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

Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House
Tin House Books
2008

In Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, Portland’s Tin House Books has released an enticing anthology of contemporary poetry: It’s got one of those nice paperback covers with page-marking flaps, proclaiming contents by hip young poets like Matthea Harvey and hip old poets like James Tate. A flip through the TOC reveals many more of the former (the Dickmans, Alex Lemon) and latter (Rae Armantrout, Lorca).

It’s a “diverse” mix of contributors, across age, gender, and country of origin — but are the poems themselves wide-ranging, in style and tone? Not exactly. I love many of the poems included here, but if I have a complaint about the book — and this of course is to be expected from a collection of poems chosen by an editorial staff with a unified vision — it’s that most of the poets have very similar sensibilities. They write first-person lyrics that make emotional appeals and tonally exhibit a kind of exuberance which is often pleasing but, after too many poems in a row, a little annoying. If I have two complaints, my other is that Satellite Convulsions feels a bit overproduced, almost smug in its slickness — much like Tin House itself. As in, where do they get off with their huge budgets?

But surely this second is a complaint only an editor of a less well-endowed journal would make, and as a reviewer, I tend to search for potential faults. Approaching the anthology as a reader I find it highly likable. I’m happy to have in my possession Olena Kalytiak Davis’s wonderful, sex-drenched sonnets that first appeared in Tin House in 2006 (this from “Francesca Can Too Stop Thinking about Sex, Reflect upon Her Position in Poetry, Write a Real Sonnet.”):

i apologize, i offer no excuse:
but, poet, though you have right to scold
it was high-souled you who made my mouth hold
what it held and tell what it told: a truce …

Another inclusion that mixes high and low language to delightful effect is Darcie Dennigan’s “City of Gods,” which opens with the line “Thistly Augustine, disser of the shy world, I cannot consider your city” and ends thusly:

Hey god in the window, god of loneliness, god of smelly spaces
stacked with newspapers, god of walks home from the L before the light ends,
if I ask you to please turn my sooty camisole into wings
and me into an industrial moth, I am asking to be man-made—
I don’t want to be this girl anymore.

Other highlights in the collection include Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Long Queen” and Bruce Smith’s “Devotion: Medea.”

If a few of Tin House’s selections bore or irritate (like Sharon Olds’ line “I feel as if I’m like / a teenage boy in love” — seriously?) most are well worth reading and reading again.

– Elisa Gabbert