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December 2016

Joe Weil—A Night in Duluth

NYQ Books, 2016

Page Length: 104 Pages

Retail: $15

After recently re-reading Raymond P. Hammond’s Poetic Amusement, a book that isn’t afraid to criticize the current state of academia, contemporary American poetry, and the pressure to publish or perish, I can’t help but find similarities between Hammond’s work and Weil’s latest collection of poems, A Night in Duluth, at least in terms of argument. The key similarity between the books is their willingness to take on the contemporary American poetry scene, namely all of the hobnobbing that goes on and the rapid speed at which some poems are churned out in order to fill a CV or earn tenure. Yet, the final pages of Weil’s book remind us of the power that poetry can still have, especially when it elevates the everyday image as something of beauty.

Hammond and Weil’s books are completely different forms. Initially his MA thesis at NYU, Hammond’s book is broken into chapters and can be viewed as a collection of essays on the current state of American poetry, one that references everyone from Aristotle to Robert Bly to make its points about the proliferation of M.F.A. programs and “workshop poems” cranked out in creative writing classes. Weil’s collection employs a language that blends the high and low brow and seamlessly references Edith Wharton and Henry James in the opening stanza of “I Want to Lick Your Knee and Weep for Rahoon,” and then asks at the beginning of the second stanza, “Where the fuck is Rahoon?” The mix of working-class language and references to literary giants or theorists (another poem references Adorno) has become a staple of Weil’s work. The working-class mixes with academic culture, and the speaker isn’t afraid to criticize some of the absurdities of academia or the po-biz, which is why Weil’s book reminds me so much of Poetic Amusement.

In “What Editors Are Looking For Is,” Weil writes:

I have noticed that the poems

and the editors, and much

of the scenery surrounding

the poems and the editors is

beginning to look the same—

fixed so to speak in an “Excellence”

that does not quite cohere.

In the previous lines, Weil imagines editors who are rarely pleased, with brittle faces, eventually smiling, somewhat, with a “pinched gladness that says/I believe this poem and I can/do lunch together. This poem will/not embarrass me should we be/caught in the camera’s eyes.” This poem and the point it makes again reminds me of Poetic Amusement, specifically that there is such a pressure to publish that sometimes academic poets pen safe poems merely to add to their publication records. The gatekeepers of literary magazines, meanwhile, are also careful what they publish in order to preserve their reputations and not offend.

The final pages of Weil’s book shift away from criticism of academia and the poetry scene and are exactly the type of poems Hammond imagines are possible, if we move away from a committee mindset and teach students to deepen their reading knowledge, place their poems in historical context, and draw on rich, lived experiences, even painful memories. One of the book’s last poems, “I Was a Good Son,” is one of the most confessional in the book, but it is also the opposite of the poems that Weil and Hammond rail against. It isn’t a safe poem, but one marked with brutal honesty, as the speaker recounts the last moments with his mother. The second stanza reads:

How do I tell her I wanted to fuck girls. I wanted to

escape into flannel shirts and beer, becoming whatever

it was that was not her dying. Even now I am

ashamed, and say: I was a good soon. I was a good soon.

What I was is love and love is not good. It is not dutiful.

It does not “Stay the course.” It breaks like a cheap watch.

I was a cheap watch. Ma, forgive me. I was a cheap watch

And both of us were lying.

After reading that poem, I had to set the book down and take a deep breath, reminded of the power poetry can still have, especially when it draws on a lived experience. There are other poems that remind me of Emerson, William Carlos Williams, and the American poetic tradition, not necessarily because of their form, but in the way they praise the everyday image, including the wind in a lover’s hair, as recounted in “Vibrant Monday Poem in Which Certain Things Almost Occur,” or a childhood memory about peeling chestnut shells in “Horse Chestnut.” That poem also shifts after a few stanzas to recall Anne Frank’s story, before finally confessing that a sort of spiritual beauty exists in the most common images in this world, including trees and chestnuts.

 A Night in Duluth doesn’t hold back. It pokes fun at the po-biz and academia. It also reads like a journey about a working-class poet who ended up in academia and knows that he’s a strong teacher, but doesn’t want to play the game of hobnobbing that the profession sometimes requires. The final pages, however, show Weil’s knowledge of the American poetic tradition, in that his poems reflect Whitman, Emerson, and William Carlos Williams’ theories that the everyday image, including working-class language, belong in American poetry, and there is a poetic energy and spirituality that can be found there.

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Suicide Hotline Hold Music

by Jessy Randall

Red Hen Press, 2016

$11.95

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Sometimes it seems as if the poetry world is forever on a search for the New. Or I should say, New! Going further, the highest praise for poetry these days is to say it “reinvents language.” As if the English language has been basically used up, and poets are tasked with making it work again, from the ground up. Or maybe it’s that poetry itself no longer draws the audiences of yore: “yore” being…Elizabethan theater? Homer’s Greece? Perhaps Kennedy’s inauguration? In any case, one can safely say that there are two tribes in the poetry world: the highbrow, dominated by academia, and the lowbrow, dominated by pop music lyrics, poetry slams, rap, and greeting card/ Internet poetry. The former is held to high standards, divided into genres, and is judged by editorial and “established” peer discretion. The latter is held to to the standard of popularity (and/or monetary success). The search for the New! is part of highbrow poetry’s search for a validation of its existence, at odds with what have become the Western values of profit and popularity über alles. Enter Jessy Randall in the middle of all this with her third poetry collection, Suicide Hotline Hold Music. Not only does she not reinvent language, she uses the same vernacular we hear in sit-coms, grocery checkout lines, and the corridors of middle school. Yet manages to put our brains on “refresh” mode, looking at ourselves and the world differently. I attribute this to her unique voice; perfectly balanced (funny but not too funny; weird yet recognizable; whimsically satirical) to fulfill the directive for suicide hotlines, as stated in her title poem: “the main thing is to keep them on the line.”

 

On this point, Randall’s voice permeates both the comics and the poetry, managing through her playfulness, subtle wit, and counterpoint between “normal” and wacky, to keep us with her. Her poetry is not so much about the astounding phrase or unheard-of imagery, but rather about a tension between revelation and restraint, the commonplace and the outrageous, a low-key, ordinary walk through a surprising otherworld within. With comics as simple and basic as one could imagine added to mostly brief poems and unassuming diction, she manages to present a surprising and satisfying array of experiential wisdom. Like this example from “Pool Rules,” a list poem whose elements jump from the expected to those which speak apparently to a wider pool:

 

No smoking. No horseplay. There will be

no stealing of your best friend’s boyfriend.

No nose-picking. Say please. In sexual matters,

be generous, but do not think of it that way.

No watch-wearing. No digital clocks. No

t-shirts with sayings on them. Spell *ketchup*

with a *k*. Do not drink to excess. If you must

read a book in the bathtub, be careful. Turn off

cell phones unless you enjoy subtle disdain.

 

This is how I like my rules, in what seems like no particular order, yet whose order gives it the element of surprise. But in case that strikes you as too suburban, she already admitted to suburbanizing New York (“I Ruined New York”: “I’m the one who wrecked … the alive, excited state of the streets, the way the museums embraced everyone who came in”) and has passed through the “Nine Circles of Motherhood Hell” (a poetry cartoon), the best defense of mothers I’ve seen in a long while. (See below.)

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The title’s mention of “suicide,” couched as it is in “hold music,” almost imperceptibly acknowledges the human condition, its necessity to deal with death and despair. If this book was meant as a sort of antidote, it may well have succeeded. I found myself drawn back to it when, sans hotline, I felt a bit overwhelmed. Maybe it was the wisdom of the “Food Diary of Gark the Troll.” Or more likely, knowing things could be worse—knowing I could have been “The Girlfriend of Time,” who ended up with “a face full/ of ectoplasm and no one to cry to.”

 

The unspoken element here is that her poems ring true. Social commentary slips through the comedic approach with a sleight of hand in which neither overwhelms the other. One of my favorites is this:

 

The Practice Children

 

“assignments might include divvying up responsibilities in a ‘practice house’ that sometimes even included ‘practice children’ borrowed from local orphanages.” —Emily McCombs, “Home sweet Home ec,” Bust, August/September 2009.

 

We know we’re only for practice. It’s

a comfort to us. Nothing we do has any

long-term effect, so we can behave perfectly,

for a time, win prizes for our goodness and then

it’s right back on the bus home again,

regular life waiting for us, the bunk beds,

the dinner trays, the horrible bathrooms.

We’re practicing, too. We’re practicing on you.

 

Here she explores the word “practice” itself and the psychological cruelty of its use through the voice of the children, “we.” This in itself acts as both a rebuttal to and exposition of the callous negation of the children’s individuality in the quote. Without showing anger or speaking out of character, the children’s voice creates a subtle jab at the quote’s moral vacuity with “earn prizes for our goodness” and “regular life waiting for us.” Here the words “goodness,” “regular” and “perfect” are used to poignant and satiric effect. Of course, the best part is the last line, where the “practice children” turn the tables. We can only guess what that involves.

 

Part of what’s trending in poetry now is genre-bending. By including poetry comics, Randall can certainly check that box. What interests me most is that although poetry comics is an amalgam of words and graphics, with the latter usually dominant, her voice remains a constant in both. The simple and down-to-earth (or TV) language is the same in both. The graphics too are simple and down-to-earth, giving the sense that anyone could do it. It’s a matter of the same wit and casual tone interspersed with quirkiness, applied differently. That the poems are mostly short and the comics simple certainly holds the notoriously short modern attention span. She fills that short space with observations that keep us reading. As one might imagine, in experimenting with a medium, some efforts will be more successful than others. In her quest for brevity, for packing subtle meaning into the simplest and most rudimentary of graphic and verbal juxtapositions, a few of her poems and comics fall flat in their restatement of the obvious. If she was banking on sparsity itself as a poetic device juxtaposed with the humor of oversimplification, it works sometimes but not all of the time—although this is more a matter of subjectivity and taste than fatal flaw. What we get in return from her “investment” is that even what doesn’t seem to say much does so out of understatement. So you’re underwhelmed? Turn the freaking page..!.. Now that’s better.  It may be a letdown in the sense that one, expecting a ladybug, finds a potato bug. But was that really so bad?

 

Which brings up the issue of what we hope to find in literature. Since Randall’s work really takes on some of the features of what I described above as “lowbrow”—accessibility, common language, comics (as opposed to the Visual Poetry use of blurry typeface as Art), humor, and brevity—she may find herself not only straddling genres, but worlds as well: the Art world as opposed to the Pop world. Rewinding history a bit, this has been done successfully by no less than Shakespeare, who wrote plays for the common man, not a literate culture, made accessible via theatre. There has always been a back-and-forth between the Cultured and the Boor; education (think middle school) forms an equalizer in modern society. By harkening back to a younger school age, Randall leaves the post-grads in a quandary: this is not your MFA-certified material, so is it Poetry? Even poetry comics can be done with more finesse, in technicolor no less. It’s…well, what is it? Whatever it is, it’s New! And that means unique.

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So here we are, in this era of depression and despair, Trump looming like a giant bully on the horizon, the 99% counting yachts while we count imaginary sheep, suicide hotlines sprouting everywhere, and I do not, on certain days, really want to hear long odes by Jorie Graham. I want to hear the sound of  “Everybody’s Hair in Middle School.” Literally. A couple of awkward pie graphs of love and I’m good to go. This may not be what Jason Guriel hoped for when he complained in “Why Is the Great American Poem So Hard to Write?” about how the world needs “a poem, not just poetry. That’s what our era is lacking, claims a growing chorus of pundits. . . .” Randall may not write the Great American Poem, her work may not be what some say ought to be done, but she does write “self-contained” original pieces and collects them into her book like (her cartoon of) boyfriends in a candy box. There’s a place on my bookshelf for that.photo2 (1)

 

 

Xenos cover
The “stranger” in Joanna Valente’s Xenos writes herself into being, sifting through the detritus of a life that spans Maine, Brooklyn, and a boat to Greece. These are poems of sisterhood, motherhood, self-preservation, desire. In verse as dangerous and illuminating as berry-stained lips under a clear Aegean moon, Xenos reminds us that we are at once self and not-self, invention and memory, family and exile.

—Sophia Starmack, author of The Wild Rabbit

Joanna Valente’s Xenos is an immigrant narrative, but it’s not simply about the transition from one country to another, one homeland to the next–it’s the narrative of the heart that finds estrangement wherever it goes, the body that does and does not recognize itself, and the way family disinherits us even as it claims us. In these poems, we meet the strangers who we know all too well, and the loved ones who remain forever inexplicable, and we, too, are them. 

—Gregory Crosby, Author of Spooky Action at a Distance

Joanna C. Valente is a gifted storyteller, crafting a deeply humanizing and expressive narrative within the pages of Xenos. To read this collection is to travel back in time, to be reminded that even then there were fires, even then so many of us were burning. Unifying and spirited, readers will find themselves returning to these poems over and over again.

—Azia DuPont, editor of Dirty Chai Magazine
Xenos cover