Meaning is what an audience tries to give art when the medium itself is ineffable. Poems like T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land ” and John Berryman’s “The Dream Songs” are accepted today as having a discernible content and an interpretable discourse. But history tells us that the vast majority of critical readers didn’t know what to make of these poems until many years later when critical opinion eventually coalesced and pronounced their themes and method of discourse.
Prynne achieves enviable compression of language by a heightened use of linguistic and cultural references that are strategically employed to treat themes of modern life. As his is a poetry of resistance to the new world order, it challenges the hegemony of the hardened shells of political and social structures that attempt to dominate human sentience.
Ange Mlinko’s new book of poetry, Marvelous Things Overheard, expresses our contemporary experience by way of micronarratives, using poetry’s familiar lens of myth, fable, and anecdote, and overlaying these with the received “truth” of the arts, science and technology as they are filtered through our national experiences and family histories. The psychological perspective, one that Mlinko surely sees as uniting us with ancients, discloses an unsettling arrhythmia at the heart of our existence in the modern world.
The twenty poems in Michael Dickman’s Flies (2011) employ the recognizable forms of his prosody, viz., a lyric mode mixed withContinue Reading
Despite the naïve generation X persona that Michael Dickman adopts in The End of the West (2009), his poetry isContinue Reading
Jennifer Grotz won the inaugural Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize for The Needle. The prize carries a $2,000 award forContinue Reading
Murder Ballad by Jane Springer Jane Springer has taken her game to a higher level in her second book ofContinue Reading
Of late Anthony Madrid seems inextricably linked with Michael Robbins, whom he met at the University of Chicago where bothContinue Reading
Fried is one of the most engaging contemporary poets writing today, for she is as thoughtful, witty and wise as the best conversationalists. Like two of her favorite poets, Charles Bukowski and Frank O’Hara, her utter lack of self-consciousness allows her to develop a unique connection with her readers, an intimacy that some poets would cut off their writing hands to replicate.
Like Bernard Malamud’s Roy Hobbs (“The Natural”) who can wield the physics of baseball with consummate skill, in fact making it look second nature, Newton, as poet, effortlessly repeats this triumph of language in poem after poem. Yet, Newton’s game is of a more serious kind, leading readers into the labyrinth of human emotions and then letting them see the Minotaur.
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