Review With Rough Gods

Hi all!

If you already have With Rough Gods, I'd love it if you took a moment to say something nice about it at the following places:

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If you don't have it, GET IT!

Thanks!

Haiku for Margaret & loss

Over at Lutheran Surrealism (see the links list) there's a haiku contest up. Much of the commentary is, fortunately or un-, not haiku. Ah well. I've been taking the opportunity to write some emotionally healing one-offs to deal with the loss of my youngest.

Here they are. I'll update if more get written before Sunday. Enjoy!

A missing daughter
Summer fades into autumn
And silenced laughter


Indefinite In Context


impossible loss

words unravel like a tear

winds abrading me

Not a crook

My wrinkled thumb stumps
air now no weight is there my
arm cradles absence.

Holy Matrimony

We are wound by God
to breed immortal children
even though they die.
Loss/Lost

A sunken island
wishes to unmoor itself
and drift, forgotten.

Elegy for Margaret by Michael P. Bobbitt

Elegy for Margaret                                                                                                         

“Is her still dead?”

A 3-year old big sister giving voice

To a very grown-up confusion—

Baby Margaret, blameless and perfect in her mother’s embrace,

Swaddled in the arms of death.

Surely there’s been some mistake,

The Reaper with a wrong address

Or a God distracted by beauty elsewhere in creation

To let this happen.

“Why is she so cold, daddy?”

“Because this is just her body, sweetheart. Her spirit lives in our hearts now.”

And yet there are still forms to sign,

Flowers and dinners and details to arrange—

All the things that people do—

Well-meaning friends grasping for something to say

When no poet or minister

Could ever find a single comforting word

That would but wither in the face of this despair.

A family strewn instantly against the rocks, irreparably broken.

Because we’re not starfish or lizards.

When you cut away a part of us

The empty space is there forever,

A phantom chord ringing unresolved in our ear—

A one/three clamoring for a five

Or even the sting of a minor seventh—

Anything but these missing notes.

When already her song

Was the joyful refrain for so many,

The unfinished symphony of a life unlived.

Mother and Father must go on shepherding,

Encouraged by the Christ story

Because Resurrection is yet possible:

That a baby’s light cannot be entombed,

Shining still on a family that refuses to go dark.

On her sisters that must bear this loss together.

In the carefree affection of Genevieve,

In the calculating whimsy of Josephine,

In the grace and poise of Cordelia.

In all of us

Who resolve to carry on in the midst of sorrow.

To sing into the stillness of heartbreak.

To answer the impermanence of life

With the eternal promise of love.

Suffer the little children…

For of such is the kingdom of heaven,

But suffer one another as well, friends—

Because the kingdom of Earth

Holds but small refuge

Beyond each other.

And the hopefully frequent memories

Of this sweet child—

Wide-eyed and laughing—

A peace in the hearts of men.

For Margaret Palmer by A.E. Stallings

For Margaret Palmer

who died suddenly at two months old

Life is brief and grief is long,

Joy is deep and sorrow wide,

Love is heavier than song,

Life is brief and grief is long.

The lullaby is right, is wrong:

Hunger, kisses, milk, and sleep.

Life is brief and grief is long,

Sorrow wide as joy is deep.

     A.E. Stallings

Interrobang by Jessica Piazza

This is not a review.

I was going to write a review of Jessica Piazza's wonderful book Interrobang but my youngest daughter Margaret died suddenly on Monday, August 5th. Instead I will leave this poem which was my favorite in the book when I first read it two weeks ago and is now far more important to me. Please buy Jess's book. Anyone who can write this deserves your patronage.

Pediophilia
Love of dolls

The week her daughter died, the room her girl
had occupied became a home for dolls.
The first an angel: fearsome, glass-gazed gift
to dull a mother's utter grief; the next
a paint and porcelain she numbly bought
from QVC. It looked like her. And now
she sees her small grandchildren grow, and knows
it's good. But they can't guess each small dress
arranged by day comes into disarray
by night. They bring her more, naive. Don't know
she weeps in the overflowing sea of limbs
that manage, year by year, to commandeer
the bed, the floor, and more. An orphanage
of girls. A thousand eyes that cannot shut.

What's Wrong With A.E. Stallings?

Perhaps the answer is nothing.

As evidenced by her two new poems in this month's issue of Poetry, "Sestina: Like" and "The Rosehead Nail," Stallings maintains my claim that she is the best American poet since Sylvia Plath. Her poems seem specifically calculated to make me swoon.

By "me" I mean anyone with a serious education (traditional or autodidact) in the classics, poetry, and poetics. If you're the kind of person who owns an OED and for whom "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" holds a dear place in your heart, you're going to love A.E. Stallings' poetry (if you don't already).

And yet I wonder.

Look at the vocabulary of both poems. "Sestina" uses "desuetude" and "Nail" "quincunx." While I love the challenge of both finding and providing unfamiliar words (especially ones that sound so lovely: see "indehiscent" in her poem "Olives") I know from experience both reading and teaching that vocabulary can be a huge turn-off for some folks.

And that's sort of the crux of the question. In a world with a triple division of poetry: popular, traditional, and obfuscatory, I would like to know what the uninitate thinks of the average Stallings poem. Is she merely a "poet's poet"? Worse, is she merely this "poet's poet"? Most of me doesn't think so, though in reading contemporary poetry with my students I've gotten a lot more traction with the poems of Jill Alexander Essbaum or Joshua Mehigan or Brian McGackin than I have with Stallings' poems.

Maybe it's not her it's me?

Perhaps I see Stallings' poems and see exemplars for what I have tried to write. Lord knows reading her "Three Poems to Psyche" so soon after the publication of With Rough Gods was incredibly unsettling. But I don't think I'm unrealistic about the potential audience for poetry. That is, I know big words scare people. Someone once told me that I was writing poetry for the intellectual crowd as well. Somehow I didn't see this (like seriously, my first book is about Greek Mythology--who ELSE was I writing for?) and was taken a bit aback.

Artists always need to balance their desire to communicate with the ability of the audience to comprehend. While I agree with both Dante and Eliot that the experience trumps the understanding, the possibility of comprehension must exist. It clearly does in Stallings' work--so is there a problem?

Maybe it's everyone else?

I am unsettled still when I read her work and am concerned about its reach to a broader audience. As I count her among my favorite poets and among our best poets, that concern bleeds into a more general concern for poetry.

Why is it that difficulty in poetry should stop an audience cold when this is not the case for other forms of art? Folks loved Inception. LOVED IT. Lost, too. I hear both students and adults debate the complexity of this song, that lyric--the complexity of some puzzling video game.

Why have they lost the ability to appreciate such puzzles in poetry?

There are plenty of answers but I think I am more interested in this question: what do we as poets do if we acknowledge this disparity?

Is it a compromise of art to acknowledge and adjust your work to accommodate the limitations of your broader audience or do you accept that your art--by its nature--limits its own audience?

A.E. Stallings work thus far gives her a solid claim to be the best poet of our age. But will she be our age's favorite poet? What value is there in either honorific? In any honorific? Laurels are just leaves, after all.

Scholarship in poetics: is it really that hard?

So twitter showed me a new article at Harriet today:

Rhyme by Anthony Madrid

In it, Mr. Madrid makes the claim that non-visual rhymes (tough and fluff) are better than visual rhymes (blow and show) because they create cognitive dissonance.

That would be nice if it weren't untrue (indeed, maybe they do on a second, third, fifteenth reading--but that's not what he's getting at in his article).

We "hear" what we read. It's one of the reasons poetry has to "sound good" even if it's "closet verse."

But asking the average poetry scholar to know about cognitive science appears to be a losing battle. I wish it weren't so.