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.