Month: June 2005

Many Postmodern poets seem to have a jaundiced view of poets ensconced in universities writing poems for fellow professors. Though I don’t really share this particular prejudice, I do like this poem by August Kleinzahler. It somehow seems appropriate to end my discussion of Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry with it:

An Autumnal Sketch

What to make of them, the professors
in their little cars,
the sensitive men paunchy with drink
parked at the fence
where the field begins and the suburb ends?

If there is a mallard in the reeds
they will take it.
They will take it and make it their own,
something both more than a duck
and less.

They so badly want a poem,
these cagey and disheartened men
at the edge of the field
And before they turn back for supper
they shall have one.

I was never a “professor” and thus never felt any overwhelming need to publish , but even I’ll admit to occasionally hunting too hard to “find” a poem that probably wasn’t there at all.

Bad poems often seem “forced” rather than a natural response to the world that confronts and confounds us day after day. As admirers of poetry, it’s probably good to keep in mind that a duck by any other name is probably still just a duck, not necessarily an imminent sign from God.

I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental that one of his own poems that Paul Hoover includes in Postmodern American Poetry is called:

Poems We Can Understand

If a monkey drives a car
down a colonnade facing the sea
and the palm trees to the left are tin
we don’t understand it.

We want poems we can understand.
We want a god to lead us,
renaming the flowers and trees,
color-coding the scene,

doing bird calls for guests.
We want poems we can understand,
no sullen drunks making passes
next to an armadillo, no complex nothingness

amounting to a song,
no running in and out of walls
on the dry tongue of a mouse,
no bludgeoness, no girl, no sea that moves

with all deliberate speed, beside itself
and blue as water, inside itself and still,
no lizards on the table becoming absolute hands.
pain of martyrs, scientists.
Please, no rabbit taking a rabbit
out of a yellow hat, no tattooed back

facing miles of desert, no wind.
We don’t understand it.

After reading 484 pages of Postmodern American Poetry I can appreciate the humor and irony in this poem, gently, or perhaps no-so-gently, poking fun at readers like myself who still search for “meaning” in poetry.

After reading some 60 Postmodern poets, it’s perfectly clear that not all poets want to be “a god to lead us.”

I’ll have to admit, though, that I am guilty of looking for insights into life in the poetry I read and am not ashamed to admit it. I want to read poetry that helps me to understand people and society better, that helps me to better understand my self. I don’t read poetry just for “entertainment;” in fact, if I wanted “entertainment” I doubt I would pick up a book at all.

That’s not to say that I expect any one poet to provide all the answers of life. It might even be enough for that poetry to make me appreciate the complexity of life, to remind me that simplistic views of life are not only wrong but ultimately destructive to the human soul.

Of course, if the poem can occasionally make me laugh at my own naïveté, all the better.

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.