Romanticism

Romanticism April BernardW.W. Norton, 2009Most of the poems in this collection, the fourth from April Bernard (whom W.S. Merwin deems “brilliant” on the flap copy, a poet of “power and ambition”) are rather lovely—and at their weakest, merely innocuous. A few are knockouts.Romanticism derives a lot of its content and emotional thrust from music. For example, the unassumingly titled “Beagle or Something,” the book’s fifth poem and one of its best:

The composer’s name was Beagle or something,one of those Brits who make the world wistfulwith chorales and canticles and this piece,a tone poem or what-have-you,chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one

—for one feeling a little vulnerable, she goes on to say, and the lyric moment is a sort of epiphany of sadness brought on by the silly music and the vision of a shaking tree seen through the windshield. Few things are more annoying that a forced poetic epiphany, but I like Bernard’s epiphany for being humble and self-effacing and taking place among the “telephone wires and dogs […] along Orange Street”; I picture her—or me—driving and crying down the Orange Street in my neighborhood. Because a dumb song does make you cry when primed for crying.Plus, the epiphanies are few and far between in this collection. Many of the poems are spare, mysterious six-liners, such as:

In a Stolen Boat,push off what seemed safe: The fishing dock,pitch pines, children glazed to sheenby ruthless summers. Pastthe jetty, past the past, to open sea—all violet and green, that choppy path between doom and luck—Put your back into it, and row.

Another high point is the book’s lone prose poem, “Underneath,” one part of a brief sequence titled “Concerning Romanticism.” “Underneath” is a poem I will read again and again for gorgeous, open lines like “Do you know what it means to be ‘under erasure,’ that lovely post-structural notion, your words and deeds red-lined-through by some revisionist, who may be guiding your hand so that you are complicit in the silencing?” I wished every poem in the book was as lush and layered.The third section of the book is the most overtly musical and was the least interesting to me initially—a number are based, according to their epigraphs, on various opera. These struck me as amusing but rather low-risk. Then I discovered the end notes where Bernard discloses that the cited arias, composers, etc., are her own invention. The risk in these poems, then, is that a reader may not get to the note. Being in on the fakery instantly imbued the poems with more intrigue. Which is to say, Romanticism is a rare book I’m inclined to read twice.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney is Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found in Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.

Poemland

Poemlandby Chelsey MinnisWave Books, 2008Chelsey Minnis is something of a poet’s poet, and to certain readers her third book, Poemland, will come off as undisciplined, even ridiculous. But to readers who want to be in on the joke, that is exactly the point. And it is, the book itself professes, “a very expensive joke,” but it is also “a fistfight in the rain under a held umbrella” … “a chance to tell the truth” … “crap coming toward you on a conveyor belt” … “a regretted regret” and “double everything!” Poemland is a book-length definition of what poetry is and what it does, a description through over-the-top metaphor (“This is meat colored candy”) of what being a poet is like. So those who hate poems about poems need not apply: “This is a long boring attack,” she writes. But for a reader like me, who dislikes description and similes in their usual context, this book is anything but boring.Minnis’ trademark is the forbidden punctuation of ellipses and exclamation points:

You must have some sort of agenda to promote in poetry!Such as self-sympathy or vengeance…You must seduce and counter-seduce…And glow with extreme sensual grievance…Like an undeserved sunset…

This is part of the poet’s self-announcing form of subversion. Her poems are subversive, but they’re delivered in the voice of a naughty little girl who defies “god’s wish” by passing out on the “sticky floor” at “catholic school.” (This girly yet grotesque aesthetic helped spur Arielle Greenberg to coin the term “Gurlesque” in 2002.) It’s the voice of a girl who indulges in funeral daydreams: “If you die everyone tells a sad story about you! […] Do not die or everyone will continue to care only about themselves and not you!” This adolescent logic is later echoed in a snide dig at every grownup writer’s fantasy of living on after death through writing: “Death will come to end swinishness… // But my swinishness will continue in my poems…!” This is what Minnis excels at—teetering in perfect balance between the childishly vapid and the ultimately truthful. To write poetry, Poemland claims, is “to enchant someone meaninglessly.” And the book enchants with a long attack of self-contradicting truisms and glittering images of a bad girlhood.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney isDon’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found inColorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.