The bipolar poetry review

Jason Schneiderman can't make up his mind about Dorothea Lasky's latest chapbook, Poetry is Not a Project. Rather than be reductive, he gives readers at Coldfront magazine two reviews for the price of one: both his curmudgeonly side and his inner poet take turns critiquing Lasky's prose poem. Should it be read for meaning or pleasure? Read his entire Janus-faced review here, or settle for a few schizo snippets below.

According to Schneiderman, here's the basic premise of Lasky's book-poem:

The argument of Lasky’s manifesto is two-fold, and fairly straightforward: 1) We’ve come to conceive of poetry as something to discuss and contemplate, rather than something to do or love. 2) Poetry is defined by the experience of uncertainty and non-linearity, and since a “project” is linear and certain, a “project” is anti-poetic.

The curmudgeon in him take issue with Lasky's cloying conversational tone:

I greatly enjoy Lasky’s prose style, but her insistence that we’re watching an unrevised monologue in process (“I don’t know. That seems wrong, too”) irks me. It suggests a blurring of the poet and essayist’s tools, and that might make sense if she weren’t at work distinguishing poetry from not-poetry. She seems to stylistically pop her gum because she wants her audience to underestimate her. Lasky is incredibly gifted, but I could never fully settle into the charm of her prose without disregarding the thread of her argument. And I could never fully embrace the argument—despite the fact that I agree with its conclusion.

While the poet takes her style at face value and finds pleasure in her playful irreverence:

Lasky—like William Carlos William’s in Spring and All—sets out to find the boundaries between poetry and prose, but ultimately finds that line impossible to trace. It’s not a line at all, but almost a no-man’s-land or demilitarized zone that one can enter but at great risk. Lasky never calls out for help; a single reference to Vygotsky indicates the erudition at work in her thinking. Like a poet, she metabolizes the thought of others, rather than directly citing it or quoting it. Like a poet, she foregrounds persona and monologue, collapsing the division between thought and emotion, between argument and monologue. Like a poet, her writing embodies (rather than expresses) her concerns, showing that prose and poetry have fuzzy boundaries, finding herself in the poetic terrain of uncertainty even as we watch the persona struggle toward a conclusion.