by Tina Brown Celona
Fence Books 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson
Cut Fastball
My first thought: vasectomy. But that might only be because I just watched the Raymond episode in which Debra suggests Raymond “snip snip.”
Vasectomies are nowhere near Tina Brown Celona’s second book of poems, Snip Snip! There is, instead, a glorious poetry editing metaphor. The title appears near the end of the opening poem, “The Sewing Box”: “…Snip snip / Is what I do to my poems” and “I’m going to call my book / Snip snip! What do you think?” This poem deals with poems—the poems themselves and the writers that write them—and what’s frustrating about this subject is that it seems redundant. Write the poem and let me read it. I don’t care about much in between, so let go of my hand.
What does work about “The Sewing Box” is the tone, the rapidity of the lines, the energy. Celona can be very O’Haraesque—one of her poetry’s best qualities. Though I don’t think the poetry world needs nor wants another O’Hara, the enthusiasm for poems and the exclamation of “I feel terrific today” is attractive, not to mention addictive.
When I come to the second poem in the book I’m not sure what to expect. And what I find comes as a surprise. Here: “I even start to fart poems.” After reading Frederick Seidel’s latest, I’m a little tired of hearing about poets’ gastrointestinal workings. That’s not Celona’s fault, but truthfully, I never was particularly willing to hear about such things. Moving on…
A funnier, more successful—though still somewhat repulsive—poem is “Book Throw Up.” This poem maintains its sense of reality in that, of course, a book cannot really throw up, but can achieve balance with a sense of the fantastic and foul: “I hate the thought of birthing a book.” The verb “birthing” here is doing a considerable amount of work in a poem made up of only six lines. It completes the poem as a beast: an eating, breathing, depositing, reproducing animal.
Turning the page, I’m hoping for more nauseated book poems, or a poem whose title suggests something having to do with an animal, a tortoise in a shell maybe, or a cat-in-hat. Though there is a bumblebee in “Untitled (After Ceravolo),” my hopes are thwarted with the fourth poem, “Sunday Morning Cunt Poem.” Immediately, I think of the word “feminist,” which as I find out appears twice in the poem’s penultimate line.
There’s been much talk about “reclaiming” the word “cunt,” but whether or not this poem qualifies as an attempt at such is unclear to me. The word’s use here is simply a failed attempt at reclaiming an audience’s attention. Don’t worry though; the cunt has yet to make its featured appearance. It actually engages in a lengthy photo shoot in “I Threw Away My Gun and My Harness” with its friend, the “asshole.”
What helps the jarring and terribly blunt nature of the “cunt poems” is the small explanation offered in the longest poem in the book: “Highlights from the Permanent Collection.” I like this title because it implies that this is the serious stuff, the things about life that are immovable. This is an exciting and simultaneously terrifying notion. Here’s the thought behind these poems:
sullenly spitting out poems
the independent wife
censored her cunt poems
as if life
could be without poems
lacking strife.
Now, I don’t usually appreciate the explanation, the “here’s why I wrote this poem,” or the “just in case you didn’t get it…”; however, the contrast in tone between said cunt poems and this tidbit is satisfying because it is human. It’s revealing in a real way, in a way that is much more daring than talk of taking pictures of one’s sexual organ. In fact, it is somewhat of a confession as we see later in the poem with lines like “Angrily I dashed my child’s brains out against a rock.” Now surely the action wasn’t carried out in reality, but the sentiment is real, unforgivable, and revealed.
The writing in “Highlights from the Permanent Collection” takes over. It gathers momentum, builds life, and in a sense departs from the poet’s pen. To use an old cliché, it has life of its own, so much so in fact, that it can’t help itself but to stray from topic to topic. Whatever may be consuming the poet’s thoughts and energy, a cause of stress or a simple, fleeting thought are all subjects that are taken to the page. In a dismal political climate then, it becomes difficult not to eventually comment on the state of things. And Celona is no exception:
The third world is waiting around the corner and what are we doing?
We’re trying to put carbon dioxide under the sea! George Bush wants to
go to war and there’s no stopping him.
Snip Snip! was released from Fence Books at the exact same time as another brutally direct book, Ariana Reines’s The Cow. But where Reines showed in all its stomach-turning real-realness “the other side of the beast,” Celona likes to say cunt again and again which hasn’t been revolutionary in some time; the word doesn’t need to be “reclaimed.” The book reads best when she’s funny or charming without the unnecessary attempt at desensitizing us to the “c” word. On that note I’ll leave you with the funniest part of Celona’s book, which comes nearing the end of the long poem:
A poetry joke: A Language Poet and a Black Mountain School Poet and a
Fence Poet are sitting around chewing the fat. What do we have in
common? asked the Language Poet. But the Black Mountain School Poet
was tired of stupid poetry jokes. He wanted to go to Asheville and smoke
pine needles.*
