as a reader, because they were a great break from the other books we read which were all very obviously trying to pass on serious messages.

One of the reasons I liked this book was because I enjoyed her exploration of language. One example of this is "Coo/Slur".

da red

yell ow

bro won t

an orange you

bay jaun

pure people

blew hue

a gree gree in

viol let

purepeople

be lack

why it

pee ink

It's such a simple thing. All she is doing is playing with the sounds in the names of colors. It's clever because she makes the reader want to read the poem again and again and recite it aloud.

Another poem that plays with language is "Mantra for a Classless Society, on Mr. Roget's Neighborhood". Mullen mixes "synonym-izing" and "alliter-izing" to create this poem. She manages to imbue meaning into it at the same time. It is this careful crafting that I admire and appreciate in Mullen's work. It reminds me of how every line 1984 is so particularly prepared to give the reader the over all sense of the situation just through the sound and hidden meanings in the words.

Finally, in talking about how Mullen plays with language, we of course have to mention her book's title and overall theme. I how she tried to explore every letter of the alphabet through her poems. I only wonder why she had more of some letters than others. I also wonder if she wrote all these poems with the intention of writing an alphabet book or if she had a bunch of these poems already and then just decided to fill in the gaps in the alphabet by writing more.

Other poems that I enjoyed are what I consider to be Mullen's little "jokes" in her book. One such poem is "O, 'Tis William". It reminds me of the classic "Who's on First?" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfmvkO5x6Ng), and I'm sure that she must have heard that and been inspired by it.

Another such poem is "Kamasutra Sutra". "Sutra" means rules, and Kama Sutra is the book containing the rules of love. Thus, I found it interesting that meaning of the poem's title is rules of the rule-book of love. Besides this, the poem itself is clever and funny.

Lastly, I liked how there are little bombs of unknown or unfamiliar words dropped all over the place in this book. They are not usually enough to seriously impede comprehension of the poem, but they are enough of a block to make a reader want to pick up a dictionary. It's almost as if Mullen is trying to get her readers to take the same journey she seems to have taken and really explore language for all its sounds and meanings and synonyms and whatever else is hidden inside it.

Chelsey Minnis - Zirconia (02/22/2010)

So many dots! The numerous ellipses-infused poems in Zirconia read like scenes flashing up on the screen during a big, dramatic movie. It's like stop-motion poetry. I read Minnis's poems and can imagine a heavy heartbeat (th-thump, th-thump) sound with each new phrase that pops up out of all the dots. And whenever there's lots and lots of dots between words (pg. 29, during the poem "Supervermillion"), I can imagine the heartbeat still sounding, even in the silence.

The dots really intrigue me. On one hand, they seem like such a waste of space. On the other, plenty of poets use blank space, so maybe Minnis isn't stretching it too far. I wondered why Minnis chooses to use all the dots instead of just blank space like most poets would. I think that she is acknowledging the sort of 'heartbeat' I can feel in the poetry. The poem is still very much alive in those spaces. The silence is not really silent.

One of the poems that really had this effect on me was "Pitcher". The images are so clear, I can almost feel the water splashing over me, soaking my shirt, the pitcher clanging on the ground as it bounces away.

I believe that all the dots give us time to process what Minnis is writing. And the dots as opposed to the spaces feels like she is telling us, 'no, this is not a moment just to breathe, this is a moment to really consider the image I am painting for you'. For example, in "Tiger", pg. 45: After "beautiful, unbroken vase" she gives us time to really see that vase, feel the clay curves ourselves, before moving on to the next thing. A few lines down, after another longer string of dots, she says "expansiveness", like a comment on what just happened in the poem. On the other hand, she uses less dots between words on the previous page when she says, "how I want to replicate...... them or re-create their arcs........ or put them in a spotlight...... against a black backdrop" because they are images that really fit together and need to be considered more closely as parts of one idea.

Another tool that stood out to me in Minnis's work was the use of color, particularly red. It reminded me of Greenfield's tree-tool. The set of poems in Zirconia made me think of modern paintings such as this one: http://bw-inc.deviantart.com/art/BLACK-WHITE-RED-12895843

The picture is mainly black and white, but there is some red, and the red that is there really pops out at you. Minnis has repeated references to blood and redness in general. One of the poems in the book is even called "Maroon" and another is "Cherry". I would like to explore this motif further. Red is known to be the first color the eye picks up on in a scene and is a color associated with drama and shocking things in general. I wonder if this is why Minnis uses the color so much or if it is because of some childhood trauma associated with blood that she has had to deal with.

Questions To Ask Bradfield:

1. There are many parts of the world that have fantastic stories of discovery and are lush with both history and nature. One example that springs to mind is the Amazonian rainforest. Why does the Arctic in particular capture your attention more than other areas of the world?

2. Some would say that pretty much every inch of this world has been 'discovered' now. What kinds of explorers do you think the future could hold?

3. When there is so much ice, and cold, and loneliness, and fight for survival in what you are describing in your book, how difficult was it for you to find any warmth or human connection to show? How did you set about trying to balance the extreme loneliness of the explorers and the landscape that surrounded them with the fact that everybody– you and your audience– has some sort of human connection to them?

"Part of my fascination with the explorers is in their ability to be a lens to see how we view “new worlds” and thus how we view our own present relationship to the earth, toward discovery, toward what inhabits the places we come to."

-Elizabeth Bradfield

Elizabeth Bradfield - Approaching Ice (02/11/2010)

Sorry for the huge delay!

Hmm... did anyone else feel, as they were reading Approaching Ice, that they weren't reading 'modern poetry'? Modern art in general, I feel, comes with this expectation that you are about to see something very strange or incomprehensible or that breaks all the rules. I didn't get that sense at all from Bradfield's work. Her poems seemed much more traditional than any of the other poets' works we have read.

Reading the poems in Approaching Ice makes me feel like I've stepped back in history. I don't mean stepping back into Shackleton's trip to the Pole. I mean that I feel like I've stepped into a time when there were village story-tellers. Everyone has gathered around and this person is telling us a story. We don't know how she got it, some of it is so fantastic we're not sure if it is true, but she tells it so convincingly, we think she could have been there. These poems sound to me like ballads or odes of the past. Granted, they don't necessarily follow the correct format of either of these types of poetry, but the overall feeling you get from them is the same. For example, in "Wilson's Specimens", we are observe this man, Wilson, as he takes care of his own survival. We can visualize the "black and white pelts/ feathered, sleek, unqualified by grey" of the strange birds he is hunting. It is easy for us to understand the necessity to do this when we know that there are "onions dwindl[ing] in the barrels". Bradfield doesn't jump around from image to image like Young and Flynn and Greenfield do. There is not only one central idea, but also one story or picture she is trying to show with each poem.

Another example is "Frank Hurley, Photographer on Shackleton's Endurance Expedition – 1915". The whole poem follows this man, the photographer, and the crew that he is with, having to live thinking about what is necessary for their survival at every moment, yet at the same time, creating history that will far surpass their own lives. The idea that leaving behind or having to destroy film is like destroying history is so painful, but true. At the same time, there is no price or weight that anyone could put on the film that was salvaged or that would be taken in the future. Bradfield voices this so beautifully in the last couple stanzas of the poem:

He filmed the ship breaking, left the Prestwich No. 5

in its stand, slipped a small Kodak into his pocket
with thirty eight more chances to curate what history
would be made in the unmapped time before him.

Has there ever been a better measure
of hope's precise and illogical weight?

The book is not ALL "odes" however. There are snippets of things that feel more like just a glimpse into someone's life, not a full story, or others that simply make the reader realize the magnificence of what has been accomplished. For example, in "Against Solitude", whether true or not, we realize what could very well have happened on expeditions to the Arctic. It is a glimpse into something so personal that it touches you, regardless of your views on cheating, or perhaps even homosexuality. "How long has it been since my mouth/ has held anything other than ice and pemmican?" Ack! Their loneliness cuts at me.

Finally, another poem that helps us put things into perspective, to see the historical magnitude of the events that she is describing is "On The Longing Of Early Explorers". We are reminded of how, for centuries, people hardly knew what lay beyond the land that they directly lived upon. The curiosity to know more, and the yearning to see beyond is expressed here:

O if only,
they'd say in quaint accents and obscure
sentence structures—if only the unsullied
could be discovered, if only, once found,
it could speak its own nobility and let us
empathize. Poignant, the despair that itched
beneath their powdered wigs, their longing to touch
the unspoiled, their sense that the world was already ruined.

More on Young... (02/03/2010)

Reading the reviews about Young's work and taking the pop-quiz on Tuesday set me thinking about what defines a poet's work. What features of a poem are derived uniquely from one poet, different from another? I decided to focus on one thought brought up in the review of Embryoyo:

David Sewell writes, "Listing, or exemplifying, is a mode [Young] falls into regularly, and this mode’s success depends on how interesting/fresh/moving the little lists are." I thought that this was a key insight. I think that aspect of Young's writing style is what made his poems seem much more accessible to me than Greenfield's. Profound thoughts are followed with more detail or several examples.

Another tactic is extreme clarity in his descriptions. Every artist tries to paint some sort of image in his/her audience's minds. However, Young seems to be particularly keen on making sure that his audience understands exactly what he is describing on his most central points. For example, in "Sean Penn Anti-Ode", he writes, "Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing/ the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge/ is his face?". And in "White Crane", he writes, "...the Japanese beetles/ infesting the roses and plum/ no matter what my neighbor sprays/ in orange rubber gloves."

But Young does not employ this tactic in every line. There are definitely some lines where he is decidedly vague. For example, in "Bivouacked and Garrisoned Capitol", he writes, "The dream/ confabulates, triangulates/ our fears and desires until/ the flood comes loose/ in the baby-crying room, your fault/ your fault, key to the lighthouse lost,/ ten-foot gap. How can love survive?" This line has so many parts and potential meanings- very different from the previous two examples.

I appreciate Young's playing between descriptive but vague and extreme clarity. It allows readers to have the freedom to experience the poem for themselves with their own interpretations while still giving them certain stops where they can catch up to the thinking of the poet.

Dean Young - Assorted poems (02/01/2010)

Dean Young's poems are engaging, no doubt. I feel like they should be read at least 3 times. First for the initial perusal, making note of lines you love, words and references you don't understand. Second to insert the new understandings of those words and references, and admire again those lines you loved. And third just to enjoy the aesthetic value of piecing it all together, and experiencing it all again. But perhaps this is how you should read anything.

If someone asked me what Young's poetry is about, I'd say "life". This sounds so paper-cutter perfect, every-origami-is-a-crane, obviously all literature is about life in some sense. But I feel like Young gives his readers snippets of life that although they may not have experienced, they can relate to, and life-lessons that just seem to ring so true.

Dean Young's Life Lessons:
Acceptance Speech: "It's not the blizzard, it's three days after."
So much focus is given to the tragedy of the event, but what about the regrowth afterwards? Life fighting to prevail- "ruined crocus pronging through", new relationships formed with strangers- "Everyone's easily identifiable beneath the funny mask". In our world, there is so much focus on the destruction in the Middle East, but what about the new infrastructure post-Taliban? So much focus on jobs being sent to other countries, but what about the new development in a country that has battled poverty for decades? So many front-page stories of lives lost, but only back page blurbs about lives created. (Two events that I can think of that really defy this pattern are post-9/11, and even more, post-Haitian earthquake. The aftermaths of both of these events have been filled with heartfelt help and more hope than pity, which is truly liberating.)
Ash Ode: "...all things loved are pursued and never caught,"
People's passions do not just come to a halt when they achieve milestones. This is because the love they have for the art, person, etc. cannot just be fulfilled by winning a Grammy or getting married. The desire continues past all that.
Centrifuge: "Save us from single formulas."
The idea that there is no one correct way to do things... can translate to modern poetry as well. Modern poetry 'breaks all the rules', but that's alright because there's no set formula for expression. "the lingering kiss... there's yet to be a single formula for it."
My Work Among The Insects: "It is best not to make everything a metaphor of one's own life"
I read this, too, as a comment on poetry. Poets must draw from experiences outside their own to connect to audiences outside themselves. They also sometimes must just tell it like it is, rather than trying to cram the events in their lives into some cardboard box of a metaphor.
Poem Without Forgiveness: "nothing can be taken back"
This one just stuck with me because its something my mother's said to me all my life. "Time never comes back"- I hear it constantly. It's too true. Amends can be made, recoveries can happen, but there's no changing the fact that what has happened has happened.
Exit Exam: No particular quote, just the whole poem.
This poem is my favorite out of the whole group. I think it relates a little bit to some of the messages of the first poem, "Acceptance Speech", as well. We are so afraid of some things, without even really knowing anything about them. We focus so much on the tragedy of death, but we have no idea what happens post-mortem. For all we know, life-after-death could be completely perfect. We don't know if we will "be released from the wheelhouse" and go to nirvana or will come back on this Earth as another being. We don't know if there is just nothing after death or if there are such things as Heaven and Hell. The possibilities of Death are just as wide open to us, probably more so, than the possibilities of Life. Why then is there so much sorrow associated with it? Why do we assign it as something negative without even knowing what it is? (I should note that there are some cultures that do not view death as negative at all, and funerals in those societies are more of a celebration of the person's life than a mourning of their loss.)

A little more...
There were so many things I underlined in the course of reading these poems, like "bole" and "Basho". Normally I would be extremely frustrated at so many references to things I didn't know about or uses of words I didn't understand. However, reading Young's work made me interested in finding out more about all of these references. I feel like he drew from what he knew and what he read and experienced, and I appreciated that he was doing it without giving the impression that he was going out of his way to sound clever. Thus, I didn't mind, and rather enjoyed clicking my way through Wikipedia and Dictionary.com searches.

p.s. "bole" = stem/trunk of a tree, and "Basho" was a Japanese Haiku master in the 1600s.

More on Greenfield... (02/01/2010)

The more I think about the light metaphors in Greenfield's work, the more I experience two things: First, a sense of irony at the fact that this modern poet, who seems to write such strange, progressive poetry uses one of the oldest and most common metaphors in the book. And second, a sense of relief at this hint that person who is seemingly so troubled that his words are undecipherable to me, still uses some modes of comparison that are similar to my own.
The idea of light as being pure, right, divine, or truthful is ancient. Sun Gods have existed for millenia. The Bible is filled with metaphors about light: http://bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Topical.show/RTD/CGG/ID/1722/Light-as-Metaphor-of-Truth.htm. There is something about light that makes it one of the few things that is at once a mystery and yet still comforting. Other things like darkness, death, or even something as earth-bound as going to a new school, have a sense of mystery about them that is often frightening to people. Light, on the other hand, people view as a symbol of safety and warmth. http://www.unique-design.net/library/word/light.html
Reviewing my notes on A Carnage In The Lovetrees, I think that this may be true for Greenfield as well. He uses light in a variety of ways, positive and negative. It is like he relies on the light falling to illuminate the truth of any situation. In an abstract sense, I wonder if this 'comfort from light' is the reason that I too grasped onto this concept out of all that I could not understand in the poetry collection.

Just Some International Food For Thought...

"Can this notion still exist that poetry does not have any feature but to praise beauty and bring joy and we shall not load the

heavy burden of social and political issues on its soft shoulders? I do not know, but I feel this notion can only exist in a utopia, where love rules, where triggers are unknown to hands, where ears and unfamiliar to explosions and where freedom is another name for life. But in a country where one’s Musalmani “Belief in Islam” is measured form the length of his beards, and its city’s rivers smell blood and where blood grows instead of red flowers in the garden and where bread is the hot topic, poetry can never be a silent spectator sitting in its beautiful ivory tower. Yes, if poetry is not political in such lands, it should be made political."

-Partaw Naderi, "The Political Poetry in Afghanistan", Kabul Press, 8^th Oct 2006, [http://kabulpress.org/English_letters30.htm]

Is poetry merely an art-form or is it valid as a tool? Is modern poetry used at all as a tool in the United States? Should it be? Should that tool be a political one?

Richard Greenfield – A Carnage in the Lovetrees (01/25/2010)

I don't quite know how to react to this book, except with sheer frustration. Page after page, poem after poem, I am left wondering what on earth Greenfield is talking about. The poetry seems to me just an accumulation of scenic lines, chopped in half and piled on top of each other. I realize that we are not supposed to try to understand the meaning of every line in this genre of poetry, but I find it troubling that I can read entire chapters, or indeed an entire book, without having an inkling as to the central idea. With Nick Flynn, it was clear– he had a traumatic childhood. What happened to Greenfield? Perhaps I am alone in my bewildered reaction to A Carnage In The Lovetrees. Nevertheless, I've decided to focus my post on a pattern that I picked up on the text.

I almost every poem in the book, there is a reference to light, usually from the sun. These references tend to reflect what seems to be the overall mood of the poem. For example, in "Elegy For The Swing", Greenfield writes,

The leaves black on the light side and yellow underneath where/

unlit...

This picture seems to fit with the theme of an elegy. (Note: elegy = a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead [Oxford American Dictionaries]) The image of the leaves brings to mind a corpse in a coffin– the dark wood of the coffin in the sunlight, the pale yellowing skin of the body within.

Another example is in "Avatar In The Shape Of A Wing". The word 'avatar' comes from Sanskrit and means 'incarnation'. Thus the word presents us with an idea of something that changes form or that is never just one thing. Greenfield uses a line about light to underline this concept in this poem. He writes,

In a field-burning haze, the midriff of the

sky provides neither ascendency nor grounding.

In "The Liar Codes", Greenfield mentions twilight a couple of times. The 'twilight zone' is known in popular culture as a space of ambiguity between two things. 'Twilight' itself refers to the odd times of day between the dawn and the actual full appearance of the sun, and the period of time when the sun is setting before complete darkness ensues. A code, too, is some sort of ambiguous set of symbols, whether sounds, letters, numbers, or anything else, which remains an enigma until deciphered. Following on this, a liar is someone whom it is difficult to trust, who's words are hollow in meaning because there is no guarantee on their validity.

Although I feel like I was not able to understand the basic ideas behind Greenfield's work, I believe that these images of light that showed up throughout his poems helped me find at least some connection between his titles and the text beneath them, if nothing else.

I have listed below some more of the "light lines" from some more of the poems from A Carnage In The Lovetrees:

The Light In Greenfield's Eyes

Vantage –

· the squared jaw of the sun and the hellish visage of the/ melting rooftops where the heat radiates into the sky and the traffic/ fumes.,

· The specific three o’clock in the afternoon light was not bleached/ but was acutely inexact in its yellow: the ball rimming the rim, ball/ which was silent, silent as it spun off and rubber-stung the air it hit/ and combined and came through the window screen, nostalgic.

Vectory –

· the orange peel light,

· an exact shadow on the dawn,

· the haze,

Piece Together –

· Watched the mobile fish turning in the half-light, spotty/ patterns on the walls over the bed. Crested mute in the silent end // of dawn, cruelty hazed the violated text.

Two In A Series Of Encryption –

· We should have screens on the windows, our lighted rooms draw/ them inside at night.,

· …expecting/ success in the quarterlight dawn

The Invention Of Drawing –

· Cornered in the pretty evening, trauma dissolved into the dew/ count and opened the sun.

· The sun was flaring a woman’s shadow upon the rock whose/ terrain had been terror, whose anonymity was traced.

· Daylight poured into the four corners – not seized, not barefooted.

Burn The Family Tree –

· Trance of arcing light

· …rivulets of hardwood over the horizon

· Degrees of evening on my face

· I opened the door to find the limbs in/ the kitchen reaching for daybreak

Device For The Blind –

· …the million liquid glimpses of moonlight floating/ downstream.

· He couldn’t see a thing in there except for the glow of a wristwatch.

Bibemus & –

· Lastlight rushes into these corners, unstoppable . . .

Biblio –

· …a bright stab crackling in the dim

More on Flynn's 'Some Ether'

2 things:

1. Question for Discussion: Nick Flynn dedicated Some Ether to his elder brother, Tad. However, aside from a few places, Tad Flynn is hardly mentioned or analyzed in the book. Why is this? Why did Nick and Tad not have more of a shared experience in the chaos of their childhoods? Or did they, but Nick Flynn would rather just deconstruct the people who have already passed him in life?

2. How to Deal with Childhood Trauma as an Adult: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1744800/how_to_deal_with_childhood_trauma_as.html?cat=7
This author writes about dealing with a fear of water caused by a canoeing accident she experienced when she was young. Obviously Flynn's experiences are very different from this, but I wonder if some of the steps she outlines (especially identifying the source and forgiveness) are not also very relevant to him. Finally if you click on the "Childhood Trauma" tab at the top of the article, it takes you to a list of links to more articles about on the subject.

Nick Flynn - Some Ether (01/20/2010)

Some Ether captures the reading in a dizzying spiral of deeply personal anecdote and volatile analysis of the same. The inspirations for this collection is quickly evident in Flynn's work: the absent, alcoholic bum of a father, the endearing but ultimately suicidal mother. The writing is full of the paradoxes that come with psychological trauma, especially when the trauma is experienced so young.

For example, Flynn's writing shows clearly that he is impassioned by his childhood and his relationships (or lack thereof) with his parents. (He wrote almost fifty poems about them!) One senses his urge, as their child, to be able to connect with them. In "My Mother Contemplating Her Gun" he attempts to enter the conscience of his mother, as if to try to experience what she felt when she held the weapon that would lead to her ultimate demise. He imagines,

"...Look at this, one

bullet,

how almost nothing it is–

saltpeter sulphur lead Hell

burns sulphur, a smell like this."

However, Flynn also gives the reader the sense that he sometimes wishes that he had none of these experiences at all, or that he would rather just not delve into the re-experiencing of it. In fact in "Momento Mori", he states his frustration with the plaguing memories rather explicitly:

"I'm sick of God and his teaspoons. I don't want

to remember her

reaching up for a kiss, or the television

pouring its blue bodies into her bedroom."

Continuing on this idea, another one of Flynn's mental conflicts seems to be over whether or not his is/ was equipped to handle the trauma his experienced. Through several of his poems, it becomes apparent that while he was perhaps not at an appropriate age when these events occurred, he is able to deconstruct and deal with them better now, as an adult. He writes in "Cartoon Physics",

"Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know

that the universe is ever-expanding,

inexorably pushing into the vacuum...

...A ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock

only he can pass through it.

Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock."

Flynn is saying that up until some age, (perhaps 10), we are too young to experience the real world with its daunting facts. We are, and should be, wrapped up in the play-pretend world, the world which runs on “cartoon physics”, created for us by adults, to protect us from the harsh realities that lie ahead. If they are to come across disaster, they should be

“burning houses, car wrecks,

ships going down– earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run

back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come

with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved.”

These disasters are unlike the ones Flynn himself was forced to experience. What control could a child even pretend to have over an alcoholic, criminal father, or a mother suffering from depression so deep that she eventually ends herself to end it? What understanding does a child even have of such things? Almost none. A child only knows the pain that comes with these, things, not the understanding of them. Flynn describes one such pain (of one of his mother’s successive boyfriends) in “You Ask How”:

“He lets me play with his service revolver

while they kiss on the couch.

As the cars fill the windows, I aim,

making the noise with my mouth,

in case it’s them,

& when his back is hunched over her I aim

between his shoulder blades,

in case it’s him.”

Now, however, Flynn is a grown man. He is able to begin understanding and dealing with the pain of his childhood. He can start to learn about the expansiveness of the universe, and how one galaxy can consume another. He can study the storm, instead of just feeling it. He describes this in “Flood”:

“In grade school I heard

clouds could weigh three tons & wondered

why they didn’t all just fall to the ground. Lately

I study rain, each drop shaped

like a comet, ten million of them, as if a galaxy

has exploded above us.”

Flynn has created a metaphor for the way in which he approaches the troubles in his past. When he was young, he considered simply the weight of the whole event, the three ton cloud, and wondered why it did not cause his whole world to come crashing down around him. Now, as an adult, he is able to study the individual causes (the raindrops) that lead to the creation of the event. He realizes that although the whole world did not come crashing down, every raindrop coming from that cloud hits you and the world around you, leaving its dark stain upon your earth. In this same way, each minute detail that lead up to the event did in some way affect his being. It is these details that Flynn (or anyone who has experienced some trauma in their lives) must deconstruct, to fully understand what has happened to them.

“Some Ether” is a fascinating read because, while Flynn is desperate to connect with and get inside the heads of his parents, the reader is just as desperate to find understanding of Flynn’s conscience. Unlike other poetry anthologies I have looked at, where the poems seem to be random snippets of from the poet’s experiences, these poems flow together like the dramatic novel of one man’s life, while still leaving enough disarray to please the artistic conscience. Through his own journey to unravel his traumatic past, Flynn shows us that the way to deal with our own pain is just like this– bit by bit, little by little, piece by piece.

Modus Operandi of Life - 01/14/2010

Got a couple of couches, sleep on the love-seat

But they do not draw nutrients from the tree

If I am your home, you'll find life within me.

Don't believe everything that you breathe

Large scale disturbances include fires or landslides

Lies and gossip are the true dusts of disaster.

He hung himself with a guitar string

These openings provide opportunities

Take the big break; don't get caught up in the pills.

You can't write if you can't relate

This energy cycle is the engine of fate

The world can't revolve in your mental state.