My First Poetry Thoughts

So this is scary.  Because if you start talking about poetry surely there's something wrong with you, right?  I mean really, how much more elitist can you be?

I've had a poetry itch for months now and I've been cruising blogs and reading a lot of online but hesitant to say anything because I suck at reading poetry and I'm acutely aware of this fact.  I've check out a copy of The Best American Poetry 2012 edited by Mark Doty and David Lehman.  I only know one name of the contributors and not because I'm familiar with her work rather I know her personally from my writer's group.  (And if you don't know her, in recent months Natasha Trethewey has become a really big deal.  Congrats!)

I like how clean and concise poetry is and how it can be open to interpretation.  I like narrative or humorous poems better than dark and brooding.  I hate the obscure, seemingly random punctuation, indentation, and inexplicable word placement on a page.  That's about as in-depth as I can express my preferences in poetry.  It's odd how I can talk more about a well made doble bock or rum than a poem.

I like this particular collection because it seems to be varied in subject matter and presentation.  I really like how the authors contribute their thoughts on the poem chosen for inclusion as it helps me better understand their work.  I find some poems that I think are amazing and I re read them five or six times or until I get desensitized to how amazing I originally thought it was.  Some poems I don't get; I move on.  Some poems I don't get and they manage to make me angry.  Some poems I don't get and I say, "What the hell was that?"  But it's worth it to find the ones I enjoy.

Since I suck so much ass at telling you why I like the poetry I like I thought I'd share a few.  The ones I'm sharing are short because I'm too lazy to write out the longer ones.  I don't claim to understand these poems; only that they got a reaction out of me in some way or another.  These are but a few from this anthology that I've really enjoyed.  


Child Holding Potato by Rick Barot

When my sister got her diagnosis, 

I bought an airplane ticket

but to another city, where I stared

at paintings that seemed victorious

in their relation to time:

the beech from two hundred years ago,

its trunk a palette of mud

and gilt; the man with olive-black

gloves, the sky behind him

a glacier of blue light.  In their calm

landscapes, the saints.  Still dripping

the garden's dew, the bouquets.

Holding the rough gold orb 

of a potato, the Child cradled

by the glowing Madonna.  Then,

the paintings I looked at the longest:

the bowls of plums and peaches,

the lemons, the pomegranates

like red earths.  In my mouth, 

the raw starch.  In my mouth, the dirt.  

***

Dorothy Wordsworth by Jennifer Chang

The daffodils can go fuck themselves.

I'm tired of their crowds, yellow rantings

about the spastic sun that shines and shines

and shines.  How are they any different 

from me?  I, too, have a big messy head

on a fragile stalk.  I spin with the wind.

I flower and don't apologize.  There's nothing

funny about good weather.  Oh, spring again, 

the critics nod.  They know the old joy, 

that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot

of future growing things, each one 

labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang.

If I died falling from a helicopter, then

this would be an important poem.  Then 

the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore

declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous

youth.  O, Flower, one said, why aren't you

meat?  But I won't be another bashful shank.  

The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,

the lilacs their taunt.  Fractious petals, stop

interrupting my poem with boring beauty.

All the boys are in the field gnawing raw

bones of ambition and calling it ardor.  Who

the hell are they?  This is a poem about war.    

***

At the End of Life, a Secret by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Everything measured.  A man twists

a tuft of your hair out for no reason

other than you are naked before him

and he is bored.  Moments ago he was

weighting your gallbladder, and then

he was staring at the empty space where 

your lungs were.  Even dead, we still say

you are an organ donor, as if something

other than taxes outlast death.  Your feet

are regular feet.  Two of them,

and there is no mark to suggest you were 

an expert mathematician, that you were 

the first runner-up in debate championships,

1956, Tapioca, Illinois.  From that time your body 

was carted before him, to the time your

dead body is being sent to the coffin,

every pound is accounted for, except 22 grams.

The man is a praying man & has figured

what it means.  He says this is the soul, finally, 

after the breath has gone.  The soul: less than

4,000 dollars' worth of crack--22 grams--

all that moves you through this world.  

***

Poems aren't novels and they aren't short stories, but somehow the good ones seem to be a bit of both at once.  So what do you think?  Do I like weird stuff?  I'm certainly open to recommendations.    

Oh, and if you want to be taken seriously it helps if your poem is about death and you use the word 'quotidian.'  Seriously, that word is used 32 times through 41 pages in this anthology...