Bluets
Maggie Nelson
Wave Books, 2009

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets starts with its worst sentence: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” I am suspicious of this sentence; I find it contrived. Everything else about the book I love.

Bluets, which is a prose-poetry hybrid (or, arguably, an essay), is written as a series of numbered “propositions,” like a treatise, and draws heavily from a list of sources cited in the back, including Wittgenstein and Goethe. (Nelson’s work may appeal to fans of Jenny Boully.) The book has three main subjects or themes: the philosophy of color; the analysis of a past romantic relationship; and the ostensible love affair (an emotional affair? unrequited?) with the color blue.

The third is often foregrounded, but it’s the least interesting of the three, or perhaps I should say the most annoying. But one can get around that by rejecting that first line as disingenuous and taking the “love” object for what it really is—an object of obsession. Or, more properly, displaced obsession, since the speaker increasingly seems to be focusing on blue as a way of avoiding the more difficult subjects of depression and loss. (I say “speaker” in deference to the common wisdom that the “narrator” of a poem is not identical to its author, but the speaker in this book does make frequent reference to the act of authoring it.)

The path toward this recognition—that the speaker-author is afraid that if she writes about her real subject, the words will supersede her actual experience, the way a childhood photo “replaces the memory it aimed to preserve”—is both fascinating and beautiful. It’s an inquiry into the very nature of color—a purely subjective experience that nonetheless falls under the purview of science—as well as a catalogue of the cultural uses of blue, in books, in pornography, in music. Nelson can write a lovely lyric line (“a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette”; “an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire”) but doesn’t stake her claim in metaphors and images. Bluets is built from ideas and questions: Why has so little been made of the “female gaze”? How long is one permitted to be “blue” before they must admit their life is simply ruined? (The consensus among her friends is seven years.)

These ideas and references serve as a string of jumping-off points for self-reflection and realization:

177. Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

I never feel satisfied with poetry that is wholly cerebral or wholly emotional, so I love that Maggie Nelson’s writing gives me a philosophy fix along with a hit of the Romantic sublime.

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–Elisa Gabbert

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Romanticism

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April Bernard
W.W. Norton, 2009

Most 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.

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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,

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one of those Brits who make the world wistful
with 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:

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the 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.

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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.

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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

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Poemland
by Chelsey Minnis
Wave Books, 2008

Chelsey 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

State of the Union
Eds. Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder
Wave Books, 2008

There are many things I like about the new political anthology from Wave Books, State of the Union. I like its size–very manageable at just over 100 pages–and I like almost all of the poets represented within–old favorites like John Ashbery and James Tate alongside new favorites like Matthea Harvey and Tao Lin. I also like its dedication: all royalties for the book will be donated to a nonprofit organization that benefits poor and homeless veterans.

But there are a few things I don’t like about it. Some of these poems seem only superficially political, as though to serve a conscience-easing function for the writer and the reader (and the publisher, I suppose); including the word “war” in a poem, as the second piece in the collection, Nick Flynn’s “Imagination” does, isn’t necessarily going to make me feel anything, be it indignation or rage or complicity. And complaining about the president (”i’m so happy i’m suicidal, like a psilosybin trip that’s moved in for good and his name is george bush,” writes Garrett Caples) may convince me you have good political sense, but it doesn’t convince me you’re a good poet.

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Many of the best poems in this collection come at their subject a little more obliquely, but are more fully realized as poems, by virtue of being emotionally complex and provoking more than one thought (e.g., War is bad or The government sucks)–I don’t read poetry to find assertions I already believe to be true (that’s what the Internet is for).

One of my favorite poems in State of the Union is “Forgiveness” by Mathias Svalina, an early-career poet (unlike most of the authors here, he has yet to publish a full-length book). Svalina’s poem manages to be both funny and tragic and contains no platitudes. I felt the last stanza exactly where I was supposed to:

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If you see a photograph
of a murdered girl
you will forever after
wear her teeth as a
necklace for your throat.
This is not forgiveness.
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It is forgiveness
when you eat
with her teeth.

Another poem I liked was “Covenant of Sticks” by Dan Chelotti:

there is a hunger when I go birdwatching:
I want to yell, do something you fucking bird,

do something that isn’t flying, feeding, landing.
Why don’t you explode? Why aren’t you the bomb

that I want you to be?

Chelotti’s risk lies in admitting an animal appetite for destruction (Mary Ruefle’s poem proclaims, “We should try to be more like animals / and less like them at the same time”), and this opens the poem up to far more nuance than simply stating the obvious, that destruction is bad.

–Elisa Gabbert
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Quaker Guns
Caroline Knox
Wave Books, 2008

Caroline Knox is a serious goofball. In Quaker Guns, her sixth and latest book of poetry, her over-the-top whimsy pays off more often than not, sometimes with big dividends.

Though Knox’s poems are often downright silly, there’s an intellectual heft behind them that keeps this collection from feeling like novelty poetry. Like a literary analogue to Jeff Koons (the sheer delight of his giant Mylar balloon), she’s working largely on a conceptual level, though the work is also beautifully crafted. Her “conceptual” poems include one where the title (which is “The Title”) appears mid-poem, another that functions as the “source text” for two E.E. Cummings poems (had they actually been erasures), a recipe for a really fucked up Jell-o salad, a ten-line poem whose couplets adhere to a pointless eye-rhyme scheme: “A Jesuit / appeared in an apesuit” (suggesting that rhymes do not a poem make).

In general Knox makes a bit of a mockery of form. “A Lot of the Days I Wake Up” is an abecedarian whose N and Q lines are, in their entirety, “Nerf” and “quiche”—but lest we think these words serve only to fill out the form, the concepts return in the final lines:

We couldn’t tell what was really going on in the photograph of the
xebu, because of overexposure.
You see, we’re in the Nerf quiche
zone again.

Don’t think Knox must resort to such gags because she hasn’t got the skills to dazzle with lines alone. She can also pull off major sonic fireworks, as in “We Beheld Two Nebulas:” (“These were atomized rotor-thrown / specks pocking a fresco— / a marks and sparks assay // in spume made out of rays”), and sparkling philosophical inquiry, as in “My Husband Sat Up”:

My school friend Annie
is descended from Garrison,
so Garrison is hidden in Annie

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as mica is hidden in vermiculite.
Garrison famously said, “I will be heard.”
What weight would you give to this.
Do you want to know more.

I wanted to know more and kept reading.

– Elisa Gabbert