Many have noted the poetry latent in Sarah Palin’s speech. Now that she’s published a memoir, Going Rogue, many are noting the non-poetry of her non-prose.

But who would have imagined that Palin had a poetic forerunner, a partner in rhyme, a fellow Bard of Bad? Julia A. Moore (1847-1920), popularly called the “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” produced reams of writing that soon became known as the worst of the verse. If Palin wrote a poem, I posit, it would be this definitive work of Moore’s.

To My Friends and Critics
(an excerpt)

Perhaps you’ve read the papers
Containing my interview;
I hope you kind good people
Will not believe it true.
Some Editors of the papers
They thought it would be wise
To write a column about me,
So they filled it up with lies.

The papers have ridiculed me
A year and a half or more.
Such slander as the interview
I never read before.
Some reporters and editors
Are versed in telling lies.
Others it seems are willing
To let industry rise.

The people of good judgment
Will read the papers through,
And not rely on its truth
Without a candid view.
My first attempt at literature
Is the “Sweet Singer” by name,
I wrote that book without a thought
Of the future, or of fame.

White space criss-crossed yesterday’s New York Times opinion page like mortar. Uneven in length and width, stanzas gave the impression of crumbling brick. Poem titles appeared painted on, recalling graffiti.

In light of the endless debate over Whether Good Political Poetry Exists, the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a wall of poetry–a throwback to the days when poems regularly appeared in newspapers–gave me a case of the grins. The poetry wall struck me as an editorial eye-roll, a visually complex, literarily ambitious “duh.” (Just the same, it’s worth bearing that debate in mind while reading these poems, which, like the rough-hewn wall, can feel uneven.)

The poetry wall is an appropriately international effort. American poets Marie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, C. K. Williams, Bruce Weigl, and Mark Doty, many of whom write on social and political themes, contributed; so did the European writers Zafer Senocak, Tomaz Salamun, Vera Pavlova, and Ewa Lipska. My favorite piece of masonry is Pavlova’s conclusion:

Under 11/09/89,
my diary says:
“Natasha lost a front tooth,
Liza for the first time
stood up in her crib
on her own.”

You wonder: had the speaker not yet heard the news? Was she ignoring it? Did she not understand the significance of the day? Or is the point that the significance of such a day lies not in what newspapers report, but in what diaries record, and that these kinds of events are sometimes, but not always, distinct? And if they are, why, and how?

Speaking of “how,” Marie Howe—whose poems so gracefully insist on the ordinariness of the extraordinary, and vice-versa—writes that the wall went up, “and that was that. People / lived and died, and married.” She describes watching TV, and noting how Berliners “touched the faces of their loved ones / and ran their hands over their heads and hair.” Her intimate moments go public, like diary pages ripped out and blown onto the street.

The title of the work by Salamun, a Slovenian poet, is nearly a poem in itself. “Remembrance of a Yugoslav” could suggest that the poem features a Yugoslav’s reminiscences, or that the poem remembers a Yugoslav—a gesture, perhaps, toward the idea that since Yugoslavia no longer exists, identification as Yugoslavian survives only in memory.

Take a look, if you haven’t already. What do you think of the poems?

When I do come across the 5-10% of poets who know how to illuminate their poems at a reading, without getting in their own way…I’m grateful to have been a witness. Creeley was an amazing between-poem talker, and Will’s mantle, functioning as sage-storyteller…showed me another side to the fine art of settling into your work. I felt it was a master class in astral projection, in accepting density as lineage. The operative parable for me, how poetry is a difficult art form to listen to, maybe related to his particular work and its wealth of trajectories…(the word-scapes in his new book, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, the seepage that drenches the poet during the poem’s genesis, is incredibly rich)…but I imagine he meant poetry in general. 

 And so he says, his solution at a reading is to contain the work. To frame/re-frame its context without giving it away. To sort of create a buffer between the intensity of the work by talking about the one plane of reality, before diving into the next.  Aware of each plane equally, the challenging one, shifting…depending on alignment.

 And I realized that’s something I attempt when I spend hours preparing for a reading, choosing the trajectory within my time slot, the vibration of material being the dynamic that drives the reading. But a speaker in touch with his many hemispheres can perform that sort of delicate dance without losing focus. I felt he was determined to impart on us a deeper, fluid note beneath his tone. His drive, mesmerizing, as poem gave way to filter.

 But maybe this cushioning relates to a more mystical writing, one that knows body as vehicle more than witness. Anyway, just a thought about getting lost in preparation when the work tells you what you need…and when the need speaks louder.

It’s a 60-second spot that uses a wax-cylinder recording of Whitman reciting the poem, black & white footage, jittery camera-work, and synthed-operatic soundtrack to create a manifesto-themed gauntlet thrown at America’s youth with the phrase “Go Forth” emblazoned as a nicely designed logo on a flapping banner at the end. The spot is basically a poetry video, using beautifully filmed images of the disenfranchised reflecting the poem’s tone without literal interpretation, but as soon as the logo appears, I feel sort of duped. And here’s where I get lost, because for an ad at least it’s trying to say something, right…but why do I feel poetry getting re-appropriated once again, right…but how great to have poetry on television, right? (”Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity” a nugget from T.S. Eliot, which leads to my mommie dearest moment, slapped left and right…it’s a poem—an ad—a poem—an ad—a pair of jeans…sob sob).

Selling religion and seeking converts — advertising is all about creating a world for the brand. A belief system with a personality to attract the right demographic. The followers whose lives will be affirmed if they drink the leader’s lemonade. How different is Walt Whitman from Joe Camel now? If I saw a poem entitled ‘My Nose My Self’ written by one, Joe Camel, in an anthology of Amercian rebels…I’d be curious, but I couldn’t get past that name. A brand-world atheist has no brand loyalty. When you buy a pair of Levi’s, you are changing your pants, not the world. But when you go on the campaign’s website, you feel change is in the air (how timely, eh) because you can leave your own thoughts in the infinite declaration gallery…like casting off a poem in a bottle, hoping it reaches shore. But how cool to have a forum to leave your thoughts for the world, but isn’t that what Twitter’s for? And then there’s a giveaway that uses a scratchy-voiced response to Whitman as a call to action to find buried treasure. Which is better than their previous Spike Jonze-directed spot, but not as original as this Michel Gondry-directed spot.

At least both of those make no bones about being ads, and are still filmic. The Go Forth campaign has a patina of self-seriousness in its, “getting a platform to sound out,” …very Rebel Without A Cause. Expertly designed in a massive campaign around a unifying theme: to be heard and seen, not even understood, just acknowledged so that you may go forth and discover your voice. Core values in America’s heartland of equal chances, right? To re-imagine America as a teen. To use language in the reinvention of American youth that reflects each generation’s media-drenched libido. Giving us an implied retro-hooligan under the layers of a smoothed-over-DIY-aesthetic is what obscures the poem that tries to mix rebellion with business.

And this is how you talk to an impressionable, unformed consumer from across class, gender and racial territories. You reach for a bottom line; rebellion. You jump on the raging hormones that scream: I want to be different. And how do you propose different to an indifferent youth in an over-saturated America? By using that common difference: America. Let’s make it cool to be an American rebel by showing one that won’t offend the parents who have the cash. Make America the brand and give her a makeover for the kids. Like a radio hit, give the vocals a processed sound using static noise effects (scratchy wax cylinder) which is very noise-core. (Here you go, make your own noise cocktail, hit the loop button and play a few of these at the same time for your own brand-world jingle.)

Jeez, this post sounds bitter…don’t mean to…just question how far poetry has to adapt to be appreciated by the general public. When I see a corporate entity put such an effort, it really is a victory. So then is my actual trouble with today’s smoothed-over youth? Or with advertising’s pliable fingering?

One last thing; Whitman’s reading here is more rebellious than anything else in the spot. More power to Daddy Walt!

Some further thoughts coming out of Alison Collins’ series of nests:

The show began with one hundred nests, but I think there were closer to eighty by the time the show closed. Collins was, as I understand it, giving them away here or there, perhaps selling a few. There were neither prices nor even a catalog of any kind at the installation. I saw no sign out for the space, and there wasn’t a single name on the wall anywhere inside the space on 37th St. or even on the big storefront windows. It was about as un-art world as a show in New York City can get, though I remember thinking some very meticulously stacked piles of rocks in a then-vacant lot on the Brooklyn side of the East River about ten years ago made for a pretty great show too. That artist went and hid in the nearby weeds if you tried to come around while he or she was working.

One theme amidst all the nests by implication is working with seriality – I take the term serial in relation to an artistic practice to be bound up with form and process at once while attending either implicitly or explicitly to an on-going life experience – in Collins’ case that experience being pregnancy and childbirth. It can often feel, I think, like an extended work is growing in several directions simultaneously when one is working in a serial manner –  you’re investigating a particular shape (which may or may not be tangible), you are not bound to a chronological sequence and, to borrow a bit of phrasing from Robert Creeley (writing in his intro to The Holy Forest by Robin Blaser) attempting to define the “progress” of the work or create “a skillfully accomplished enclosure” is really beside the point. Working serially is like being in the middle all the time while hopefully coming to understand the contours of the space and materials you’re working with, or at least that’s been my own experience. The final arrangement, such as it may be, may point away from its making despite wearing it.

And so a nest can be viewed as capable of serving as an enclosure until the service is no longer necessary, or until raided, or until abandoned or broken down by the elements. Its security is necessarily transient, and in Collins’s steel nests, which are not without their aspects of vulnerability despite the materials (I have no idea what the “new vulnerability” might be, by the way, though I’ll look it up), the transformations they bespeak take place off stage. They are known and unknown as well as continuous. All of this points to poetry for me, if not to poetics, which I barely understand unless they’re in motion and I’m not being asked to do something like reflect or judge or ponder relevance.

In using the term serial I don’t mean to conjure up the kind of story that is done in sections printed weekly or monthly somewhere, but say the word enough and I inevitably recall hearing my stepfather and his brother talk about reading serial adventure stories in Britain in the forties wherein one section would end with the protagonist in an impossible scenario involving being tied to a pole in the middle of a lake with alligators closing in and the first sentence of the next installment would be “and with a great leap she was free!” That’s quite a bit different than sculpting one hundred steel nests or writing one hundred and forty poems each titled “Have A Good One”, though the feeling of entering a new piece or segment is a bit like that of a freeing leap to find a new set of traps to enter or a set of shining bars to swing from.

While the relationship between the abundance of steel nests and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – Collins’ point of inspiration in making the nests in the first place – is not up on the surface of the nests themselves, the connection is going to be evident to any one who has read Metamorphoses and has a sense for that work’s handling of transformation as practically incidental to daily life, even that depicted through myth, which I suspect was no more abstracted from reality for Ovid than a list of cuckoo news items I see everyday on the aol news page I have to get through in order to check e-mail is for me. That said, you don’t have to have read the Ovid in order to connect with the work and 20-ft. long snakes are indeed taking over the country.

The “in their own terms” portion of the previous post’s title is borrowed from Fairfield Porter’s book of selected art criticism, Art In Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1955-1975. I tend to turn to Porter when I have to write prose. Partly because I adore the writing, partly because Porter, a painter himself, championed artists whose work was radically different than his own, and partly because he wrote the sentence “Criticism should tell you what is there.” That’s helped.

Also, the title “Currency of Fashions” from a few posts ago is also the title of a poem by Jim Brodey, a kind of reverse litany in which nearly every line ends with the word “nothing,” including the line “I am a princess of bubbly nothingness and mean nothing.”

Poems can sometimes help with that.

The Poetry Foundation has these poems available for your perusal today. No offense, fine poems, but kind of a weird list, isn’t it?

I hope no one will mind if I offer Robert Pinsky’s poem “9/11″ here. There’s a lot I like about this poem. Its unapologetically direct title. Its swerves from incisive analysis to granular reportage. Its inclusion of Marianne Moore, Ray Charles, Frederick Douglass, Donald Duck, and Emily Dickinson as American icons. I like the line “The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.” And many other things, but perhaps most of all the poem’s willingness to make large claims, and inclusive claims, at a time in our literary history when such gestures are generally scorned as de trop or naive. I think that takes some nerve, and I applaud it.

9/11

We adore images, we like the spectacle
Of speed and size, the working of prodigious
Systems. So on television we watched

The terrible spectacle, repetitiously gazing
Until we were sick not only of the sight
Of our prodigious systems turned against us

But of the very systems of our watching.
The date became a word, an anniversary
That we inscribed with meanings–who keep so few,

More likely to name an airport for an actor
Or athlete than “First of May” or “Fourth of July.”
In the movies we dream up, our captured heroes

Tell the interrogator their commanding officer’s name
Is Colonel Donald Duck–he writes it down, code
Of a lowbrow memory so assured it’s nearly

Aristocratic. Some say the doomed firefighters
Before they hurried into the doomed towers wrote
Their Social Security numbers on their forearms.

Easy to imagine them kidding about it a little,
As if they were filling out some workday form.
Will Rogers was a Cherokee, a survivor

Of expropriation. A roper, a card. For some,
A hero. He had turned sixteen the year
That Frederick Douglass died. Douglass was twelve

When Emily Dickinson was born. Is even Donald
Half-forgotten?–Who are the Americans, not
A people by blood or religion? As it turned out,

The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.
And on the other side that morning the guy
Who shaved off all his body hair and screamed

The name of God with his boxcutter in his hand.
O Americans–as Marianne Moore would say,
Whence is our courage? Is what holds us together

A gluttonous dreamy thriving? Whence our being?
In the dark roots of our music, impudent and profound?–
Or in the Eighteenth Century clarities

And mystic Masonic totems of the Founders:
The Eye of the Pyramid watching over us,
Hexagram of Stars protecting the Eagle’s head

From terror of pox, from plague and radiation.
And if they blow up the Statue of Liberty–
Then the survivors might likely in grief, terror

And excess build a dozen more, or produce
A catchy song about it, its meaning as beyond
Meaning as those symbols, or Ray Charles singing “America

The Beautiful.” Alabaster cities, amber waves,
Purple majesty. The back-up singers in sequins
And high heels for a performance–or in the studio

In sneakers and headphones, engineers at soundboards,
Musicians, all concentrating, faces as grave
With purpose as the harbor Statue herself.

(Robert Pinsky wrote this poem for the September 8, 2002 edition of The Washington Post Magazine; I cut and pasted it from here. You can hear Pinsky read the poem here.)

It’s municipal election day where I live. I went by the activity center at a Baptist church to vote on my way to work. Got there early and was first in line when the doors opened at 7:00, so I got to be the very first person to sign in. The poll workers were still drinking their coffee, still a little unclear on the procedures, still a little flusterable: the nice lady, who must have gotten up at 4:00 a.m. to do her meticulous silver hair, kept looking for my name in the registry among the scores of “Browns.” A poll watcher designated by one of the candidates hovered, frowning, alert to the possibility of fraud. But finally I received my ballot, that oddly large sheet, discovering on it, as I knew I would, just one opportunity to make my mark. (The current school board commissioner for district 4, Bryan Chandler, is facing a challenge from newcomer Kelly Horwitz.) I filled in one of the two ovals — right there on the table in front of the workers, not much caring who knew how I was voting — got my “I Voted” sticker from another amazingly coiffed senior, and fed my ballot into a machine, which, to much general consternation among the poll workers, kept spitting the sheet back out, making me wonder if I’d made the right choice, until finally someone pointed out that the poll workers had forgotten to tear off the little perforated receipt along the bottom. Problem solved, vote recorded. Outside, along the sidewalk across the street, beyond the required 30-foot perimeter, supporters for the candidates stood with signs. I suppose they’re working in shifts, since the polls will be open until 7:00 tonight. That’s a long time to stand up for your candidate for school board.

Last fall the NY Times printed a number of poems as part of their election day coverage. This was my favorite of them:

INFOMERCIAL 2

The old mule delivers the goods.
Nugatory diddlings are on the decline.
Stateliness has its day.

There are indeed many encouraging signs
in the weather and in handshakes.
Still there are those who mistake dark clouds
for raffish hucksterism. They have never savored
the elation of an empty crystal ball.

To them I say, seconds will call upon you
in the morning. Tonight there are dreams to be thumbed through
before the complicated, awful business
of summoning beautiful particles after the horse is stolen.

That’s Ashbery, of course. You can hear him read the poem here.

Elsewhere, the election news is not so good. Can’t blame the mules, though. They seem to have performed admirably.

Now and then I think I have something of use to say about poetry as a category, but generally I’m much happier talking about poems. What attracted me to poetry in the first place, I think, was its prizing of instances, its radical recognition that the purse seine of theory inevitably lets slip millions of particular minnows. (And, to tax the metaphor, sometimes catches different fish than those wished for.)

So, without further ado, a poem! By Rachel Loden!

Well, wait, a little more ado. I choose to post a poem from Loden’s second book, Dick of the Dead (Ahsata, 2009) in celebration of a remarkable event which occurred last week: She gave a poetry reading for the first time in . . . well, let’s just say a long time. You can read about that here.

I loved Loden’s first book, Hotel Imperium, which I reviewed here back in 2000. In Dick of the Dead she’s up to some familiar and some fresh tricks. Sly puns, deft references, barbed wit, and an overall . . . I guess I want to call it mischeviousness, abound.

OK, here you go. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do. (Oh, forgive my pedantry: I just want to remind those of you who grew up with The Simpsons that “Milhous” was the M. in “Richard M. Nixon” well before Bart’s friend “Milhouse” came into our lives.)

MILHOUS AS KING OF THE GHOSTS

A cold cellar-hole at the end of the day,
When faithless pretenders cover the sun
And nothing is left but my candidacy—

There was dead Checkers with her list of slights,
Slow tongue, green bile, black list, white mind
And April, cruel as rumors of my demise.

To be, on the lawns, where no helicopter lands,
Without that preening statuette of dog,
That dog surrendered to the moon;

And to feel that the light is a Key Biscayne light
In which everything is lofted up to the elect
And no returns need be tallied;

Then there is no use in counting. It comes of itself;
All the blue votes turning a brilliant red,
Even in Chicago. The wind moves on the lawns

And moves in myself. The last Iowa sweetcorn
Is for me, the snows of New Hampshire drift up
Into an empire of self that knows no boundaries,

I become an empire that fills the oleaginous pipelines
Of the earth. The bitch is still yapping
By gravestone-light and I am whipped high, whipped

Up, sculpted higher and higher, cool as a sphinx—
I sit with my head like a Rushmore in space
And the scrofulous hound smelling blood on my wings.

Isn’t that gorgeous? Now I knew exactly what you’d want to read next, so to save you GoogleTime(tm) (call me, Google, if you want to negotiate), here it is:

A RABBIT AS KING OF THE GHOSTS

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

I’d be glad to know what you think of either of these poems, and I guess I’m particularly keen to hear what you think characterizes the relationship between them. Loden often does “covers” like this; it’s one of the things that most intrigues me about her work.

OK, if that GIF is too annoying, just tell me, and I’ll take it down. Would be a shame, tho.

Adrian Matejka’s second book of poems, Mixology, was published as part of last year’s National Poetry Series, and I’ve finally gotten around to picking it up and checking it out. I knew Adrian very briefly when we both lived in Carbondale, Illinois, in 2001. He had a radio show on the local independent station WDBX (then 700 watts; since upgraded to 3000), and he asked me to come on the show and read some poems. I’d done this sort of thing before, on a poetry show on Madison, Wisconsin’s indy station, the venerable WORT. But Adrian’s show was a little different.

When I arrived at the studio, Adrian explained that while I read my poems, he was going to play music in the background. In other words, he was to be the DJ, and I the MC. Frankly friends I freaked. As we got into it, though, I found myself really enjoying it. I would never claim to have skillz as an MC, but fortunately Adrian’s an excellent DJ, so the end result didn’t sound half bad.

I think.

I could be wrong.

I’m probably wrong.

I’ve many times before and since thought about adding music, or still or moving imagery, or other sorts of aesthetic enhancements, to my poetry reading schtick. Doesn’t it seem like kind of a no-brainer, in this age of collage, pastiche, inter- and extra-disciplinarity? Studio artists are all over this; the Venice and Whitney biennials are always full of film, sound, text, dance, and theater in addition to painting, sculpture, and photographs. Yes, surely, yes yes yes, there are many poets who mix, collaborate, boundary-cross, draw, dance, sing. But be honest: If, when you go to a poetry reading, the reader says just a sec, I gotta fire up the laptop projector / plug in the mp3 player / unpack my sax / put on my costume / etc., don’t you cringe a little in anticipation, hoping s/he isn’t about to make a fool of him or herself? Don’t you? I do. Why do I?

Anyway, my thanks to Adrian for making me feel like Rakim for that one hour in Carbondale, long ago. Here’s a poem from Mixology. Actually, this is the version that was in Prairie Schooner. It’s a little different in the book. Is it cool that we just like post all sorts of copyrighted material on here, bosses? More mixology, I guess.

WHEELS OF STEEL

I got me two songs instead
of eyes—all swollen and blacked

out like the day after a lost fight.
Two jigsaws spinning, buzzing

the backdrop for woodshop
or emcee, bar mitzvah or afterset.

It’s Run DMC rocking without
a band, but not without me.

Two rims spinning after the car
stops. Baby, I’m the little lenses

in the bifocals if they were on pulleys.
I’m the Wizard of Oz if Oz

was a fish fry in July. Call me
Master of the Cracked Fingers.

One song spins forward, the other
back to repeat itself: Every day

I’m hustlin’. Every day I’m hustlin’.
Baby, I’m the layaway payment

on a Ferris wheel. My songs orbit
parking lots and rent parties

like the crazy lady’s eyes
when she finds out her lover man

already left. One of my songs
spins backward, while the other

plays forward like sugar mixing
in to make the grape. My songs

are the pinwheels for this parade
of moonwalks and uprocks.

Hi, Harriet. I’m going to do some more recycling! I wrote this review for some peeps and they never published it. I thought this was a bummer, not only because I’d spent time working on it, but also because I thought these books deserved some notice. I cut-n-paste the review here on Harriet for those reasons, plus the reason of needing things to blawg about from a contractual point of view, plus to say nyah nyah to the aforementioned review-not-printing peeps, plus to satisfy a certain meta-curiosity I’ve been feeling, namely, whether/how/why my writer-writing differs — in tone, substance, form, content, etc. — from my blogger-writing. But ugh, don’t bother yourself too much about that last bit if it’s of no interest; it’s only slightly so to me. Instead read these reviews and let me know a) whether/why you do/n’t find my comments about these books valuable and/or enticing and/or whatever, and b) if you already knew about these books, what did you think of them?

Reviewed below:

Rick Barot, Want (Sarabande, 2008)

Chris Martin, American Music (Copper Canyon, 2007)

Karen Volkman, Nomina (BOA, 2008)

American poets have long debated the merits of “free” versus “formal” verse, but since all poems depend upon conventions of sound and signification in order to be read, they are all in some sense “formal.” If poets are to make poems, they can’t not use form. They can, though, choose how to use it, and therein lies the challenge (and joy) of writing poems. These three poets make very different prosodic decisions, but each author, in his or her own manner, demonstrates the varieties of tension and pleasure which thoughtful formal choices can engender. (Did you catch those slant-rhymes, reader? And that run of trochees? Reviewers have to make formal choices too, you know!)

Rick Barot titles his second collection with a primal monosyllable of longing, but his poems offer a smorgasbord of satisfactions. Barot’s speaker takes walks along the ocean, goes dancing, lingers in bookstores, libraries, and galleries, travels widely, reads constantly and variously, and is usually in the good company of a friend or lover. The guy has a boyfriend who roller-skates around the apartment in the nude! If this is want, what would having look like?

Formally, too, Barot’s poems hemorrhage loveliness even when we might expect some dissonance. Though they rarely adhere to strict patterns of meter or rhyme, their meticulous syntax and elegant rhetoric create a strong impression of classical grace and harmony. The effect is so relentlessly successful it leads me to a strange suggestion: These poems may be too beautiful for their own good.

The primary red striped onto the black, the dye
spotting the mirror and sink with
a kind of gore, a sulfur that is in the air for days:
you are twenty-two and this means

even folly has its own exacting nature. The hair
turned red, as easily as last month’s
blue; the piggish, miniature barbell pierced into
a nipple. At the club I watch you on top

of the speaker, tearing the shirt your brother gave
you, the music a murderous brightness
in the black room. Now you want it all off, down
to clear scalp. Your head in foam,

you ask me to do the places you can’t properly
reach: the neck’s mossy hairs, the back’s
escarpment, an edge of bone the razor nicks
to small blood, tasting like peppermint

and metal on my tongue.

Gore and sulfur! A torn shirt! The lover’s blood licked from a razor! This is ardent stuff, but it’s hard to deliver a convincing blast of l’amour fou in quatrains as gracious and polished as these. (Who, other than my college roommate who wore a cravat and smoked a meerschaum, uses the word “folly” with a straight face?)

The dozens of allusions to other writers and artists here may suggest a preference for the aesthetic over the real. Nothing necessarily wrong with that; carving out a refuge from reality is a defensible motive for making art. But Barot’s magnificence of expression sometimes seems less a respite than a flat denial. When he writes about a flood that killed thousands in his native Philippines in 1992, the devastation sounds upsettingly pretty (“rain was in love with the world”; dead bodies were “slick as fish”), and I’m reminded of Wallace Stevens’s idea that “since the imperfect is so hot in us,” delight “lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.” Barot is an absolutely lustrous writer, either unwilling or unable to utter a flawed or stubborn sound. Even when one’s wanted.

*

Chris Martin’s poems are as shambling and nonplussed as Barot’s are poised and authoritative. The speaker in Martin’s first book wanders around (usually in New York, occasionally elsewhere), works up makeshift theories of human nature, cracks jokes, and above all simply pays attention: a sidewalk tout hands out mysterious fliers for “Computerized Donuts,” someone accidentally throws a Frisbee into the giraffe pen at the zoo, “a jay // Crowds a turtledove / From the clothesline nobody / uses.” Through Martin’s eyes, the world’s supply of trivial but somehow remarkable dramas like these seems happily inexhaustible.

When Martin notices “the birthmark / On the bridge of the nose // Of the girl in the deli / Buying a diet Pepsi” on his way to check out a gallery in Chelsea, and then refers to another woman’s nose as “Currinesque,” in reference to the contemporary painter John Currin, he fairly demands comparison to Frank O’Hara, whose I-do-this-I-do-that-as-I-walk-around-the-city poems also displayed reverence for both everyday images and the rare air of the downtown art scene. Martin’s prosody, though, is distinctively his own. Every poem here cinches his digressive sensibility into triplets of short, choppy lines, and provides no terminal punctuation until its very end, so that by the time I get to line thirty or so, I begin to suffer the kind of craving for closure a soprano holding high C must feel.

My love is studying
Anatomy and I
Am a dilettante resuscitating

The moaning anomie
Of postmillennial drudgework
Into daily veer

As Watts teenagers writhe
And jolt like the victims of electricity
We diminish them

To be, an earnest rage born
Of the absurd, a fit
Response to an irresponsible

Age, each morning’s paper
Soaked in a bloom
Of limbs . . .

And so on, for another forty-nine lines of subordinate clauses and phrases, before Martin grants us a period at last, and lets us take a breath. Martin’s penchant for kinking his syntax further increases the sonic anxiety, and the combination of runaway sentences, strong enjambment, and syntactical inversions makes for a fretful but invigorating reading experience. I want to rush through the poem, since I won’t be able to comprehend a complete thought until its end, but at the same time, nearly every line forces me to stop, take stock of where I am, and wonder how I got there.

This formal tension neatly mirrors Martin’s chief thematic question, which is whether the poet’s job is to make sense of experience, or simply to record it. “I am / Not even a cinematographer wrenching / Beauty from an otherwise // Dumb panorama,” he writes, “I am that dumb / Panorama . . .” The poet’s investigative sentences seem driven by a desire to interpret and synthesize, but his halting line-by-line perceptions suggest he doubts poetry capable of anything more than “dumb” observation. It’s the collision of these two impulses which creates the strained but sweet “American / Music” Martin has “come to / Bring you you redoubtable ear.”

*

Instead of inventing a new form, Karen Volkman revisits a very old one. Nearly every poem in her third collection is an Italian sonnet, a form which poets writing in rhyme-poor English tend to avoid because it demands more rhymes than its English cousin. Volkman’s not daunted by the form’s challenges, and finds plenty of room to maneuver within what Wordsworth called “the sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.”

The blue blanched figures—system of a bird—
possess the future in the singing spring,
syrinx opulens, the eye a ring
noon will burn in like a perfect word

in a breathing sentence the silence blurred.
Principally throat, motion arriving
aural integral or static wing
comes to this remonstrance, harm, high, heard

and white kept opiate the nothing wides.
Palliative the skewed sky shackles, flails.
High integument that curts and glides

and beads the waters where its silver sails
the streaming numbers, aureate scales.
Enough says the girl and screams and hides.

Some might say Volkman can handle the sonnet’s prosodic strictures so easily only because she’s excused herself from the form’s traditional obligation to make an argument, or at least sense. What, after all, does this poem mean? Since when is “curt” a verb? Why is the sky skewed, and what does it shackle? Where did that girl at the end come from, and what’s she so upset about? Sonnets by hall-of-famers like Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Spenser may be (and are) subjected to multiple interpretations; still, it’s usually clear what they’re about on some basic level.

Volkman’s sonnets make a different kind of sense, though. I can’t offer a convincing gloss of the poem above, but if I overheard someone reading it aloud in the next room, so that I could make out its cadences but not the words themselves, it would sound completely intelligible, because its sentences are structured in ways I expect from a sonnet making some kind of argument. What Volkman’s sonnets are “about” is the syntactical and sonic rhetoric of the sonnet itself. The poem’s form isn’t a means to an end, as in a traditional sonnet; it’s an end in itself, a demonstration of itself.

There’s also a wily rhetoric of diction at work in these poems. Considered in isolation, the words which end each line in the sonnet above might seem to have been lifted from a deeply sappy, long-forgotten nineteenth-century poetess. In context, though, we see those stereotypically poetic words in pitched battle with the other registers of vocabulary in the poem: colloquial, erudite, foreign, even scientific. The poem enacts its argument not in the form of ideas expressed by its words’ denotative values, but by setting up a conflict between different types of words, their connotations, histories, and associations.

Nomina’s sameness of sound and scheme from page to page can make the poems begin to blur together, so it’s best to take them in small doses. Yet Volkman’s subversive exploration of the most venerable of all traditional forms is undeniably fascinating. Of these three books, hers is both the most volatile and the most fastidious. All three, though, are excellent specimens to wave under the nose of anyone who says there’s no freedom to be found in formal verse, or form in free.