Buzzed Books #52 by Amy Watkins

Anna Journey’s The Atheist Wore Goat Silk

Much art is made to elevate mundane things. Think of Georgia O’Keefe demanding that we look again at humble flowers. Think of Neruda gazing at a slice of lemon and seeing a cathedral window, or finding the poetry in a suit or a pair of socks. An artist like Neruda or O’Keefe makes the mundane sacred. Anna Journey’s new collection, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (LSU Press, 2017), is full of poems about vulgar, even ridiculous things, but what is extraordinary about them is not that they are holy, but that they express what is so naturally strange about the human condition.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Dildophone,” about a joke musical instrument “played” onstage by a prank-loving musician ex-boyfriend. The dildophone (a sex toy taped to a funnel) may not be an everyday object, but if we use the second definition of “common”–“showing a lack of taste and refinement”–it’s about as common as it gets:

                        […] between

the banjo and mandolin players, red-

bearded and wiggling and he swung

the dildophone’s cock. For a solo

he’d jack off the shaft as if to alter

the instrument’s pitch.

Journey doesn’t pretend that the dildophone is anything more profound than a vulgar sight gag, but she uses its vulgarity as a starting place for a meditation on abuse, autonomy, and art:

They didn’t know

how his mother slapped him when,

at fifteen, he traded his violin

for an electric bass, or the way she’d pop

another codeine and make him–three

years old–balance a pencil against

the spruce body of a toy fiddle

for an hour each day so he could practice

holding a bow […]. Sometimes

if she looked away, he’d start to hum

and feel the body resonate.

The dildophone is elevated by what it represents to the poet: personal and artistic freedom. She doesn’t claim that the dildophone is sacred, but she forcefully shows us that a thing can be both vulgar and significant.

The book is full of poems like this: poems about vulgar, absurd objects and experiences imbued with personal significance. For instance, two separate poems about a prom corsage made of fried chicken drumsticks–a novelty spotted online–use the bizarre object as occasion to ponder maturity, aging, and death. In the first of these, “Fried Chicken Prom Corsage: Ode to My Thirties,” she likens the object to the “brutal extravagance” she possessed as a younger woman. She writes, “I should throw / myself a party for having / even survived.” In a poem about the ordinary experience of receiving maternal advice, she uses the ridiculous image of hanging a slice of bread out of her mouth while chopping onions to begin a litany of loss:

[…] the white oak swamp’s

wafts of methane, the idling pickups, the fuck yous

I spat and left hanging in the air. The man

I left there. Or the flare of my dead

closeted grandfather–brandy cobbling

the bottom of his breath as he crawled out

of his ground-floor window for weeks

to wander the neighborhood after his lover’s

suicide, drunk, muttering, still wearing

Bob’s tweed hat.

Each poem launches from its triggering image into something bigger, more significant, yet it remains firmly grounded by that image.

On the whole, the poems are original, personal, and funny. Because they are so specific and because they often include something truly weird, they also feel absolutely honest in a you-can’t-make-this-shit-up kind of way. The world Journey writes is strange, but recognizable.

Pair with: the dildophoner’s favorite beverage, a common rum and Coke.

_______

Amy Watkins (Episodes 124, 161, 164, 192, and 209) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press, 2014) and the art editor for Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine.

Buzzed Books #50 by Amy Watkins

Ari Banias’ Anybody

Ari Banias’ debut collection, Anybody (Norton, 2016), begins with a poem titled “Some Kind of We.” In it, his reason for writing is laid out as plainly as a thesis statement in a freshman composition class:

I am trying to write, generally and specifically,

through what I see and what I know,

about my life (about our lives?),

if in all this there can still be–tarnished,

problematic, and certainly uneven–a we.

Throughout the book, that “we” changes shape, from the American everyperson to pairs of lovers to family to gender groups.

What holds each “we” together is tenuous. For instance, he imagines that every home in America holds “the large plastic bag / with slightly smaller mashed-together / plastic bags inside.” As a basis for a poetic national identity, it’s not much, but it’s also probably true. There’s a gallon-sized ziplock stuffed with plastic grocery bags in one of my kitchen drawers as we speak. I use them to line the bathroom trashcan. Banias’ poem continues: “it is overflowing, and we keeping adding, / bringing home more than we need.” We are excessive, but we knew that already, didn’t we?

In poems about more specific or more personal groups, the imagery carries more emotional weight. In “Villagers,” immigrants to the US are recognizable by “boxes taped up and up then tied with twine | addressed on every side | in that careful longhand taught on other continents.” Because one of the book’s “wes” is the speaker himself–a person who has inhabited multiple genders, carried multiple names–images of clothing are especially significant: a nightgown that becomes a jellyfish, a tuxedo, “a sundress on a splintery / swingset in Texas.” In one of the collection’s most poignant moments, his grandmother, oblivious to his bound breasts and changing identity, places her engagement ring on his finger and calls him beautiful.

Many of the poems rely on a Frank O’Hara-esque stream of consciousness–images and ideas racing ahead of the poet’s or the reader’s ability to logically categorize them. Poetry is made out of this kind of risky juxtaposition, but great metaphors are recognizable as well as unexpected:

Some taught me famous names, to drop the coins of these

in slots of conversation so with others I might feel like we.

This is new, but it’s also such an apt description of the awkward pop culture currency teenagers (and some adults) trade in that it feels almost familiar, as if we should always have thought of it this way. The same poem continues:

But I at the shore of a sea, I on the pebbled, tar-smeared edge

of an island. There hungered or grumbled or stood an astonished I

I picked at like a splinter once part of something bigger.

That desire to be part of something bigger–to “feel like we” as well as “I”–is something that genuinely binds us as readers, as human beings. As Banias says in another poem, “There’s something to be said for individuality, / multiplied.”

Pair with a six-pack of whatever you like. Share it with someone.

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Amy Watkins (Episodes 124, 161, 164, 192, and 209) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press, 2014) and the art editor for Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine.

Buzzed Books #46 by Amy Watkins

Solmaz Sharif’s Look

In a September 2014 feature for the Kenyon Review Online, “A Poetry of Proximity,” Solmaz Sharif calls poets “the caretakers of language.” She writes:

The State exerts (or at least attempts) authority over us in many ways, including its use of language: passive construction, missing subjects, riotous chiasmus, etc. A combination of rhetorical flourish, euphemism, and passivity provide the State with the means to justify, formally, warfare. Today, the President of the Free World can have a kill list, can proclaim he is really good at killing, and there is hardly a shudder here. This is because our here is so small, because we are not hearing what is below the dead language. In a poem, our relationship to these languages change.

To resuscitate the dead language, to bring readers closer to the meaning those State-sanctioned euphemisms hide is the goal of Sharif’s first poetry collection, Look (Graywolf, 2016). To say that goal is significant seems like a grotesque understatement, particularly as I’m writing this on the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Fifteen years later, Sharif demands our attention to the abuse, injustice, and inhumanity that are still part of the fallout of those attacks and the United States’ response to them.

Sharif uses terms from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, reappropriating the words, altering our “proximity” to them. In the title poem, the first in the collection, those terms form a humanizing argument that hinges on the word “look” (in military terms, “a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence”):

Whereas I thought, if he would LOOK at my exquisite face

or my father’s, he would reconsider; […]

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is

                        your life? It is even a THERMAL SHADOW, it appears

so little, and then vanishes from the screen; […]

Let it matter what we call a thing.

The various meanings of the word “look” must be pondered: seeing, noticing, paying attention, but also–in the context of that military definition–being receptive to change, being open to another’s experience. The best poems in the book make us look. They remind me uncomfortably of the human beings on the far side of the dehumanizing language of the past decade and a half of war.

As in most collections, there are many very strong poems and a few that are less successful. In a few instances, the use of military terms feels forced, at least to my ear. Sustaining that premise in poems about family, personal relationships, and even politics is a challenge, which is better met in some poems than others.

At the end of the second and longest section in the book, Sharif includes a sequence of linked poems called “Reaching Guantánamo.” Each poem takes the form of a redacted letter, with blank spaces left where words have been erased. In some cases, the reader can fill in the blanks, but in others the missing words are mysterious–meaning and emotions, places and people lost to the State’s control of language. These are some of the strongest poems in the collection, and drive home the distance war has placed between the imagined letter writer and reader, the writer and censor, the words and their meanings.

Overall, Sharif’s Look is ambitious, intelligent, moving, important, and a little dangerous. After all, we let the state sanitize the language of war for a reason. It is poetry’s responsibility to return integrity to discourse for writers, readers, and citizens.

Pair this collection with a glass of Amaro Meletti, a bitter liqueur.

_______

Amy Watkins (Episodes 124, 161, 164, 192, and 209) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press, 2014) and the art editor for Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine.