I have a form of optimism about poetry: it rises above awards. Roy Jacobstein's A Form of Optimism wallows in them, a hog-heaven of them. I picked this volume up at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill the other night and gave it a read. The poems are competent, even good, in a workshop-clever way. They are so standard that I could have sworn, while browsing in the bookshop, that I'd read stuff by the poet before. And I may have, somewhere, sometime. But I think that feeling of familiarity comes from having read this type of stuff so many times in so many standard reviews over so many years.
The voice, the speaker's "presence" in every poem, the nice turn of phrase, the interminable focus on the small and local and intimate--the moment--the finding of meaning in the daily and otherwise unnoticed; it's all the stuff of poetry workshops, of professionalism, the curse of William Carlos Williams upon so many succeeding generations: no ideas but in things.
This poet is everywhere in his poems. He (his voice, his point of view, his experience, his conclusions, his lessons) is inescapable. In a book of poems ostensibly "about" exotic foreign scenes and cultures, you get hardly the sense of the poetry or the culture--only of the observer and the recorder and what he has chosen to record. It's a book about Roy Jacobstein: "Looky! Oh, look what I saw while traveling through this place!" This place being anything from a dusty road in village Africa to a landscape in the poet's own family history. A book of verse? Certainly. A purply-travelogue? Most certainly.
The poems all attack their topics like a seminar assignment, making meaning after meaning after meaning. Like wonderfully behaved children, they establish scene, develop complication, build tension, resolve through some denouement, then conclude with a moral, usually implied, and a moral often so obvious as not to need verbalizing. One after another. Like bon bons, the first two or three are delicious and make you want more, which you can't resist, until soon the tongue is sugar-coated and the stomach sour. Sugar shock!
You'll do anything for something trivial and meaningless.
But these are all award-winning pieces--the book won the Morse Prize for 2011--and many of it's poems were first published in the best reviews: Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, The Indiana Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly. Everything about the book, as a publication, shouts "I am a book of award-winning poems!" from every part: the front cover, the back cover, the frontispiece, title page, the biographical back page. What bona fides!
But read the poems. Jeez, buy the book. Support the enterprise even if it stoops again and again to the "awarded." Only, don't mistake the treatment of safe themes (life is unfair, the West is cruel and clueless, death is among us, it's hard and even unsafe to be different or think different, there's a big exotic world out there and here let me introduce it to you) in a safe manner for what it isn't: poetry.
The voice, the speaker's "presence" in every poem, the nice turn of phrase, the interminable focus on the small and local and intimate--the moment--the finding of meaning in the daily and otherwise unnoticed; it's all the stuff of poetry workshops, of professionalism, the curse of William Carlos Williams upon so many succeeding generations: no ideas but in things.
This poet is everywhere in his poems. He (his voice, his point of view, his experience, his conclusions, his lessons) is inescapable. In a book of poems ostensibly "about" exotic foreign scenes and cultures, you get hardly the sense of the poetry or the culture--only of the observer and the recorder and what he has chosen to record. It's a book about Roy Jacobstein: "Looky! Oh, look what I saw while traveling through this place!" This place being anything from a dusty road in village Africa to a landscape in the poet's own family history. A book of verse? Certainly. A purply-travelogue? Most certainly.
The poems all attack their topics like a seminar assignment, making meaning after meaning after meaning. Like wonderfully behaved children, they establish scene, develop complication, build tension, resolve through some denouement, then conclude with a moral, usually implied, and a moral often so obvious as not to need verbalizing. One after another. Like bon bons, the first two or three are delicious and make you want more, which you can't resist, until soon the tongue is sugar-coated and the stomach sour. Sugar shock!
You'll do anything for something trivial and meaningless.
But these are all award-winning pieces--the book won the Morse Prize for 2011--and many of it's poems were first published in the best reviews: Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, The Indiana Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly. Everything about the book, as a publication, shouts "I am a book of award-winning poems!" from every part: the front cover, the back cover, the frontispiece, title page, the biographical back page. What bona fides!
But read the poems. Jeez, buy the book. Support the enterprise even if it stoops again and again to the "awarded." Only, don't mistake the treatment of safe themes (life is unfair, the West is cruel and clueless, death is among us, it's hard and even unsafe to be different or think different, there's a big exotic world out there and here let me introduce it to you) in a safe manner for what it isn't: poetry.
No comments:
Post a Comment