Posts filed under 'Poetry'
Chill October night
A vampire writes in non-verse
A nip in the air?
How do you like my haiku?
I felt compelled to write it only because it seems appropriate to at least try to use the form when reviewing a book written in haiku. Vampire Haiku by Ryan Mecum, uses the form created in Japan (seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, then seven, then five syllables) to write a book. It’s not really poetry, it’s a narrative, using the short poems to convey the story. Call it poetic license. And it’s pretty fun.
The story starts with twenty-one year-old William Butten, on the deck of the Mayflower as it begins sailing to the New World. William makes a vow to document all his new world adventures into small poems. A young woman on deck a few nights later charms the young man. Once they begin necking, life as he knew it takes a whole new direction. Because he’s now, well, immortal. And the vampire woman he fell in love with? He kind of alienated her by killing her vampire husband. So she disappears from his life, reappearing from time to time as the story progresses. Not that she’s that necessary to keep the story moving forward. But every story needs a love interest, right? So there you go.
American history provides a pretty convenient backdrop on which our poet can sketch his vampiric ways. We move from feasting on Pilgrims in the 1620s (that first winter wasn’t really that harsh) to draining Redcoats in the Revolutionary War, to Davy Crockett, who didn’t so much die at the Alamo as well, you get the idea. Emily Dickinson, P.T. Barnum, Babe Ruth, Amelia Earhart, James Dean, J.D. Salinger also make cameos. Pop culture through the ages gets tweaked as well, including Woodstock, Buffy, Count Chocula, goths, and a Facebook “menu” for real dining. The movie version of Twilight gets mocked of course. Oh and he notes that flat-screen monitors will fit inside your coffin when the lid is closed. I tell you, is this a great country or what?
All told, it was a pretty enjoyable read. It’s illustrated with drawings and photographs and occasional drops and splashes of red on the pages. And it’s a pretty quick read so, even though you know you’re wasting your time, you don’t waste that much of it. More story than poem, more humor than horror, this may not be the best example of haiku but it was (I’m just guessing) a lot more fun.
And if you prefer your undead to be of the rotting flesh variety, look for Zombie Haiku.
November 5th, 2009
Dennis - Central
Part of the pleasure of reading a book of poems is you can jump around, taking in a few poems at a time – first those ones that immediately appeal to you, then going back to fill in the blanks or pick up the strays at it were. Forrest Gander’s Eye Against Eye is notable for a gorgeous sequence of poems in response to some black-and-white landscapes by the photographer Sally Mann. I say “respond,” but “interpret” would be more accurate – the poems do the double work of describing and explicating our experience of the photos, since we do not necessarily understand what we see, even if that thing strikes us with emotive force (as the photos certainly do).
Thus a white streak under a bridge in the upper third of a mostly black field becomes a swimmer, whose smooth motion offsets the leaping of a barely-visible branch slightly lower in the foreground, then connects in turn with a blemish in a lower corner on the surface of the print itself. The blemish ruins the perfection of the print – but it is redeemed. Easily missed, if Gander hadn’t pointed it out to us, it…
joins together the realms
of seer and swimmer
in our experience of plunging
into and out of the image.
This is what good poetry does best I think, it imbues the vivid and particular (the individual) with meaning and dignity. In varied and inspired ways, each of the poems does this. I like most that the effects are so diverse (even visually with the arrangement of words on the page); and the pay-off is so consistent.
Three longish poems round out the book - a meditation on Mayan ruins, a wide-ranging evocation of modern life, and a dreamy retelling of the poet’s encounter with a bicycle thief in the Mission district of San Francisco. Though less successful, these poems are good representatives of our poets’ concern with information overload, with chance and disintegration. Then there’s the page fillers called “ligatures,” that indulge in even more cutting edge poetics!
June 2nd, 2009
Tien
I’m not usually a poetry reader. But something about the title (maybe the subtitle?) for Andrew Hudgin’s newest volume of verse made me curious enough to give it a try. That title is Shut Up, You’re Fine : Poems for Very, Very Bad Children, a volume of humorous verse, by Hudgins with drawings by Barry Moser. Trust me, there’s not a love poem to be found. And these poems probably aren’t suitable for children.
The poems are all written from the point-of-view of a (mostly) pre-pubescent child, capturing moments in a child’s world from that skewed perspective that an adult could only laugh at, when that adult isn’t cringing from discomfort. Poems are all over the place, from a young adolescent being slapped around by his parents for having become such a disappointing young thug, to a youngster who speculates on why his parents spend so much time looking for him in their bedroom when he plays hide-and-seek with them, to a younger brother celebrating his advantage over his sister when he finds her stash of drugs hidden in her bra, to various and fascinating contemplations of aging grandparents.
Barry Moser’s art doesn’t appear with each poem, which is something of a shame, since it’s pretty entertaining itself. They do add something to the text, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it charm.
Life, death, family, sexuality– all the big themes are touched upon, just not in a very enlightened way. I’m pretty sure the term “doggerel” was invented for poems like these but don’t let that stop you– there’s plenty here to enjoy if your taste in poetry isn’t too refined. At least it rhymes, usually. Just be prepared for more than a few moments when you find yourself going “Eww!” while suppressing a laugh.
Too bad I just missed National Poetry Month. But I’ll be all set for next year…
May 28th, 2009
Dennis - Central
…it’s a helluva town!
Pet subjects. We all have them. Some people like to read everything they can find about the Founding Fathers. Others can’t get enough science books, or memoirs. For others, novels set in the Wild West is what it’s all about. For me? I’ll read anything you give me about New York City.
New York City is just one pet subject for me among many, but it’s a rewarding one, not only because a lot of novels are set there, but also because so many writers themselves live in New York City and write nonfiction about it. One such example is novelist Colson Whitehead, best known for his titles John Henry Days and The Intuitionist; he’s also written the short prose poetry book The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts.
Those readers looking for a story or guidebook-like information about New York City will not find what they’re looking for in this book. What they will find is beautiful, evocative writing:
“Our streets are calendars containing who we were and who we will be next. We see ourselves in this city every day when we walk down the sidewalk and catch our reflections in store windows, seek ourselves in this city each time we reminisce about what was there fifteen, ten, forty years ago, because all our old places are proof that we were here. One day the city we built will be gone, and when it goes, we go. When the buildings fall, we topple, too.
Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us…” (pp. 9-10.)
I’ve never lived in New York, only visited. But I think I became a little bit of a New Yorker when I read that.
March 31st, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
Poet Gabriel Fried describes riding on a ferris wheel in one’s small, rural hometown as offering “the feel of dough and the pleasures of ascenscion.” His prize winning collection, Making the New Lamb Take, delivers in a similar fashion.
The biblical, classical and pastoral imagery and stories girding many of the poems have been often told and used. Oh no, another poem featuring the Eurydice/Orpheus story? This collection has three good ones, offering vantage points on the story that were new to me.
Stylistically conventional, the poetry is full of rhyme and alliteration; while he employs end-rhymes sparingly, nearly every other line features an internal one. Fried delights in assonance. In many cases, he resorts to quiet and simple rhymes that are barely there, but when consciously noted, please and induce smiles.
Cloaked in this bread of tradition (and bread’s a good thing in my book), Fried’s poems take sudden and strange turns delivering the reader to new ground and perspective. Or should that be new depths? His poems have a vortex-like effect: each line propelling you down to the one below it till you find yourself at poem’s end, a bit breathless and asking “what have I just heard?”
Fried’s poems speak to the experience of mourning and hope. The voice in many seems to be struggling to recall a marvelous vision or knowledge that, like a half-remembered dream, seems to only decay and grow uncertain with the effort of recall. Conversely, others express a yearning or hope based on the hunch that our present conceptions of reality are as the ant’s to our own.
I would be hard-presseded to abstract in a line or two the thoughts and emotions evoked by many of the poems in this promising debut collection. Instead, one is best left with the poems themselves as precise evidence of the emotion/thought they evince. A collection that tantalizes, frustrates and fosters attention.
November 14th, 2007
Jim - South Madison