Poetry Review: "Oh dont," Kelle Groom

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Kelle Groom offers a lovely--and potent--meditation on the capacity of images to prompt echoes in one's thoughts.

The poem "Oh dont," by Kelle Groom, originally appeared in Witness XXII (2009). It is also featured in her collection Five Kingdoms, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler and David Lehman.

The poem's language emerges from impressions of handwriting and pictures. The thoughts these spark go from meditations on the image to meditations on memories, climaxing with an remembrance of loss. There is also the attendant frustration that one perhaps could have done more. It’s a demanding read. Groom trusts the reader to intuit the connections between the images and the narrator’s reflections upon them.

The poem begins with the text of a photograph’s title plate, “—Albumen silver print attributed to F. M. Parkes & Reeves," which would seem to set the stage as clearly as an establishing shot in a movie. But it’s simply the starting point for a series of associations. That text is written in an odd script that suggests a ghost’s hand, which in turn suggests a paradox: handwriting written without hands. This is followed by the contemplation of a ghost’s point of view, trying to respond to the people death has cost it. A note in ethereal handwriting is all it can muster. It’s a moving reversal of perspective, reminding the reader that the grief of loss may not be restricted to one’s thoughts: the one lost, even the dead, grieves, too.

Groom then transforms her contemplation of loss from both sides of life’s divide. It becomes a reunion between the narrator and a lover who has passed away. The narrator thinks back on the totems of the romance--her lover’s guitar, his songs, his trusting her with knowledge of a place holding a most personal memory--and suddenly her lover is with her again. She realizes her thoughts are folly. The recognition is eloquently expressed with the metaphor “the woman in me still driving by.” But on a certain level the narrator doesn’t care. Her mind is entranced with another trope, that common but always lovely symbol of love’s happiness: the dance. But her feelings of loss reassert themselves. Presence becomes absence, and she reminds herself “no one was dancing.”

The narrator, though, can’t turn from the loss, and the most painful aspects of it are then recounted. The reader is first confronted with nearly inscrutable details from her memory: “cement to my thigh,” climbing stairs, and breathing that takes in the burning. The narrator shifts attention to other images. The first is even more inscrutable than the memory flashes. (Groom’s remarks in The Best American Poetry 2010 indicate it is a description of Marc Chagall’s 1914 painting The Lovers (Vision). Click here. The poem might be stronger if this had been made more explicit.) The memories then reassert themselves, first with pleas of “Oh don’t keep coming?/Oh don’t stop?,” and then further associations are sparked by the ghostly writing on other photographs. The words “la porte ferme” become la porte fume. The narrator is then plunged back into the memory of which there were previously only glimmers. Groom brilliantly suggests what happened through metonymies: the “cement to my thigh”; a door that is closed; a door that is smoke; breaths while climbing the stairs that take in the burning. One realizes the lover died in a fire while the narrator was trapped on the stairwell outside. The reader is left contemplating how the pain of loss can sneak up and overcome one. Even more disturbingly, one is left with the knowledge that pain can manifest itself through guilt: the poem ends with the narrator admonishing herself for not doing more, “…even/a blind girl can see that’s smoke.”

The poem makes a startling progression. It begins with musings on the nature of a piece handwriting, and builds through associations to the pain and guilt from helplessness. Groom dramatizes the power of metonymy: associations invariably bring one face to face with oneself and one’s experiences, and one may not always like what one sees. What’s even more poignant is that those associations can make one feel the pain of responsibility even when it’s misplaced. Memories carry both joy and sorrow, and even the most random and irrelevant sight can make those feelings come rushing back. One can’t run away. When associations start appearing, they often don't end.

Short Take: "Q," Sharon Olds

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Sharon Olds' poem "Q" begins with a delightful bit of free-association alliterative wordplay. The poem implicitly asks what one thinks of when one thinks of the letter Q. Olds begins with words that start with the letter--“questions,” “the Queen,” and “quail,” for example—and then builds a sentence out of Q-word nouns and verbs: “Quailing was part of Q’s/quiddity—the Q quaked/and quivered, it quarrelled [sic] and quashed.” Olds then shifts gears into other associations, such as the letter’s phoneme K and their phonic ties to the Semitic caph and koph. She even provides a commentary on the letter’s appearance with a reference to the “Q face,” i.e., a face with the “tongue lolling out.” One can’t help but smile at Olds’ resourcefulness and humor. But after that, the tone of the poem shifts, and one then cannot help but applaud. Olds moves from humorous effects into a disquieting one. She accomplishes it by transforming alliteration into synecdoche: the letter Q also makes one think of Iraq. The poetic masterstroke, though, is the combination of this synecdoche with the one she creates on top of it. The letter Q is the part that signifies the whole of Iraq, which is the whole that in turn signifies the part of those killed during the country’s invasion and occupation. It’s a brilliant progression, one made all the more potent by the irony of it concluding a piece that appeared to start as a lark. The poem couldn't be shaped more elegantly. It originally appeared in the August 10, 2009 issue of the New Yorker. Editors Amy Gerstler and David Lehman included it in The Best American Poetry 2010.

Short Take: "Black Telephone," David Trinidad

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

David Trinidad’s short poem “Black Telephone” might best be described as “Five Ways of Looking at a Telephone,” although I don’t think Trinidad has as much on his mind as Wallace Stevens, at least not here. The poem is essentially an exercise. It focuses on a single object--here an old-model telephone--and spins analogies and other associations from it. The first two “ways” focus on the telephone itself, while the latter three are concerned with the telephone’s parts, namely the cord, dial, and receiver. Trinidad’s two “ways” of looking at the whole of the telephone are the most interesting. These combine an awareness of the device’s obsolescence with a portrayal of how contemporary eyes might see it. Specifically, one would look at the telephone and its ring as a story element in a period movie, or as an antique of interest to a collector on eBay. The latter depiction comes with an enjoyable irony. Trinidad notes that in its new role, the telephone will have to be shipped “the distance it once / miraculously bridged.” The treatments of the telephone’s parts aren’t as sophisticated. These only focus on obsolescence, although he does manage to evoke a feeling of portent from each one. Tropes such as “web of / dead roots,” “a circle / of interminable clicks,” “a lead weight / pressing cold / dead silence” may seem rather histrionic, but I still like them. They do remind one that all objects contain multitudes. The poem originally appeared in Tin House #42, Winter 2009. It is also featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler & David Lehman.

Poetry Review: "On the Waterfront," B. H. Fairchild

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

B.H. Fairchild’s lovely poem both evokes the longing and highlights the absurdities found in movie-inspired daydreams. It also subtly challenges the reader to ask the value of those daydreams for oneself

As one can guess from the title, the 1954 film On the Waterfront, one of actor Marlon Brando’s signature vehicles, is central to B.H. Fairchild’s 2009 poem of the same name. The movie functions as a trope for the teenage narrator’s insecurity about his own identity, specifically his longing to define himself in terms apart from his small Kansas hometown. And Fairchild, fine poet that he is, uses this central trope as a stepping-stone to deeper questions about living life.

The time is the 1950s, and the narrator sees the film repeatedly in his job as an usher at the local movie theater. He identifies it with the New York City of his dreams, a place where

… bebop and blue neon lights
would fill my room, and I would wear a porkpie hat
and play tenor saxophone like Lester Young…

The irony is that none of this has anything to do with the film, which is a brutal melodrama about organized crime’s control of the longshoremen’s union in Hoboken, New Jersey. Fairchild subtly emphasizes the disconnect, such as having the narrator quote dialogue from the film that has no relevance to his musings. Fairchild also hits notes that a reader familiar with the New York City area will understand as discords. Identifying the locale of the film as New York is one, and locating the waterfront of the title as being on the East River instead of the Hudson is another. The film is only of interest to the narrator as a springboard for his fantasies, a role it fills just as well as Fairchild’s complementing tropes of the gas masks at the local Army-Navy store, or of a town veteran’s Purple Hearts.

But Fairchild stays ambiguous about whether these fantasies are a bad thing. He begins the poem with the epigram “Know thyself,” Socrates’ famous dictum, and near the end the narrator has the Latin equivalent, Nosce te ipsum, said to him by another character. The poem ends with him acknowledging that he doesn’t know what it means. The surface implication is that he doesn’t understand the Latin, but the deeper one is that he doesn’t know what the saying means for himself. The reader is left wondering about the latter: is the narrator being told to put these fantasies away and accept small-town life, or should he recognize them as seeds for ambitions beyond it? The answer, I suppose, lies in whether one feels daydreams take one away from oneself, or bring one closer. It’s the best type of ambiguity--one that reads the reader at least as much as it does the text--and it’s a fine ending for this resonantly wistful poem.

“On the Waterfront,” by B.H. Fairchild, was originally published in the Winter 2009 issue of Sewanee Review. It is featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler & David Lehman. Fairchild also included it in his own collection, Usher.