Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

It took me a long journey to arrive at this book. After C.D. Wright's death in January 2016, there was an outpouring of grief for her among people I knew on social media who had known her personally: these mourners volunteered anecdotes about her above-and-beyond generosity, kindness, inclusiveness, and humanity, her willingness to set aside careerist considerations to speak out against injustices. Reading such stories, I thought, "I wish I knew someone like that. More: I want to be someone like that." Then the February 2016 issue of Poetry printed Wright's "From 'The Obscure Lives of Poets'", a piece almost superhuman in its breadth of imagination, its wide-ranging visionary empathy and intellect, which reminded me of some of the great poets of Latin America but whose likeness I could scarcely recall having seen recently in U.S. poetry.

Then, at a Barnes and Noble in suburban Minnesota, I stumbled on ShallCross. This is a store where I spent some of the happiest, most peaceful hours of my childhood, and although the book industry has drastically changed of late, this particular store still felt like a welcoming refuge: as I approached the poetry section, an elderly female employee warmly greeted me, irrelevantly but with the best of intentions informed me that she could help me add my name to the waiting list for the then-soon-to-be-released latest Harry Potter book (this, especially, made me feel like it was the '90s again), then respectfully withdrew and left me to the privacy of my own meanderings.

ShallCross (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), the final poetry collection Wright assembled before her sudden death (and the collection to which "From 'The Obscure Lives of Poets'" belongs), is an unusually designed hardcover: there is no book jacket, and there are two pages that fold out to accommodate poems whose very long lines are printed vertically rather than horizontally. The front matter touts Wright as "the most thrilling and innovative poet of the past four decades," a "beloved" poet whose work mingled "journalistic activism, sociopolitical outrage, and erotic lyricism." Reader, how could anyone human not be seduced?

The book consists of one long poem, three quasi-long poems, and three groupings of short poems, a perfect assortment for a reader of short attention span like myself. These sections vary dramatically in style and typography: some poems use punctuation whereas others use none; some are composed of short lines while others use only long lines; some poems are aligned flush left, others flush right; some are double-spaced, others single-spaced. To me, these variations testify that the poet was 100% mentally present during the making of her poems, attentive to every last detail of composition and visual presentation.

I was immediately sucked in by "40 Watts," a clustering of very brief, almost haiku-like poems about everyday life in the Ozarks whose sensibility lies somewhere between Basho's and Lorine Niedecker's. This is one of the "40 Watts" poems in its entirety (I took a snapshot of it on my phone so that I could return to it at any time, any place):

Poem from Pearl's House

I can smell the lilacs
outside her window
I can smell the spring
where she kept things
cold I smell the shed
his worn-out leather
the snake that must've
been sleeping when
the rags hit the gasoline

Poems like this, which use line breaks cannily and don't use punctuation at all, require reading in an iterative way: as you're reading, you have to pause now and then, reread previously read lines, and ask yourself questions like, "Does the descriptor 'outside the window' apply to the lilacs or the spring (or both)? What word (or words) does the adjective 'cold' modify?" This forces you to be as present during the reading process as the writer was during the writing process.

Because it requires you to be so present in the moment, reading this book feels like engaging in a spiritual practice like meditation or yoga, or, perhaps, like reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead: at least half the poems, by forcing the reader to dwell on the manifold little vulnerable things that populate our lives (the lilacs, the leather boots, the snakes that might incinerate at virtually any moment), feel like they were written for the express purpose of preparing us -- both the writer and the reader -- to confront our eventual deaths. They teach us attentiveness, patience, equipoise. There's a school of thought that says a writer's or artist's personality doesn't matter, that Hitler's paintings were fine paintings even though he was Hitler. Books like this remind me of why I am inclined to disagree with that dogma: with a few exceptions that are rare as lightning strikes, it is only possible to learn attentiveness, patience, kindness, etc., from someone who possesses those traits, just as it is generally only possible to learn wisdom from a teacher if that teacher is wise.

The "40 Watts" poems were my favorite in this book, but I must also give a shout-out to "Breathtaken," a collage-style poem created by piecing together phrases gleaned from the NOLA.com Crime Blog and from interviews with the deceased's survivors:

...homeless, stabbed in torso

homeless, stabbed in back

on Loyola

on Danzinger Bridge, a boy, 17                                              [NOPD]

on Danzinger Bridge, a man, mentally challenged

                                                                        in the back [NOPD again]

behind the wheel of his new car

by a peer, 14

on Babylon Street, 17, by peers

in Gert Town...

This is the kind of very ambitious poem that could easily devolve into moralistic grandstanding but, miraculously, doesn't. Its pounding repetitiveness could easily grow tiresome, but Wright has a fine sense of timing that doesn't allow this, and she mixes just enough variation into this delicate balance of theme and variation that even I (who generally am allergic to long poems) found myself compelled to read this quite long poem in a single sitting, on the edge of my seat.

I also prefer Wright's shorter poems, even though the critics all seem to focus on her booklength projects. I love the anecdotal stuff in this review.

great review!

Thorough or WHAT? Well-done, Jenna (insert sound of applause).

Yesterday I was at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop in Dumbo (a place I've wanted to visit since I first heard about it, for what should be obvious and uncanny reasons) and picked up a copy of the chapbook 40 Watts (Octopus Books, 2009, 2012, and one of only 600 paperback copies, according to the copyright page). I was going to post a separate topic for this, but then I realized that it's the same sequence included in Shallcross that you singled out here. I agree!

I also tend to prefer Wright's short poems to the long ones that got so much critical attention. To read these forty short and strange lyrics is to appreciate a master poet in complete control of the white space on the page. The cheerful, the sinister, and the weird are in perfect balance:

Poem Without Angel Food

well a great many things have been said
in the oven of hours we have not been
shaken out of the magnolias today was another
hard day and tomorrow will be harder well
that sounds like our gong but we'll have
the boy's birthday and we will have
music and cake well I think only
good thoughts and go up and talk to the rock

Also, Jenna, I saw a copy of your first book on one of the shelves there. It's a good store.

Brendan wrote: "Yesterday I was at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop in Dumbo (a place I've wanted to visit since I first heard about it, for what should be obvious and uncanny reasons) and picked up a copy of the chapb..."

It's funny: I lived in NYC for ten years, during five of which Berl's Poetry Shop was in existence, and yet I never went there. Maybe some time when I'm visiting the city again, I should. I'll just, like, casually stroll in, carrying one of my Le Bags. :-)

One thing I found interesting about ShallCross is that, prior to its publication by Copper Canyon, most if not all of its component parts had previously been published as stand-alone chapbooks by small presses: for example, The Other Hand was previously published as a chapbook by Horse Less Press, the edgy and quite-tiny-seeming small press that published another chapbook I reviewed in this group, Brenda Iijima's and Annie Won's Once When a Building Block *. It seems to me that most poets who are as well established as C.D. Wright was in the last years of her life don't go around publishing chapbooks with edgy micropresses like that (many years ago, I studied in a workshop under Mark Strand, and I remember him saying disparagingly that he would never publish his work in relatively less-known journals like Crazyhorse when he was able to publish in top-tier glossies like The New Yorker). I think it's cool that, despite her established status, Wright continued to support deserving fringe presses up until the end.



*(The Other Hand, incidentally, struck me as the most opaque section of ShallCross: most of the time I was reading, I felt like it was all going over my head -- I picked up on themes of nuclear destruction, wartime casualties (?), amputated limbs, phantom limbs, starting anew after an ended relationship, possibly a divorce -- but I had a hard time putting the pieces together in any coherent way, and consequently, this section had significantly less emotional impact on me than other sections in the book. If anyone else here has read The Other Hand and could maybe explain it to me so that I understand it better, I would really appreciate it!)

Oh, and thanks for reading and leaving the kind comments, Nina and Ken!

Thank you for the great review, Jenna!

I agree with and particularly like your passage:
"...it is only possible to learn attentiveness, patience, kindness, etc., from someone who possesses those traits, just as it is generally only possible to learn wisdom from a teacher if that teacher is wise."
It reminds me of the biblical passage about how you tell a tree from the kind of fruit it bears.

Again, a lovely review from you and my thanks to you for sharing it with us, Jenna!

Richard: Thanks for the very kind words. Coincidentally, the passage about the tree and the fruit is my lifelong favorite Biblical verse, and I was just discussing it with some people elsewhere on Goodreads the day before you posted your comment!

Louisa: Thanks for your kind comment as well. It's nice to be able to connect with a fellow poetry lover as far away as France. I hope you enjoy your future forays into Wright's work. I'm also very interested in this idea of presence in poetry, the eternal challenge of how to write a poem that is alive, a living thing in the presence of the reader, rather than just a static record of some past moment experienced by the poet. To me, this is one of the central challenges involved in writing a poem, and I always feel exhilarated when I come across a poet who appears to have discovered a new, different angle of approach to it.

I'd be curious to hear more about what poets you read and like!

I must confess I sometimes prefer reading critical reviews to purely positive appreciations, particularly when the review in question is critical of a poet for whose work I feel affection. Critical reviews, when not merely mean-spirited but grounded in a sincere wish to make meaningful distinctions, help me clarify my thoughts about what makes good poetry good and what makes great poetry great.

This morning I stumbled on a very thought-provoking, lucidly written, and, I thought, well-argued, critical review of Wright's work by Adam Kirsch, titled "Discourtesies," first published in the New Republic in 2002 although also appearing in his 2008 essay collection The Modern Element. In it, Kirsch argues that Wright's "difficult" poetic techniques leave him dissatisfied because they conceal what Kirsch describes as an essentially "affirmative," "warmly sentimental," "fundamentally unchallenging," even "ingratiating" world-view. Kirsch goes on to describe Wright's world-view as "so much 'blessing' and 'beauty,'" saying that her body of work brings "news to which no one could possibly object," that at its heart it boils down to a sort of uncontroversial "exhortation to love the little things, or even to stop and smell the roses." Kirsch also expresses dissatisfaction with Wright's apparent preference for "surrounding an object with details, rather than capturing its essence with one sure stroke of image or metaphor," and he gives examples of poems where he thinks use of this technique falls short of success.

While I wouldn't say I quite agree with Kirsch's verdict, I'm intrigued by it: it makes me look anew at my own position as both poet and reader; it makes me wonder whether, indeed, literature must be novel both in thought and in technique to move beyond "very-goodness" and enter the realm of "greatness." Is it indeed a sign of weakness, as Kirsch seems to imply, to take a "merely" affirmative position rather than to seek new vanguards to challenge? Can affirmativeness ever really be trite? I once talked to a poetry reader who passionately exclaimed that poetry that "makes [her] want to argue" cannot be counted as great poetry, but here Kirsch seems to be asserting the opposite: that "news to which no one could possibly object" cannot be considered great poetry, either. I think these are interesting questions to think about, and so I thought I would post about Kirsch's essay here in case others might also want to read and grapple with it.

Having said that, I'm curious as to whether anyone here has read criticism that directly or indirectly engages Kirsch's arguments? I'd love to read more that would help me flesh out my thoughts on these issues.