Soft Science, Franny Choi, Alice James Books, 2019

Soft Science by Franny Choi is a collection of poetry focused on the effect of technology and technology-in-media on contemporary lives. One of the threads running through the book is the comparison—and sometimes blurring—of cyborg and women as shaped things molded by the society that uses them. The poems respond vehemently and sometimes violently to Othering in many forms; this is part of what makes the book so powerful and so important. The book is organized according to multiple (imagined) versions of the Turing Test, allowing the speaker (a cyborg? a woman?) to self-express and also to refute the shapes and molds imposed on them. It is representative and slightly a summing-up that the first line of the second poem reads “// this is a test to determine if you have consciousness”.

But I’m writing this more as a personal response than a review; hopefully the above gives you an idea of whether you’d like to look at the poems for yourself. I picked up the book based on the cover and the title; I want to read poetry about science. The first poem is presented in the form of a table, yes, columns, rows, headers, lines separating each entry and boxing them in. I bought the book because I was completely flummoxed about how to read this as a poem and because I really thought this is the kind of thing I should be reading, all the themes presented are important to me—and when I scanned the table of contents I saw a poem titled “Everyone Knows That Line and Ogres and Onions, but Nobody Asks the Beast Why Undressing Makes Her Cry” and how could I not read that?

As I progressed through the poems, I learned that Choi has a wonderful ear for alliteration, consonance, and rhyme, and that she uses full and partial rhymes and homonyms to propel her poems forward. It’s wonderful. I loved how over and over the poems take commonplace phrases and play with them, rewriting them, a word at a time, to build into something completely new, or simply casting a different light on the meaning of the phrase by giving it different context. Many many of the poems sing exactly how I love poems to sing.

But I still have no idea how to read a poem without lineation but with slashes, such as each of the Turing Test poems, such as this bit from the second poem:

// why do you insist on lying

I’m an open book / you can rifle through my pages / undress me anywhere / you can read / anything you want / this is how it happened / i was made far away / & born here / after all the plants died / after the earth was covered in white / i was born among the stars / i was born in a basement / i was born miles beneath the ocean / i am part machine / part starfish / part citrus / part girl / part poltergeist / i rage & all you see / is broken glass / a chair sliding toward the window / now what’s so hard to believe / about that

By the end of the book, I had given up trying to assign meaning to lineation in the poems that used it. I confess, that made them much easier to read, less probing and confusion, more emphasis on the words, but I keep coming back to the fact that lineation is the main difference between poetry and prose and if it means something the reader can’t understand, then what good is it? One could argue that “understanding” and “having an effect” are different things, and I would agree, but I would have liked something for the effort I exerted.

So, I am very glad to have read Choi’s work and will look for more of it, but, personally, I am even more confused about how to read a poem.

Just saw a post at Sam’s Tumblr that made me thrilled and sad at the same time: one of his readers discovering that they do in fact like poetry now that they’ve found Leonard Cohen.

When my book was published, one of my childhood friends apologetically said he’d given up on reading poetry and hoped I would forgive him for not buying or reading mine. I wasn’t offended about him not liking my poems — they’re not everyone’s cuppa — but given how many lyrics he’s quoted to me over the years, I’m with Sam: he’s into poetry, just not mine.

Other people have said to me (or in reviews) that they don’t usually “get” poetry, but that what I write is their speed. (Another frequent reaction I get: “You’re making me hungry!” It does help to like food if you’re hanging out with me, though you’ll lose patience with me if you’re too precious about it, since I’m the kind of gal who likes wine but whose level of discernment pretty much divides it all into two categories — “tastes like wet socks” vs. “tastes good.” Though I do recognize and admire the chops (so to speak) of people who can tell by taste whether a sauce contains flour or cornstarch, or if it was made with butter or oil. It’s not so far removed from my understanding that there are at least three tiers of perception in play when viewers and judges reacted to singers in this year’s edition of Voice France, with me smack in the middle tier: with pretty much every singer, there were commenters who were outraged by the judges’ reaction or lack thereof, usually along the lines of “They were great! Why the eff didn’t the judges turn around?” (or “Why didn’t all the judges turn around?”) And I sat on my hands when reading most of those reactions, because I’ve been around long to recognize that “Well, actually” should be deployed with caution and care: The people venting don’t need to hear from me that their favorite was flat on a few notes or lacked agility or failed to communicate an understanding of the words they were singing. At the same time, as happens every year, the judges got excited over certain qualities and moments I just didn’t hear myself — one semifinalist in particular I found all but unlistenable, but the judges and other audience members were geeking out through multiple rounds over his potential, and he wasn’t so handsome that it could be explained by his looks, so my conclusion is that they’re perceiving him at a level / through a lens I don’t have.

What is really awesome, of course, is when there isn’t that gap between what one loves and what a beloved might like. I recently recommended René Marie‘s mashup of “Bolero” and “Suzanne” (her father’s two favorite songs) to my friend Carolyn. The next day, she replied, “Loved this. David a room away making breakfast called out ‘Who IS that?'” *glee* So it is with poems. The anniversary of Gwendolyn Brooks’s birth was a couple of days ago. Back in junior high, I copied out “One Wants a Teller in a Time like This” for a couple of people. One sneered. That stung. But some months later, the other showed me the much-read copy he kept in his wallet, and that remains my lodestar these many years later: to make a few poems that people might want to keep with them and to share.

(Which doesn’t mean I’m above frittering away whole afternoons on bonbons and experiments and throwaways and general goofing off. I’m also reminded of Mika’s talk-through about “The Origin of Love,” where he describes slogging through a year of generating “crud after crud” before the lyrics suddenly, finally gelled.)

In my WorkFlowy and on the backs of envelopes buried somewhere beneath coupons and lists and public health reports, there are assorted subject lines for VTL posts sketched out in my head while waiting behind trucks or doing laps in the pool.

Then, when I actually start typing in the WordPress or Dreamwidth window, I inevitably roll my eyes at myself, for if “all the things I mean to write about soon but not today” were an awards genre, I’d have so much metal in my house that the collectors would be rubbing their hands in glee. Not the historians and archivists, but those scrounging for every last scrap they can to get by.

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What I really signed in to say was: I came across Sean F. Munro and Henry Goldkamp’s “Battle for America” while scooching around for something else, and after reading a few lines was “I’m not closing this tab until I tell someone about this poem, because goddamn.” I am perhaps overly fond of not-really-joking that I contain multitudes, and this poem is a demonstration that “being really fucking angry” and “having basketloads of fun” can occupy the same screen.

It may be that I am extra-susceptible to enjoying brackets as someone who grew up in Kentucky — the state so basketball-mad that when UK got put on probation folks were shooting at Lexington Herald-Leader boxes, because they could not bear how the newspaper was reporting the truth. Kentucky is also the state that elected Mitch McConnell senator while I was in grade school. Because my big brother will probably see this, this is where I feel compelled also to say that Kentucky has fine dancers, dedicated teachers, some superb museums and hotels, public libraries that lend out fishing poles, and excellent restaurants — I had a terrific time just a week ago at Frankfort’s Bourbon on Main and Serafini, and so did the motorcyclists with me, including the hockey-coaching civil engineer who had flown planes during Vietnam and assessed the wine list with the ease and expertise of someone who really knows his Chiantis and Cabernets. Kentucky is not a cultural desert, but I cannot frown on anyone who might be feeling the urge to milkshake its governor or senators.

Munro and Goldkamp’s bios indicate that they, too, live in the South (NOLA and MS respectively).

[Writing this entry has (in spite of myself) demonstrated (to myself) why I don’t actually follow through with blogging most days: 19 years of this has taught me that I will spend far more time on even casual running-my-mouth “hey go read this” entries than I intended to, that twenty rabbit holes will open up within the course of coming up with three sentences, and that I will end up ranting more often than not. And/or that I will nearly melt a colander, discover fridge frost on a bowlful of radishes, and rant for real about oil pulling and detox teas when my man jokes about me sipping shots of sesame oil (because that bottle was on the counter by my glass, whereas I’d already put back the Monkey Shoulder) in the course of cooking and consuming dinner, which was happening between and in the middle of some of the sentences here.]

Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, Marilyn L. Taylor and James P. Roberts, editors, Kelsay Books, 2018

Edited by Marilyn L. Taylor and James P. Roberts, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle contains more poems in the form of a villanelle than probably any other book you’ve picked up: over 50 villanelles, covering topics ranging from gun laws to cats to bereavement.

A villanelle is a 19-line poem, composed of five tercets and a quatrain. What makes the form so difficult is that the first and third lines repeat—ideally without modification—alternatively as the final line of the second through four tercets. After the opening two lines of the quatrain, they come together as the closing couplet. Additionally, of course, the remaining lines follow a tight rhyme scheme. (Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is a famous example of the form.)

In general, the form of the villanelle best supports a topic that lends itself to obsession. In Thomas’ case, it is grief. In Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” it is loss. While I personally wouldn’t put many of the topics covered in this anthology in the obsession category, an incredible poem could change my mind. But my main issue with the majority of the poems included in this anthology is that they feel as if the form is using them, rather than the other way around.

Specifically, the lines that repeat in the villanelle need to be supple enough to take on different shades of meaning each time they come around again. Unfortunately, I found many of these poems to include repetons that were too specific to change meaning with each tercet. Additionally, that specificity kept them from being able to magnify in meaning when the two repetons appear together again as the closing couplet of the poem. An example of such an inflexible repeton was “Ease my pain, play me part-songs for Delphinia” from Richard Roe’s “Requests for Torch Songs for Flowers Sent to the Villanelle Show”. Contrast that with Barbara Crooker’s “I will not falter, neither will I fail”, from her poem “Diagnosis: Autism”, which, while a bit repetitious itself at least allows for the lines around it to give it a different context as the poem proceeds.

Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle collects poems with a wide range of topics (so many cat poems!) but I feel it does a better job of showing off poetry’s versatility and applicability to contemporary life than providing the reader with villanelles which, as Dickinson said, raise off the top of your head.

The epigraph to Maura Dahvana Headley‘s The Mere Wife is a translation of “The Wife’s Lament” by Ann Stanford. It’s bold and grammar-inverted in a way that makes grief obvious. I immediately wanted to read the remainder; I immediately wanted to read more of Stanford’s poems if this was what her translations looked like. Stanford’s last volume, Holding Our Own, was selected by two of her students and each wrote an introduction to it. One was emotional, the other was distanced; both discussed why, although patronized by May Swenson, Stanford’s work was not collected in the big women poet anthologies of the late 20th century: No More Masks! and The Rising Tide.

I have long been a fan of Abbie Huston Evans‘ poetry but only recently did I get a copy of Carl Little’s essay “The Life and Poetry of Abbie Huston Evans”. It was occasioned by her death, although it did discuss her antecedents, genetic and poetic, spent some time quoting her poetry and raving about said quotes, and listing other essays which discussed why Evans’ work did not appear in No More Masks! or The Rising Tide even though a poet as famous as Edna St. Vincent Millay introduced her first volume.

In both cases, the reason listed was political. Neither Evans nor Stanford wrote political or political-icizable poetry. Although, if one needs some help #resisting at the moment, I would point you to Stanford’s “The Weathercock”. And if you need music to convince people the earth—rocks, plants, weeds, trees—around them are worth valuing and working to save, I could pelt you with poems by Evans which do just that.

A lot of feminist criticism talks about The Canon, what authors are passed down, and who is excluded. And here I find that not even May Swenson, or Edna St. Vincent Millay, unlikely to go forgotten anytime soon, can keep a poet’s work in the barrel of history. Instead, I believe, we are required to exhume the beauty we need and hand it down to others, handful at a time. I hope that you have a moment for Stanford or for Evans. And I hope that when you do, you too find something you were looking for.

“To E.D. in July”
by Abbie Huston Evans
(copied from Evans’ Collected Poems p. 93)

Emily, lie you below
And I above, this morning,
While this same earth you used to know
Stabs deep and gives no warning?
It passes me how it can be
That I instead am seeing
Light loved by you implicitly
While you resign your being.

Tell me truth, did you find heaven
And your old neighbor, God?
Or is it nothingness, not even
A sleep, beneath the sod?
Did your relentless wish create
What is from what could be;
Or found you one grim predicate
Wherewith nouns must agree?

Listen: the tide is out again;
The rock-weed lies out hissing.
I could weep in the world of men
To think what you are missing.
To your low ear I bring in news
Gathered this same day, giving
A pocketful from which to choose
Fresh from the land of the living.

The sun finds garnets on this ledge
The tide’s bare hand is slapping;
And where the grass fails at the edge
A poplar bush stands clapping.
Woodpecker drums his hollow log,
Pond-lillies open slow,
Shell-pink upon the cranberry bog
Has just begun to show.

This morning early, Emily,
I saw a crane go wading
About the glassed cove to the knee,
The ripples round him braiding;
The cove out of the mist pulled free
As radiant as a bridge,
But smokiness blew in from sea
With the turning of the tide.

Know kittens still lap creamy milk,
Know mice still gnaw the rind,
And like great lengths of waving silk
Hay-fields blow out behind;
Barn-swallows scissor down and up
With tea-stained vests (you know!),
And hawkweed crowds on buttercup,
And elderberries blow.

—Here, take them, Emily, they hurt
In telling; can you bear
To hear of elderberries, skirt
The coasts of sun and air?
Know all that hurt you once hurts still.
Need any tell you now
Night brings the moon, dawn finds the hill?
Want you such hurting now?

This morning, my subconscious chose to inflict on me an extended dream about work. This is in itself nothing new, but I am nonetheless vexed that my interior film projector can’t come up with better movies. It’s not as if dwelling on the heaps of deliverables will deal with them, so why can’t the reel revel instead in, say, ridiculous Bottega Veneta jackets? Sheesh.

In the meantime, I’m sneaking in some postcard-scribbling between work, working out, and housework. Some with addresses from Postcards to Voters and Americans of Conscience, and some as part of the August postcard poetry fest that doubles as a fundraiser for SPlab (the fest + service fee added up to 11.71 USD for me); registration closes July 19.

Three of the postcards I wrote on today are in the above snapshot; because there isn’t a lot of room on the cards, and I try to write something related to the image and/or stamps I’m putting on them, I am (so far) spinning out springboards rather than dives — that is, prompts rather than full-fledged poems. That’s OK. The ground rules emphasize that these should be first drafts, and each card is a handful of steps toward something more, which is more than I’d come up with left to my own devices when this hemmed-in by must-dos.