I'm trying to reread a book of poems that I read cover to cover last weekend. I don't do this ordinarily. There are just too many books of poetry waiting to be read for the first time. But this one begs a second reading, maybe a third, too.
It's titled a Year & other poems and was written by Jos Charles. It's her third published book of poems. She's won some prestigious awards with her work, has an MFA from the U of Arizona, and, as of the publication of this book, is in the PhD program at UC Irvine. This book was published by Milkweed Editions, in hardcover with a dust jacket.
Quite a resume of accomplishments for somebody who's still in school!
I am trying to read it a second time because its poems are nearly unreadable to me. I take that back. As far as the content goes, the poems are completely unreadable. I don't get even an inkling of what her blurbists say contains "a universe of meaning," whatever that means. The poems are "measured in event and situated in survival," whatever THAT means. They express "gratitude made wise by grief, grief made whole by joy." I think I understand that, though I don't see the movement from one to the other in the book.
It pisses me off when I can find neither gratitude nor grief nor joy in a book of poems where these emotions are said (by a blurbist) to be what the book is about. I get pissed off because someone (a blurbist, an editor, a publisher) is trying to make me feel dull and stupid for NOT seeing these emotions in the poems. A blurbist (the same one who says the book is about gratitude > grief > joy) writes of the book, "time is the subject, time is the beloved, time wraps its arms around us to soften our pain, diffuse our suffering." That annoying plural pronoun usage aside, we might want to ask, so is it time or gratitude or grief or joy or suffering that this book's poems are about?
(Two of the four blurbists quoted on the jacket also deploy the noun "lyric" as a verb: "the poems lyric and listen with thoughtful grief-rage." What? Jos Charles, says another of her blurbists, is "a maker of silences that speak, of grievances that lyric us." WHAT?)
But enough about the blurby hyperbole. What about the poems? Here is the first poem, or possibly the first three poems, of the book, just to give you a sense of what we're dealing with here.
LIKE YOU
I looked for arbors to bend beneath carried circuits
countless in the blood myself from room
to room to see a city
square pin calendars to walls
& hear, I have heard, of inventories of
names dead unspoken
as if the first
I'D CLIMB TO SEE
WHERE out from under story or
carriage pooled to the floor it's pressed to
new growth a mushroom up from bathroom tiles
of a house where xmas lights loom still togethered a yoke
of violet overhead & it could not matter less if you look
where up from floors restingless plotless shelterless green
I've double-proofed my typing here and there are no mistakes. What's above is what's in the book.
My sense of narrative flow wants to read these three poems together into one, but the table of contents insists that they are separate. I feel less lyric-ed or song-ed by this kind of writing than confused, frustrated and annoyed. Annoyed because the built-in difficulty (what one of the blurbists characterizes as writing that "teaches us to pay attention to language again"), strikes me more as performative, show-offy, than truly artful. But I guess they said that about Emily Dickinson, too. They said it about John Ashbery.
And look where we've put those two in the pantheon of American poetry!
And am I not the one who insists that the poetic is always language calling attention to itself? The one who claims that poems begin in sound, no matter where they go from there?
Still, I don't feel positively lyric-ed by word sequences like "floors restingless plotless shelterless green." I feel almost embarrassed, for the poet, for the blurbists trying to spend praise there, for the publisher, for the craft itself. This is poetry?
Yes, this is poetry.
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