by Kyle Simonsen
Blood Pudding Press 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson
Bells and Whistles
I’ll begin with the external. When I first picked up wing’d, a limited edition chapbook from Blood Pudding Press (ick), I knew it would be a strange journey. It’s a beautifully crafted little artifact with intriguing cover art by Cat Rocketship (a wild and coy white cat batters and ingests what seems to be a human heart), but the intrigue evaporated when I read the poet’s bio. I quote: “Kyle Simonsen has no tentacles.” Great. No tentacles. Me too. I hate bio blurbs that attempt to give some kind of view of the poet’s personality, especially when they read like a weak attempt to frame the way one read’s the poet’s poems.
At this point, I’m not impressed. So, I move on to find out a bit more about Blood Pudding Press. “Interests of the press include horrific confection, provocative frisson, and ribbon bindery.” All bells and whistles. This type of overwrought, flamboyant self-presentation takes away from the art and makes a show of itself in its feeble attempt to be different. All I can hope is that a similar “artistry” isn’t involved in the poems. Perhaps my annoyance is a mere product of my faulty process, reading the bio and press info before entering and engaging with the poems.
The first poem in the book is “Classification of Affected Fauna.” It’s a charming title and sets expectations high. The poem turns out to be a table of contents; each line lists the title of the next poem in the collection. It seems Simonsen’s hope is that “Classification of Affected Fauna” will work on more than one level. This is not the case as none of the titles cohere into anything more than nonsense, but perhaps this is the point. As Donald Hall has noted, “Even when words make nonsense, their disconnection from sense is a statement.” Right?
Let me try again. The first poem in the book is “the ghost in Stafford’s machine.” It’s a charming title and sets expectations high. The poem turns out to be…boring. Not funny. Not witty. Not surprising. In this poem, Simonsen borrows some of William Stafford’s lines from “Traveling through the Dark.” This is not the problem. In fact, the borrowing is nicely done. “Traveling through the Dark” is an excellent poem and is probably a source of inspiration for many writers. Simonsen does something interesting here. He changes small things about Stafford’s lines, prepositions mostly, to create new meaning. “traveling into the dark i came upon a doe.” Nice. I’m there. “with Kevin Federline in her mouth, flopping.” No good. Turn back. Pop culture references can be well-made; however, making fun of Kevin Federline was boring even before it was a cliché (for the few of you that can’t be bothered with TMZ, K-Fed is Britney Spears’ former flame and Baby Daddy).
There are many references in this poem (Jane Goodall, Jay Leno) and some work better than others, but there is so much else to comment on. In the subsequent poem, “canyons flood,” Simonsen makes an interesting linguistic choice. He writes, “most of what comes between me and she / is mud.” The poet’s choice here is to be “poetic.” The pronoun “she” is in the subjective case when grammatically it should be in the objective case since it follows a preposition. I’m not a grammar stickler, but I do champion the idea that we should make choices and our reasons should be somewhat self-evident. The only reasoning that I can pull from this choice is the small and fleeting forced rhyme of “me and she,” which hardly warrants the choice. In retrospect, this seems hardly worth mentioning. A more worthy aberration from “said the machine to the poet:”: “i likes to proclaim myself luminous, and / manage to make myself so.” Too much of the book is Poetry or play to no end: “cleverness” that suffers from not being clever at all. Another example from “snakes are just like humans”: “they must have erogenous zones too”. I don’t know. Look it up.
Let me be careful to point out, however, the very redeeming and quality theme of self in this collection. It begins to take shape in “canyons flood” and continues to build throughout the remaining poems. From “canyons flood”: “rising above, moving beyond, / these imply an otherness, an else, / an idealistic self-flattery.” The composition of self is perhaps life’s largest complexity. Simonsen is also schooled in the art of the image. Take the following example:
[she…] stood /
clutching the drapery and gazing into
the distant eyes of a slobbering hyena
rabid from the god up
These lines are effectual and moving. “She,” however unidentified, represents fear of the unknown, fear of the self, and internal turmoil. The phrase “from the god up” is also particularly vital to the theme as we all begin with “god,” with creation. Then we are faced with the task of continuing to create, of self-creation which is our life’s work, to develop a self that we may be comfortable with. There are many hang-ups and setbacks along the way, as we encounter in “often have they built their own windmills.” Simonsen writes, “the narcissist engages in self-destructive / and self-defeating behaviors.” These behaviors sometimes force us to become something other than our self, sometimes a monster with “sixteen arms / and four tentacles,” fighting to reemerge as something better.
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