Posts Tagged ‘Slope Editions’

The Next in Line

Monday, April 20th, 2009

by Christopher Schmidt
Slope Editions 2008
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

7

The End of Possibility

next in lineYou should probably judge Christopher Schmidt’s first book by its cover.  It’s a friendly blue-grey, not too flashy or eye-piercing, but it stands out.  The text elements are well balanced, the framing lines bringing a sense of order and balance.  There’s a black and white photograph by John Coplans that at first seems to be an obscenely aged body, shown from the waist down—hairy, wrinkled, bunchy, strutting—but then it resolves into two fingers, poised for walking, Yellow-Pages-style.  It’s clever and shocking, an intimately coy visual pun.  It retains its eroticism and appeal even after surrendering to your realization of what it is, because you can still see what it looks like.  In other words, when you go to the bar that is a bookstore, Schmidt’s the keeper you want to take home.  The cover is a perfect flirtation, a come on—it’s a promise, and Schmidt delivers.

                                                                ***

It’s easiest to start by describing the pleasure of the most obviously conceptual poems, the poems which are most clearly driven by a conceit.  “Top/Butt” tells the story of an erotic outing without the use of the vowels “a” “e” or “i”. (“Soon Luc spots humongous chub on pup slut Todd.”)  “Block Text” lists words that include “black” or “block” but reverses them to give us new formations that are deracinated (“Block Panther”), funny (“Cockblacker”), or topical (“Jenny from the Black”) while keeping the eroticism of the words/work in place. 

The vision of the erotic that Schmidt offers is surprisingly friendly, and refreshingly playful.  Throughout the poems, sex is not tortured or punished, but social and inventive, bringing back the best of the sexual ethos of a magazine like Gay Sunshine, while abandoning any self-righteousness.  Timothy Liu, who selected the volume for Slope, is right to compare the work to Barthes. Schmidt is a master of that untranslatable jouissance that Barthes prized:  Schmidt offered up to us as a pleasure.  Who would think that avoiding vowels could make sex talk fun?  Schmidt takes Kafka for an outing to a Bathhouse and the Black Party, though Franz seems to have less fun than Schmidt does (poor Franz).  It’s also a decidedly gay book, unapologetically invoking Polari (a British gay slang that went out of style with stonewall), Fire Island, bathhouses, and Kiki DuRane (Justin Bond’s character in the duo “Kiki & Herb”).  But it’s gay the way that Erasure is gay.  You don’t have to like the boys to dance to it.   It’s all right with Schmidt if you don’t speak Polari.  After all, no one does.

Schmidt’s touch is so light, it feels like he’s rediscovered the harpsichord in a time of Thelonius Monk imitators.  In some ways, it’s that generous trust that the reader understands that makes the book move so trippingly forward.  But Schmidt’s irresistible charm is underwritten by an enormous intellect and a genuine concern for the reader.  If this book were a one night stand, it would not only care about your orgasm, it would make you pancakes in the morning, and from a recipe in an obscure French cookbook you’d spend the rest of your life trying to track down.  

                                                                ***

Schmidt has a wonderful ear for casual speech, and for internal rhymes that come back quickly on themselves.  His engagement with the banal continually elevates the mundane into a tight sonic playing field.  From “Go Lightly,” a sonnet early in the book:

Helen chooses beans and egg whites.  June:
yoghurt, prunes.  “Starch can line a skin like stress,”
says Helen.  June: “I bloat a tide full moon.”
Sugar is not a vegetable, “ought” a thing to obsess    

Just as he settles into a perfect iambic pentameter, he disrupts it, and he distracts from the rhymes by overloading the lines with the same sounds.  Prosodically, the poems are tight and smart, but they always insist on remaining a field of play.  These poems are masterful in that the know all the rules, but more importantly, know why those rules were made in the first place.  Lines like “Those who know, don’t.  Those who care, scare” (39) and “Thin, skin so uninteresting” (57) pepper the collection.  Unpack this one: “Queensburying (like bunbuyring, like Ashberying)” (39).  Working from the template of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Invitation to Marianne Moore,” Schmidt wrests the wry “Invitation to Ms. Kiki Durane,” (appropriately) an altered Sapphic.

                                                                ***

In a long poem about a  (possibly seductive) student, Schmidt explores the parallels between teaching and prostitution.  The boy finally reveals that he has tiny vestigal fingers growing out of his pinkies.  It’s a moment of amazing intimacy and confusion.  The relationship has reached the end of possibility—and it’s beautiful, in part because Schmidt is so good at calibrating those moments where there’s no where else to go. In these ways and more, Schmidt’s debut collection is a remarkable accomplishment—clever, smart, and emotionally satisfying. 

*

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The Other Side of Landscape: An Anthology of Contemporary Nordic Poetry

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

Edited by Anni Sumari & Nicolai Stochholm
Slope Editions 2006
Reviewed by Jim Wood

7

Tröllasögurnar eru komnar

nordicMost people tend to be at least a little bit curious about cultures and societies separate from their own. Seeing strange and fantastic cities and landscapes, where they are neither strange nor fantastic to those that inhabit them, is probably one of the primary reasons for the siren song of travel abroad, summoning us to spend time and money visiting places that other people see as normal and unremarkable. These places are interesting to us, no doubt, because they developed on a trajectory of their own, with seemingly little or no concern for the development of the society/city/landscape that could be appropriately characterized as our comfort zone.

The same could be said for the exploration of foreign literary traditions, except that sometimes we fail to acknowledge the independence of literary development, filtering whatever we encounter through the traditions we are familiar with. We judge other worlds on our own terms, as it were. To some extant, this is inevitable: it is virtually impossible to step out of your own eyes.

This is just one of the problems we invariably encounter when we attempt to engage an unfamiliar literature. We also face problems of translation and selection. That is, when the language needs to be translated into our own, we may wonder how much content and connotation to attribute to the original writer, and how much to the translator. In addition we may wonder how representative the selection we choose is of the literary tradition it came from. Again, these problems are to some extant incircumscribable, but should be kept in mind.

The Other Side of Landscape, in its title, implicitly addresses the motivation for assembling and/or reading a small anthology of Nordic poetry: a taste of something which may seem foreign or fantastic. Indeed, such a volume couldn’t hope to (and apparently never claims to) give more than a taste. An attempt at anything more would belittle the literary tradition at hand.

As far as selection, the book takes a delightful approach, going for geographic and linguistic breadth over depth. Five Nordic lands are represented: Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The first four speak North Germanic languages which are more or less related (i.e. they have all evolved to varying degrees from a single common ancestor language), and the last is a linguistic isolate: Finnish is unrelated to any other European language (save perhaps Hungarian and Estonian), and some scholars think it is a leftover from the languages spoken in ancient Europe before the Indo-European tribes moved in and, basically, took over. The only disappointing aspects of the editors’ selection strategy are (1) no representation from the Faeroe Islands, which have a very rich literary tradition and produce more books per capita than any other country in the world and (2) the choice of breadth over depth has the obvious consequences of under-representation for each land (e.g. there are only two Icelandic poets).

The choices they did make lend themselves nicely to satiating the appetite of those who want to explicitly explore another land: “I love Denmark, occupied as it is by ghosts/ with painted human forms/ and crows that sing Carl Nielsen.” We also get to encounter lines and images that we would be less likely to find in our own tradition, appealing to our sense of the fantastic: “The snow never melts/ in the ears of trolls/ that have turned to stone/ at dawn on the moors.” Trolls, for example, have a much more prominent place in the cultural and literary inheritance of Iceland, than they do in many other places. We get to imagine wild, jagged, snowy rocks on the empty moors, and the reference to trolls reminds us that we really aren’t in Kansas. At the same time, the poems in this collection are consistently human in a way that requires no reference to any place outside of our own: “I wash my face, earlier this year/ I drained the well and collected spiders/ in huge jam jars.” Doubtless, spiders have connotations that cross linguistic and cultural boundaries. Some evolutionary psychologists have even proposed that humans are genetically programmed to be afraid of them, and let’s face it: I don’t care what language you speak, they’re downright creepy.

The problem of translation comes up now and again. For one thing, the reader is bound to wonder whether the choice of yearn in “like the darkness I yearn into you” faithfully represents an equally corny word in Norwegian, or if the translator didn’t do justice to some nicely descriptive word in the original. Similarly, take the following line: “for they know not/ what they are missing.” The problem here is that in Icelandic know not is the ordinary, vanilla-flavored way to say didn’t know. When we translate word-for-word, we end up with an English sentence which, while grammatical, has an extremely archaic or formal flavor. Again, it is possible that there was some element of archaism in the original, and the translator did a brilliant job of carrying that over, but it is more likely that something (in this case, ordinariness) was lost in translation. Either way, it is distracting to the reader and can detract from the poem itself to have to consider these things. Some of these problems, I have to emphasize, are intrinsic to translation and partially unavoidable.

One way to approach the issue, at least the most natural way, is to take it as it is: an object in space-time, the result of a variety of collaborators, with no reference to its origins embedded in another language and another cultural context. The book in my hand can be its own result, judged on its own terms as an object. The question isn’t, “What would this have done for me had I been a native Swedish speaker reading this in Sweden,” but rather, “What does this collection of English poems do for me now, as it is and as it stands.” The danger here, though, is that to judge it without keeping its origins in mind (not to say that you have to constantly dwell on them) will necessarily result in an interpretation clouded by your previous literary experiences. There is no such thing as judging it on its own terms, because you will unavoidably judge it on your own terms. Failing to acknowledge this will only cause the worst kind of misunderstanding: the kind that doesn’t recognize itself.

And when judging these poems on their own terms, you’ll likely find consistency across the board—not necessarily greatness, but consistency. The title of the poem alone reveals the heavy-handedness of Sweden’s Jörgen Lind in “A Theory of Evolution (The United States of Amnesia)” (as do sentiments like “We force ourselves, squeeze ourselves…”). Plenty of strong poetry to go around though; Ann Sumari’s touch in “Fete” is comparatively elegant: “we lose our way in the unobstructed darkness— / into the lime white painted darkness.” However “English” the poems have become, some cultural elements become undeniable, unavoidable, and quite satisfying; here Didda’s Icelandic is translated into English, but the poet’s use of the Danish for “I love you” remains:

And I sat there with them,
sang a song and there was whispering
of “jeg elsker dig” by many different voices.

Given the problems of reading translated poems, of unfamiliarity with the literary tradition, and of the unavoidable limitations of representativeness, how do we, or should we, encounter a collection such as this? With celebration. Celebration for what it is, with blatant recognition of the intrinsic difficulties as such. The reason is because although we never see the “other side” the way the inhabitants of the “other side” do, it broadens our view and delights our spirit to flirt with different versions of ourselves. It is a curious, new flavor of the human perspective. In reality, we are a world of humans, and any sense of “them and us” is just a natural imposition of human cognition: discreteness where there is only spectra. If we want to become scholars of Nordic literature, the applications of this book are obviously supplementary to a whole library of works. Otherwise, we do well to delight ourselves in exploring something that is perhaps a bit outside our comfort zone; we may not, in fact, certainly won’t, understand all of it, but we do get a chance to see new things, described by other eyes, and translated from other languages, a refreshing taste of variety within the same human theme.

*

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Odd Swallows

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

by Robyn Ewing
Slope Editions 2006
Reviewed by Brett Price

6_5stars_6

A ____ of ____

ewing coverFrom the get-go Ewing warns:

I do nothing
    straight-
ly.      

And in the context of Odd Swallows, Robin Ewing’s second collection of poems, nothing could be more precisely put, and at the same time, so completely understated.  Its thirteen sections (fourteen, if you include the final “Special Advertising Section”) employ charts, graphs, comic strips, Mad Libs and more to explore a range of subjects from the particularly personal to larger social concerns such as poverty and war.  One interesting effect of such formal zaniness is that the poems always seem to ride a line between a number of tonal and conceptual binaries: hope and despair; humor and severity; invention and gimmick, etc.   

In the book’s second section, “Art Love War,” many of the poems take on the serious baggage inherent in those massive subjects, but often the manner in which they’re addressed undercuts that seriousness with playfulness.  This is not to say either extreme outweighs the other.  They’re both present simultaneously and the poems serve as grounds for contrast.  The poem “Love, Sincerely” is a good example of this:

Dear                Guy in charge                        ,

      If:
        Lack of           curiosity          .               

      Then:

        Man’s art is          war           .

Love,
Sincerely

Here, Ewing uses the light-hearted form of a Mad Lib to make a statement that seems to oppose that light-heartedness.  It could be read both as a plea and also as a distilled kind of prayer, one that operates simultaneously as hypothesis for and explanation of war.  However, the blanks suggest that any number of other possibilities could replace these particular choices at any given time, which is where the poem really gets its mileage from the form.  In this way, the instance of this poem points well beyond itself and makes a statement about the larger world of which it is a part.  Furthermore, it ends not with a signature, but with what could be read as an imperative command, implying that the speaker doesn’t write in search of an answer, but instead to offer one.

The book greatly challenges a reader’s sense-making methods too, but rarely do the poems give off the feeling that they’re undermining one’s ability to make any sense of them at all.  When the forms aren’t recognizable, often there are keys to accessibility provided.  This isn’t to say that the poems are riddles and Ewing gives the necessary tools to solve them, just that they often leak bits of information that can illuminate approaches to the poems that surround them. 

For example, two of the book’s most interesting sections, “V. Ordinary Swallows” and “VI. Odd Swallows,” work in a kind of counterpoint.  The two poems in “Ordinary Swallows” are pretty straightforward and scientifically toned.  The first, “An Ordinary Swallow Lecture With Weak Feet,” is a paragraph of information about swallows taken directly from a pocket guide to birds (who knows if it’s a real pocket guide or not?): “Their airy flight is characterized by brief periods of floating, frequent shifts in direction and abrupt changes in speed…”  The information sets up a metaphorical framework from which the poems in the following section, “Odd Swallows,” can deviate.  And they do. 

However, there are some poems that don’t quite get off the ground as well.  “40 Something Places In 20 Something Years Is It Something? (Condensed)” is a sprawling hybrid map-chart.  While it really is gorgeous to look at and breaks the distinction spatially between itself and the poem on the following page, it’s hard to see how it amounts to much more than a fragmented list of bits and pieces of the speaker’s history.  “Upon The (Extended) Mass Mourning of John F. Kennedy Jr. and His Wife” is a quirky one-liner: “Ugly people die too,” which seems to come out of the blue and fade back in just as quickly. 

These moments are rare though. “Porto Poemplay Series #YY R24: Smilin’ Jack Smacked By Paradise” is an “involuntary collaboration” between John Milton and comic strip artist Zach Mosely.  Each illustration is paired with selected lines from Paradise Lost.  There are 18 total sections and the resulting narrative is dark and surreal.  It’s a fine example of how the past can be re-contextualized to say much about the present. 

On the whole, Odd Swallows is fun, challenging, and humane.  The poems disrupt the chronological order of the book with hyperlink-like footnotes and other strategies of redirection, and yet it maintains a surprising coherence.  It’s worth swallowing and re-swallowing and when you think you’re done, Ewing reminds:

Unfortunately
    my mind
    is
indestructible.

*

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Isa the Truck Named Isadore

Monday, October 2nd, 2006

by Amanda Nadelberg
Slope Editions 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

7

Heads

nadelberg coverThe cover of Amanda Nadelberg’s Isa the Truck Named Isadore is a close-up of a Barbie head stuck atop a stalk in an unkempt patch of flowers and weeds.  Oddly reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’s jar on a hill in Tennessee, Barbie’s head shines in the sunlight, which haloes her hair so that the flowers seem slovenly in comparison. Where Barbie’s plastic torso would be, two heart-shaped leaves diverge. 

The picture is a catchy advertisement for the contents of the book, and I give Slope Editions credit for using a picture taken by the author herself.  As promised by the photo, the childlike quality of Nadelberg’s work is not lacking an adult sense of irony (children aren’t the only ones who dismember their toys).  Each poem title is a person’s name, and the names—delivered alphabetically from A to Zeb—are mostly unusual, and all evocative. I am most intrigued by the Welsh ones, and plan to look up how to pronounce them as soon as I finish this review.

As we move through the alphabet, we meet many misfit characters, some weird, some just plain silly, and some rather touching.  Sometimes their innocence rises toward an alternate and mythic world. “Elijah” concerns a visit from a childlike fertility god. “When you open the door / he humps the banister” (but he’s not a dog).  “He drinks so little from the cup…everyone can’t be sure if / he’s really there” (bird?).  The roof he climbs on is definitely “slate” (London?  Peter Pan?). “He looks so pretty in your dresses while you help wash the dishes / downstairs” (a transvestite, a male dress-up doll, an imaginary friend?)  “Next year he will be / elsewhere but tonight this night/ you’re the winner. It’s a big night / when you’re sleeping with Elijah.”

There is a cheerfully weird quality about the language, though I wouldn’t describe it (as a blurb does) as “Fox in Sox gone savvy.”  This would not be fair to either book.  At times, Nadelberg’s lines are more an update of Gertrude Stein.  “Runa” begins: “Ready and waiting is/ pretty or is pretty or/ is awed by the/ fisherman is an outdated/ version is a bad/ mother here.” I also detect a whiff of The Spoon River Anthology. Each character’s limitations can seem appealing or insulting depending on your mood.  The teenager in “Ughtred,” who is planning out her life both “short-term” and “after,” ends up saying “all I can say is / I wish myself a pretty pair of cowboy boots and / even prettier pregnancy.”  The silliness piles up, but so does an undercurrent of desperation.

I might read some of these poems to my daughters, as the blurb suggests, but definitely not all of them.  For example, “Kaapo” runs a baby factory in the shed. “I bought Theo, my now-dead, / there.  One hundred / plus twenty dollars.  His blue face/ was so endearing.” On first readings, these poems seem light and funny, but rereading brings out more sadness, and the sense of a very limited world.  Sickness and death are here, but few people ever change.  Children are sold or adopted. Cuthbert says “My / parents are gone and I am/ glad about it.”  Individuals long to be elsewhere, even though other places seem “pretty much the same.”   

I do, on occasion, find myself wishing that Nadelberg’s syntax could be stretched and tensed more by further manipulation of both enjambment and the larger white space between stanza breaks. Lisa Jarnot’s introduction cites more prosodic craftiness than I can hear, but does suggest where the prosody works best.  She cites the book’s “well-shaped” couplets, though there is only one poem written entirely in couplets.  This unwittingly makes the point that whenever stanza breaks are used as a formal, lyric device, rather than just a narrative break, it makes the work more memorable.  In “Johanna,” the spacing helps sustain the rhythm elegantly, however silly the content:

His wife is an elegant room.

Cameo white with green things of detail.

Orange helps the eyes in a couple of ways.  Carrots. Signs.

The room is beautiful.  So many syllables.  Argentina.

His wife is duitiful.  Elegant.  Roomy.  On the first floor
to the left of the stairs.

His wife like many things needs to be cleaned and
ventilated, is glad when well lit.

The careful pacing lets the poem get away with “green things of detail” and helps lend the content an effectively humorous gravity.  The last poem, “Zeb” is in quatrains.  Though the stanzas start as paragraph breaks, the syntax starts to leap over the white space to rhythmically reinforce the speaker’s poignant address to Zeb, who is remembered as “wanting to come in and over.” The speaker apologizes that her “Aunt said no,” and wouldn’t let him.  The poem ends with a breathless, semi-punctuated invitation:

Alaska, will you come
to Maine for the summer?
I promise no singing
but I’d like you to come

to Maine for the summer
my family will be there
and I’d like you to come.
It’s a long drive but

my family will be there
(…)
And they want to meet you.
They are from Minnesota.
They like Bob Dylan
he sings so small and big.

Though the speaker might be searching for words, she’s hardly rambling.  The stanza and line breaks raise the emotional stakes, insisting that her family will be there, her words will break through the wall.  In these and other poems, Amanda Nadelberg promises to match her wonderfully imagined world to a lyric drive that makes her work leap off the page without limiting the gently haunting voice of her characters.

Few of Nadelberg’s characters realize they are trapped, and many are unable to escape. “Norbert” expresses longing for truckers, not for their cowboy mystique, but for the simple fact that they carry things in carefully labeled boxes closed up like hearts, and get to travel long distances. “Pansy” speaks about a flight attendant who “stepped up to / the bat.”  This character “was a visionary of sorts.”  This would be a positive attribute if the poem hadn’t started “This was the moment that no one had been waiting for.”   “Unafraid of the night and its colors she would count as many as she wanted.” “She sent some flowers to the moon.”  And although the ending is cheerful, it suggests that she was taken away to the loony bin, because the moral is: “when the state policemen come to your front door and offer to install an escalator to the moon make sure you let them.” The desperation takes time to sink in.

Not all spins out of control.  Some poems suggest an author watching over her characters, concerned with how they turn out.  “Ferdinand” humorously suggests a clear-headed moral that would turn the general silliness into a savvy survival skill.   Four times, the book is interrupted by an authorial voice imploring us to reread “Carwyn,” as if that one simple instruction would send seven copies of a chain letter bringing the characters good luck (or springing them from jail).  Simple as it appears at first, Amanda Nadelberg’s world becomes more involving the more time you spend with it.  There is more at stake each time. The light, humorous tone is made to do double duty—comic and tragic.  In this sense, the author has imagined an oddly complete emotional world by deliberately limiting its contents.

*

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Who’s Who Vivid

Wednesday, July 5th, 2006

by Matt Hart
Slope Editions 2006
Reviewed by David Sewell

7.5

A Whole New Sincerity

Hart Vivid Cover

The New Sincerity is just like the old sincerity, except now the earth is melting. “Grasshoppers on fire!” you’re probably thinking, what the hell is this new sincerity? Well, here’s a somewhat longish quotation from Matt Hart that appeared in a (well-deserved) love letter he wrote to Gregory Corso in Octopus:

What I want to talk about in this appreciation is how Gregory Corso and his work can be seen as a precursor to New Sincerity in poetry, one that I’m beginning to see in the work of many of the poets of my own generation—and which frankly I’d like to see more of—a poetry which thrives on the ideas that 1) capital-B Beauty and other aesthetic and human values are real and available to us both experientially and intellectually, 2) that language is so inefficient with regard to the _expression of essentials that we need poetry to make it work significantly, 3) that as poets, we need to emphasize poetry as a means to an end, rather than merely as an end in itself, and 4) that poetry needs to utilize the experimental muscle of the last century to move beyond mere experimentation and instead start amounting to something—something fully beautifully human.

The first two items might be summed up as nothing new at best, as a stab at the fog with a sword made of gravy at worst. The third item sounds fine as a jab against self-referential, onanistic writing-about-writing writing, but, again … oh, I’m sorry, I thought I heard a foghorn. The fourth, though, is crucial. The relevance of poetry depends on it.

These days, we’ve been awhile at reaping the bounty that the past century’s experimentation has afforded us—freedoms that even the most repressive government can’t legislate away. And now, with the freedoms gleaned from these experiments firmly encoded into the poetry DNA, we can again see that poems should—or at least, can—aspire to something other than art for art’s sake. (Rah! We’re human again. Rah! And, yet, we don’t feel the need to confess our childhoods or mental illnesses.)

Even if Hart’s points, including number four, are descriptive rather than prescriptive, they’re still worth hollering down the halls of liberal arts/arts colleges everywhere. The youth, when they’re sober enough to put one foot in front of the other, are either being led astray or are wandering off on their own.

Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with wandering off, but there’s nothing really valuable in wandering off if it’s being done over well-trod ground. There are lessons to be learned, or at least rediscovered, from the recent past, in lieu of reinventing the iamb: collage all you want, transcribe conversations with your Aunt Jenny after she’s had two bottles of Shiraz all you want, cut and paste and stitch and glue and associate and jump around like a ritalin-addled child in a moonwalk all you want, but if you expect the reader to care about your poems because they’re weird or difficult or experimental or conceptual or whatever, even if they’re devastatingly smart and clever, don’t hold your breath. Perhaps this is another piece of the flotsam floating away atop the wake of 9/11; perhaps it’s just the pendulum swinging back from whence it came.

Theodor Adorno’s proclamation about the barbarism of writing poetry after Auschwitz was a moral call and too complicated to do much with here. Hart’s is not. His words are nothing more (and nothing less) than a preemptive defense of poetry, an attempt to rescue it from the Manichean trap that ghettoizes much of poetry today to one of two camps: the esoteric and impenetrable/experimental and the calmer, clearly resonant capital-P Poetry that swallowed the confessional aesthetic like a python dislocating its jaw around a gazelle. Lines have been drawn in the sand and sides have been chosen. But, as Greenland turns into a lush rain forest and the oceans swell with the runoff, the lines in the sand risk being washed away. This could be a good thing—at least for poetry, that is.

In Who’s Who Vivid, Matt Hart’s first book, there’s love and longing and regret woven into oft discursive and entertaining (and almost always surreal) poems. There’re lists and philosophical proofs and dialogues and monologues. There is, at the heart of many of the poems, heart. It’s appropriate, then, in an aptronymic sense, that the poems in this book behave as they do.

Here, in “In Fifteen Minutes,” is Hart at work:

Later somebody spilled some water and somebody else
slipped and fell and started leaking. That’s when I ran
to get the baking soda and subsequently missed

the flower delivery. That’s when I broke
through the overwhelmed ceiling
and did what I could to get you alone.

Ignoring the not-terribly-interesting flying metaphor, we can see Hart trying hard to make something of combining details surreal with connections emotional. Hart’s world is his world— anthropomorphized ceiling, the ability to fly, unhinged (that is, highly personal) details (did someone die, say?), a wild enjambment—but there’re also, transplanted into it, emotional/relational touchstones that keep the poems from floating away—something happened or didn’t happen, and the speaker feels something about it; might we too?

If, in his role as dean of the New Sincerity, Hart intends to lead by example, then his goal must be to go past mere accretion (say, to a stalagmite) in his poems and actually amount to something (say, an ice cream cone). Whether the poems are dramatizations of a mood or emotion or consciousness, narrative threads allowed to fray, bald-faced enactments of something otherwise ineffable (all of which I’d call, if done well, “something fully beautifully human”), or other things entirely, they should arrive somewhere, not at meaning, per se, but at the embodiment of something, beyond the experience of reading the poem, that matters—to the poet and to the reader, hopefully. As Hart says in his letter to Corso, poems should be seen as the means to an end (as well as being ends in themselves). And, for the most part, Hart’s poems do achieve his goals, with a few caveats.

There’s no getting away from the alienating feeling that jumpy poems produce, and Hart’s poems are jumpy in the way that’s de rigeur for young, smartish poets these days. But, at the same time, somewhat paradoxically, the twists and turns along the road foster emotional connections between the work and the reader—the reader must stay astute and engaged and must really care to be dragged through the motions—the reader is moved to feel something in the act of reading the poem. But the reader must be led somewhere other than the carnival. And Hart does, most of the time, lead the reader somewhere, and not in the trite, lazy way of stapling on the transcendence, in the clearest writing of the poem, at the end of the poem, as if it were a worrisome afterthought.

“Breakable Swan” achieves most of the points in Hart’s rubric. Here we have the resplendent—“Now I drink something lukewarm / out of a cup the color of a trailer park.”—the wonderfully evocative—“In the distance a foghorn, / and all the while I’m tracing shapes / in the air with a dessert fork.”—and the unfunny/unnecessary—“Triangle, triangle / let down your hair!” That Hart sometimes overreaches is not surprising, nor is it a particularly sharp criticism. His poems are all about chance—or personality, to think of another poet—and they don’t, no, they can’t, always work.

The best poems in the book are those that go beyond mere pedantic exercises in smarty-pants poetry; the best poems somehow capture something that couldn’t otherwise be captured, inviting readers to care about what’s happening and interesting them enough to try to find out why. For instance, the following from “How I Know I’m Still Missing”: “When I cross the bridge at midnight / I pretend I’m a sparrow escaping a star.” What more do we ask for in poems than that?—a brightly painted door that suddenly swings open, and all we have to do is step inside.

Nowadays, it’s goddamn brave to make poetry that risks popularity or, gasp, being understood. Which is not to say that Hart’s poems run the risk of being either of those things. But he’s clearly concerned with moving in that direction, or of trying to find out what happens when the imagination is let loose within the confines of his four points above.

And whether he achieves success in every line, he knows what he’s up to. Here’s the ending to “Letter to a Friend I’ll Never See Again,” which, appropriately enough, sums everything up quite nicely:

I’m not being clever, but rather just the opposite.
I’m telling you I love you, but it sounds like a rant.

It sounds like somebody plastered in Ohio.
This is how I’ve burned all my bridges.

As far as I can tell, at least one bridge is still standing.

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