books
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Here is a book I read that was intellectually interesting, emotionally compelling, and formally distinct from other work I’d been reading. Here is a book that I would consider poetry of rhetoric more than poetry of imagery, although the image of the Hawaiian punk rock singer screaming the title of the book stays with me.
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I love how crazy this book is, how schizophrenic and obsessive and paranoid. I admire small poems, their bravery and simplicity. I praise the declarative sentence. I sometimes (as I do here) support end-stopped lines. I acknowledge anaphora (“Giving Back”) and its effect. I love list poems, poems that steal a form from outside poetry,
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Before MM’s iconic book, there was this one, the book she left behind, stacked neatly on her desk in manuscript form. In school I once heard a lecture in which my teacher positioned Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath as opposing elemental forces. While most of the vernacular escapes me now (aside from one of them
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Is anyone in my generation not indebted to “The Colonel”? If not indebted, can any of us write without acknowledging it or understanding its importance? At its core, this is a book about exile: physical exile abroad–the kind of displacement of vision that burnishes a poet’s perspective both on the world and on one’s own
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Why is he not more widely discussed now? It’s a curiosity to me. I remember my classmate in grad school who, breath a fog of whiskey, insisted he was the greatest poet of the last century. I remembered this book, that it had encouraged me to write when I was younger, I remembered reading “Buffalo
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A book you read sideways. A book with lines full of caesura like pot holes. With disco lyrics, classical allusion, secret gay slang. A book that is two books. A book full of boys dead or dying. A book of spirituals, of a kind. A book without titles. A book with the detail of gossip,
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