Though I still have several things I’m working on fixing on my web site and I’m still working on the side on Photoshop and Illustrator, for the moment I’m intent on finishing Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry.
Luckily, I’ve suddenly found several poets I like, so I think I can manage to finish the anthology soon and then move on to actually exploring several of the poets I want to explore more in more detail.
I’m not sure if I like William Corbett’s poetry because of how he describes it or because of the way it is written, but I like what he says about the function of poetry:
I seek to make poems that are clear as a cloudless fall morning – the reader ought to be able to see freshly what’s right in front of him and into the distance for miles. My endeavor is to make the everyday memorable, to discover and declare the value in what’s considered ordinary. The language I like best is plain and ringing, clean and accurate as a well-driven nail.
While I’m not sure that all of his poems, or anyone’s poems, for that matter, can meet these standards, I do like many of his poems. At least on one level they remind me of William Carlos Williams poems, both through their concreteness and their sense of humor.
My favorite poem in this section of the collection is called
WICKSON PLUMS
Six green plum bottoms
perfect from nipples flow
sit in the antique white
bowl where bread rose.
Out the kitchen window
my daughters ten and thirteen
run across the field
just their heads show
as they dip into a swale
like the ocean first Marni’s
blond head than Arden’s brown
hair flowing rises into sight.
Late August’s weak sun
lays whitely upon us all
upon the ragged spent grass
and nearly done blackberry canes.
The evening cold comes up
around our toes. You no longer
hear the cricket then suddenly
they catch your attention again
like the flies bred through
all these wet days brushed away
from the plums. Green ones.
Fill my mouth with sweetness.
Although the poem reminds me of William Carlos Williams’ famous
This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
in some ways, by juxtaposing the plums against the scene outside, and later the evening crickets, Corbett introduces the entirely new idea of how difficult it is “to see freshly what’s right in front of him,” because of the many distractions that we face in the real world.
We are so caught up in a world of shifting demands and objects vying for our attention that it is difficult to pay the proper attention to anything.
I found a number of interesting poems by Corbett online.