Poetry in review

There have been a few times recently when I have wondered why I subscribed to Poetry magazine. Much of the poetry published in its pages is either so opaquely self-referential that a mere layman like me cannot see any meaning in it, or so pretentiously simplistic that it seems to consist of nothing but banal statements of the obvious chopped up into short lines. The critical commentary about poets I have never read and am unlikely to ever wish to read holds little interest to me, especially when there are strong hints that many of the reviews and letters have more to do with personal vendettas and factional maneuvering than with the beauty and usefulness of the written word.

Fortunately, the May issue carries enough valuable freight to justify receiving it. Donna Malech's "Makeup" contains some lines that mystify me. ("Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head." Huh???) But I like its sometimes witty, sometimes doubtful commentary on appearance and substance, which uses images not only from cosmetics but from the world of the theater and other aspects of life.

... The skin, a silly one-act, concurs.
At the carnival, each child's cheek becomes
a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself.
Each breath, a game called Live Forever....

P.K. Page's "My Chosen Landscape" (not available online) riffs on a short quatrain by Gwendolyn MacEwen about "a continent, a violated geography.... [a] naked country" of sand dunes, burning winds, and emptiness. It seems to me at least partially an internal country of intellectual and spiritual isolation, in which the speaker sometimes longs for fresh, unmediated contact with the world, even while admiring its spare, ascetic beauty:

Restless in all this emptiness, I seek
a fellow traveler, search for a sign --
a secret handshake, a phrase, some unusual color
like periwinkle, for instance, or bright citrine,
but the monotony of sand persists
and nothing improbable finds entry
into the appalling platitudes of speech --
the lingua franca of everyone I meet --
in this land devoid of flags and pageantry.
"Yet still I journey to this naked country,"....

I've been to that country, I think, and it's always interesting to compare notes with other travellers. If a landscape is a metaphor for a life, then the last quarter of the poem seems an appropriate expression of the mixture of ambivalence and affirmation with which many people view their own chosen landscapes.

Marilynne Robinson's review of the Library of America's collection of American Religious Poems (edited by Harold Bloom, or at any rate by someone working under his aegis) discusses at some length the history of American religion and the poetic traditions associated with it. Although this has the unfortunate effect of making the volume at hand seem almost incidental to the discussion, Robinson puts forth enough thoughtful and sometimes provocative ideas to be worth the reading. ("Elegies present another problem. They tend to be expressions of pious assurance and are therefore religious poetry, but they are for the same reason unlikely to push beyond conventional sentiment -- that is, to be good religious poetry....")

"The Pure Product" is, according to the editor's note, "the first of a series of exchanges in which we are bringing poets of different aesthetics together to discuss new books." It's an intriguing notion, something like a cross between a formal intellectual debate and a critics' cage match. The two critics occasionally give in to the inevitable temptation to take potshots at each other and at the critical schools with which they associate each other, but in the process they convey a better idea of the content of the books being discussed, and the viewpoints and thought processes that go into the critical response, than the reader would have otherwise. Their radically different reactions strongly suggest that the critical reception which a poet receives is largely a matter of whether the reviewer perceives the poet as being one of Us, the "correct" school of poetry, or one of Them, the Enemy who must be Destroyed At All Costs (lest They get some of the academic patronage which We should receive). Like the tag-team reviewing of films popularized by Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert, it brings the existence of different critical viewpoints and reactins onto the open,rather than presenting a facade of impartial infallibility. By doing so it broadens the viewpoint of the reviews and keeps one person's idiosyncratic response from comprising the whole of the "critical reaction". It's a feature that I will make a point of looking for in future issues, and one which I hope the magazine will continue.