Raping a classic, and loving it

Contemporary Poetry Review recently introduced the Dylan Thomas Random Poetry Generator, a program that mashes together the common fixations and phraseology of the great Welsh poet into custom scraps of artificial poetry and randomized nonsense. Just click, and a new "poem" appears. At first I was outraged that a "journal devoted exclusively to poetry criticism," and one that regularly flaunts its laurels from celebrated academics, would even entertain the notion of allowing such bollocks to exist on their site. On the main page! The nerve. This isn't poetry, it's a mockery of the craft! They equate Thomas' work to that of typewriting monkeys that peck before the hunt. It's shameful, says I. But I confess to the propagation of about twenty of these ignoble creations. Clicking away, nearly laughing at the oddball brilliance of such randomized lines as "salmon lie impatiently / and all the barge-booted eyes kiss / while the virtuous tides burn and rave", I felt a strange mix of perversion and effortlessness, like I was raping the old Welshy with each poem "generated" by the unfeeling byte of software. I, like many before me, went gently into that good night and emerged with a smile.

The Pulitzer Birdhouse: God's Silence

I decided to give Pulitzer Prize-winning author Franz Wright a chance at flight, but found his much-hyped 2006 release "God's Silence" to be a strange mix of boredom and inaccessibility. For me, these two rarely go hand in hand, but Wright gives new meaning to the word “paradox”. The inside cover hails the book as “a deeply felt celebration of what poetry (and its silence) can do for us.” The problem is, “God’s Silence” screams when it should whisper and barely murmurs when it should shout. “East Boston. 1996” doesn’t know when to shut up, and reads like a tiring diatribe that strings together those familiar images we like in a pop poem (deserted cities, ringing telephones, convenience stores, and the goddamn Holocaust) but abandons any sense of cohesion, employing short and sweet cantos that aim at poignancy but only disrupt the flow. He seems to think that separating the last line of a poem from the body will make it stick out, but when its as weak as “what all things stand for,” it just makes you wonder if his faux genius is worth the extra space on the page. Or how about a one-lined poem, like “Love walk with me in the desert, the (italicized) blizzard of Eden.” The italics equate to attempted avant-garde nausea. Nice touch. Nevertheless, Wright has his moments, with some slightly interesting dreamlike abstractions in “Parallel Self”: “Dreamily / smiling / with an ice pick / in my skull / it was all in my mind.” If poems are to be boring, they should at least be understandable. It seems the critics confuse subtlety with apathy, and award prizes to birdhouses.

Conflict: NYTimes Poetry Review Takes Liberal Liberties

The New York Times review of Maggie Dietz’s “Perennial Fall” was nothing short of magnanimous. David Kirby, the reviewer, grants plenty of credit where it’s due, but took a few disturbing turns that beg a brief discussion. When referencing Deitz’s dream poem “Three Dog Night”, Kirby juxtaposes his appreciation of the work with the
conventionally critical aversion to dreams and visions. This seems to reflect poorly not on Kirby but on the poetic community as a whole. If the current trend in poetry is to steer clear of all things surreal and intangible in an effort to make it more accessible, then I may be doomed to uncovering more birdhouses than birds. The stranger, the better. I live everyday looking through my own two eyes and, although I admit a tree isn’t a tree isn’t a tree, I know that her tree and his tree and my tree all boil down to THE Tree. I want something bizarre and foreign and unobtainable, like the “dark man / with joints of light brandishing the moon like a hatchet” Dietz sketches from one of her visions. This is a beautiful bird.
Perhaps more disturbing is Kirby’s completely unfounded (and unnecessary) paragraph in which he tries to equate Dietz’s poetic message to global warming. Climate change and carbon emissions have nothing to do with her poetry and Kirby knows it, as evidenced by the complete lack of specific references or citations in the paragraph. It didn’t ruin the review, but it kept me distracted throughout the following couple paragraphs. The shameless Gore plug ate away at my skull for a few moments, necessitating the rereading of some sentences. Or maybe the rising temperatures have begun to fry my brains. Save the shoddy science for your mainstream publications, Kirby.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/books/review/20dietz.html

First Bird Sighting: "Perennial Fall"

Whilst perusing the poetry section in the public library, I stumbled across a group of thin-spined paperbacks with names like “Ruin”, “Floating City”, and “American Sublime”, each practically announcing their obscure contemporary authorship with smatterings of postmodern cover art and promotions from never-heard-of cohorts. Figuring these to be prime fodder for twenty-first century poetry reviews, I pulled a few from the shelf and, after confirming the post-2000 publication date, scanned a few poems for either that novel, soul altering image or the clichéd romantic couplet. What I found was “Perrenial Fall”, a refreshingly original collection of poems by editor and lecturer Maggie Dietz.
Her writing is sometimes a tease, shifting suddenly between the massive and timeless and the trite and popular, such as in “Colleen in Sonoma”: “The sun blooms clean. My face / framed bare against the ancient mountains…His tears fall like leaves…the strip malls glowed fluorescent as TVs.” The effect would be almost maddening if it didn’t seem so deliberate. Her coy and seemingly trivial poetic gestures, like TVs and sardines and cow shit, follow gorgeous and heart-wrenching flourishes, then gently give way to quiet and beautiful closure: “At night, the stars are like / sardines, white-silver, tight as fists.”
Her poems assume the shape of birds because they are anything but formulaic. More impressively, she never shies from her own imagination. She proudly weaves visions and dreams into a beast of surreal integrity – one that is not easily tracked, but leads the way to clearer skies.

Read page 19 of the Beloit Poetry Journal at www.bpj.org/PDF/V51N4.pdf for a good sample of her work.

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