“A Sassy Art”:New Poetry that Defies Formula

In certain circles, it is de rigueur to mutter about the proliferation of MFA creative writing programs. Skeptics contend that the inevitable result will be a culture of formulaic “workshop” poetry—perhaps well crafted, but too careful and predictable to knock the breath out of a reader.

Annually, 80–100 collections of independently published poetry are considered for this ForeSight feature article. For reviewers, it is exhilarating to be exposed to such diversity of voices, styles, and form. Yet there’s also an agonizing aspect: only a dozen books can be chosen.

Even with that limitation, the final selection reflects a staggering. high-quality range. From Richard Michelson’s wry narrative poems about his Jewish immigrant relatives to Jen Currin’s lyrical dreamscapes—or from Kay Ryan’s minimalist brevity of line to the elegant formalism of AE Stallings—there is no evidence of fatigue or formula here.

Selected Poems

James Applewhite

Duke University Press

0-8223-3639-1

This work spans eight volumes written over thirty years by a Duke professor. Gathered together, his poems read like the song-cycle of a life unfurling through landscape—rural North Carolina, with the whiff of tobacco, sweet gum trees, and barns with “wood sides silvered and alive, / like the color pork turns in heat over ashes.” Applewhite conveys an intimacy with land that’s increasingly rare in a culture of frequent flyer miles and truncated attention spans. People and place are so seamlessly entwined here that they know each other like longtime lovers, when “no words ... are enough.” Although gentle elegy infuses Applewhite’s poems, he’s unflinching in the shadows. In “Southern Voices” he writes of “servant turned / Tenant, [who] longs for a clear pronunciation / But stutters the names of governors, Klan / And cross-burnings, mad dogs and lynchings. / So ours is the self-effacing slur of men / Ashamed to speak.” Integrity of craft and compassion merge in what Applewhite terms his “seasoned diary.”

Manthology:

Poems on the Male Experience

Craig Crist-Evans, Roger Weingarten, and Kate Fetherston, editors

University of Iowa Press

0-87745-988-6

This anthology deflates any notion that poetry, like quiche, is not for consumption by “real men.” Its poems inquire into the complex, myriad roles that men inhabit—refugee, drug addict, soldier, lover, father, son. This lyrical investigation includes the voices of women as well, featuring poets from Jane Hirshfield and Rita Dove to Arthur Sze, Stephen Dunn, and Tim Seibles. Billy Collins advises: “The idea isn’t so much that the poems celebrate men, as that they challenge the reader to discover for himself or herself what is male about the poem.” At times starkly provocative, and other times tender, these poems will provide abundant fodder for discussion.

The Sleep of Four Cities

Jen Currin

Anvil Press

1-895636-70-1

This poet teaches creative writing in Vancouver, BC. Like dreams, her poems speak the language of image and intuition. She has created an enchanted universe—where senses quiver, and colors are so saturated, they’re almost hallucinogenic. But beauty draws the reader close, only to plunge into emotional risk: everything is transient and uncertain. Even nostalgia is uncomfortable, like “working ... a new glove,” as if memories had arrived in the wrong size. Currin writes: “When the simple life explodes—/ You begin to believe the night.” It’s a place where familiar things suddenly turn odd, and travelers must remain alert, watch every step, and keep moving: “How quickly grandeur crashes / a flash in the pan / of quick highs, steady lows. The drumming pervades our dreams, / changes the tempo to get up and go.” There’s no complacency here; Currin’s bold lyric poems startle readers awake.

Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon:

Women’s Poems from Tang China

Jeanne Larsen, translator

BOA Editions

Hardcover 1-929918-73-9

Softcover 1-929918-74-7

The author of three novels set in China, Larsen also publishes and translates poetry. This is her second volume of translations from China’s Tang Dynasty (618–907). Whether they inhabited court circles, or worked as wine house courtesans, Tang-era women possessed little room for movement in their lives. A “palace lady” might be taken into a noble household for “childbearing, sex, entertainment, or conspicuous consumption.” Courtesans could be sold or given away, and were confined to specific areas. Yet this anthology of forty-four female poets reveals a passionate inventiveness of image, language, and emotion. Larsen notes: “Silenced people find ways to reach into the world around them. They can defy a social order, or make clever use of one ... Their voices sometimes enter history’s register.” Larsen’s translations ensure that these worthy poets are heard, more than a millennium after they wrote.

Stumble, Gorgeous

Paula McLain

New Issues Poetry & Prose

1-930974-56-6

The author, who wrote the memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Homes, was raised in foster care after her father—then, two months later, her mother—abandoned her and her sisters. Her poems offer a child’s frank gaze, bewildered yet fascinated by the world. They retain childhood’s audacity to ask impossible questions, and name what is beautiful or absurd without inhibition. In “Heaven,” McLain expresses incendiary yearning: “Imagine cupping / your hands around a burning thing so it won’t fizzle / Out ... Imagine / Wanting to open your hands. Imagine resisting / ... [I was] a fuse, wick, girl-sized torch.” Loneliness resides here, mixed with wonder, as in “Jackalope,” about a notorious hoax creature (the antlered rabbit), “stitched from two sad animals ... mongrel and luminous ... [its] sob is so tuneful, so human / It makes cowboys buckle and kneel ... There is only one loneliness. We share / As we share a sky, the fable of forgetting, / A clamor, a cry.”

Battles & Lullabies

Richard Michelson

University of Illinois Press

Hardcover 0-252-03061-3

Softcover 0-252-07303-7

This poet is the recipient of the Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry. His most recent book begins with an epigraph from Yehuda Amichai: “When a man dies, they say, ‘He was gathered unto his fathers.’ As long as he is alive, his fathers are gathered within him.” In narrative poems about his immigrant Jewish family in Brooklyn, there’s a glimmer of humor and sass, even (or most of all) when they are bittersweet: “My grandmother put back the green bananas, / unwilling to make an investment in her future.” Also a gallery owner in Massachusetts, Michelson has written numerous poems in the ekphrastic tradition, inspired by artists from Edvard Munch to Egon Schiele. Here, the poet serves as a curator of stories, carefully collected in a well-lit place so they may be visited, again and again—studied, puzzled over, and finally, celebrated.

You & Yours

Naomi Shihab Nye

BOA Editions

1-929918-69-0

Daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mother, the author was raised in Jerusalem, St. Louis, and San Antonio. Her previous books range from 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems from the Middle East, to an anthology for young readers, Is This Forever or What?: Poems & Paintings from Texas. Here, Nye’s poems address the fragility of home, borders, and belonging. In “Cross That Line,” she recalls Paul Robeson, his passport revoked, standing on the US border to sing to a Canadian audience: “His voice left the USA / when his body was not allowed to cross / that line ... Remind us again / brave friend. / What countries may we / sing into? / What lines should we all / be crossing?” These poems are brave and pressing; Nye dares to sing aloud about the “explosions of minor joy” that link ordinary human lives, regardless of passport or politics.

Ornithologies

Joshua Poteat

Anhinga Press

0-938078-90-9

This stunning debut received the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, selected by Campbell McGrath. Poteat’s poems are suffused with the cognizance that “nothing in this world is ours.” Each image teeters on an unsustainable, exquisite edge, as in “Nocturne for a River”: “Tell me, sad horse, with doves nesting / under your raised hoof in this century of longing, / how can I go on loving this ruined excuse for a city ...” Yet Poteat’s insistent power of witness itself constitutes a form of solace. In each meticulously observed moment, there’s the assertion of a life well loved. The morbid is tasted on the tongue in his poems, but Poteat transforms loss into a lush homage to human experience in all its complexity: “To live at all is to grieve / and from what life did we gain this trust, / awake each dawn / to find the bright air / full again / rustle and coo / in the widening palms?”

The Face of Poetry

Zack Rogow, editor

Margaritta K. Mitchell, portraitist

University of California Press

Hardcover 0-520-24603-9

Softcover 0-520-24604-7

This handsome, substantial volume is the next best thing to being invited into a gathering of America’s finest contemporary poets. (Think Galway Kinnell, Agha Shahid Ali, Li-Young Lee, Birgit Pegeen Kelly, and Gary Snyder sharing the same space.) At its heart, it’s a celebration of poetry as a community event, documenting the longstanding “Lunch Poems” reading series at UC Berkeley. To re-create the experience of those readings, this collection delivers poetry on multiple levels: visual (striking black-and-white portraits of poets); print (a handful of poems by each writer), and audio (an accompanying CD). An irresistible treat for poetry aficionados, this book will, just as importantly, lure folks who haven’t read poetry in years.

The Niagara River

Kay Ryan

Grove Press

0-8021-4222-2

The author has published five previous books; this volume received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Ryan distinguishes herself by capturing the flickers of strange lyricism that both disrupt and enrich quotidian life, like batwings trembling above a birdbath. But there’s nothing coy or precious here: Ryan’s poems are plainspoken, with terse lines that reflect a Zen ethic for rigorous pruning. So readers are unsuspecting when the poems suddenly swerve onto unruly emotional ground, as if a cab driver had dropped one off in a dark field. “Chinese Foot Chart,” for example, begins with foot massage, but opens into the essence of human yearning: “Press a spot in / the arch and / feel the scalp / twitch ... Each touch / uncatches some / remote lock. Look, / boats of mercy / embark from / our heart at the / oddest knock.”

Hapax

AE Stallings

Northwestern University Press

Hardcover 0-8101-5170-7

Softcover 0-8101-5171-5

This poet’s previous poetry collection received the Richard Wilbur Award. A scholar and translator of classics, Stallings lives in Athens, Greece, and is a contemporary master of formal poetry. Whether she engages in sonnets, couplets, or haiku, her language retains fluidity, grace, and ease. It is rare to encounter a poet who enlists form so compellingly, without constraining a poem’s emotional content. These poems are at once fluent in classical references and timely. In “The Modern Greek for ‘Nightmare’ is ‘Ephialtes,’” she writes: “Heroes lie thick, anonymous, / blurred with honorable mention / in mass graves of fine intention ... Even now I lose the day, / Always look the other way, / While old treachery awaits / The heart’s warm springs, its hot gates.” For Stallings, rhyme gathers momentum, like the galloping of hooves; it stokes readers’ emotional anticipation. This volume proves that formalism in American poetry still has a vigorous heartbeat.

Radio Waves

Genie Zeiger

White Pine Press

1-893996-41-7

A memoirist, former psychotherapist, and crisis clinician, this author regularly speaks on public radio. Her poems scrutinize faith, grief, survival, and death through the experience of Judaism. An act of re-collection, they restore through language what would otherwise be lost. A haunting, fable-like quality reminiscent of Isaac Bashevis Singer infuses “Faith”: “Jews / packed into boxcars ... disguised themselves as clowns sporting / piecemeal costumes hurriedly made en route / from bits of newspaper, foil ... shreds of prayer shawls ... [They went] jumping, hooting / wheeling down the wide aisles toward Auschwitz, so convincing, that, when the train stopped, they leapt free from the cars.” Zeiger locates vast, terrifying human issues on such an intimate, irresistible scale that readers join the family’s table, watching “the sticky drip wax / of Sabbath candles lit by my mother.” Recollection constitutes the reclaiming of personal terrain—and in “To Go to Jerusalem,” Zeiger reveals an exuberant space: “To be a Jew leaving home willingly, with no one shouting. / To walk, not run.”

As Brooklyn Poet Laureate D. Nurkse once told a student obsessing over a line-break, “Poetry is a sassy art.” It will defy any effort to tame it. These books testify to the spectrum of gloriously unruly talent in US poetry today.