a new measure (poetry report)

  In “Bamboozled #5,” Sylvia Jones writes:   Everything we have          and have been    given is manufactured and bad.   “Bamboozled” is a six-part ekphrastic poem written in response to a montage of blackface figurines from Spike Lee’s  Bamboozled . In an interview , Jones explains that writing in the ekphrastic style—and the “intense, almost conspirational dialogue” with the artwork it affords—enabled her to “unsettle static history” and speak to the legacy of minstrel iconography in the present.   However,  Television Fathers  feels just as absorbed by the future, declaring in the opening poem:   sometimes it’s good to be afraid of the future it’s the year of that feeling everyone has when they’re dancing and I’m not lonely cause I’m friends   with my neighbors, and my childhood home is an airbnb is a brothel of vacationing millennials and hallelujah money, it’s the bootstrap trick m...

In a poem about three-quarters of the way through  Soft Water , John Coletti writes:   that poetry is psychic is no new concept though it continues to surprise me   What’s satisfying about  Soft Water  is its use of “no new” features of poetry—caesura and line breaks, done with musicality—to still surprise and arouse emotion.    If this sounds cheesy, it’s probably because contemporary poetry trends toward ironic detachment and cynicism. That attitude is appropriate, given the world as it is. (As if in acknowledgement of this state of affairs—the grim state of the world, that is—Coletti writes:   I meant this poem to be gentle the source of perfect wisdom though gentle times / these are not)   However, Coletti still writes lines like:   I lay awake beside you restful and holding your hair saw my breath burn. It made me feel young autumn air   The line break that transitions the abstract “feel young” to the concrete (but ephemeral) “...

  Atom and Void  begins with the poem “We Who Are About to Die Salute You,” which begins with the line: “For starters, my ignorance is what resents what outlasts me.” Riffing on ancient Roman literature, the title (along with others like “At Capacity” or “The Last Night of the World”) suggests a sense of imminent collapse, empire’s fall, or even of being at the end of the human project.    (Interestingly,  Atom and Void  is the title of a book of essays, also published by Princeton University Press, by Oppenheimer—a key figure in hastening that end.)   Heard in this context, the resentment—which I read more so as disaffection —of the poem’s first line could be read as virtuous, since the ultimate legacy of “what outlasts me,” from Ancient Rome to the atomic bomb, is violence. Except that Fagan, while persistently stressing the fallenness of humanity and the fallibility of knowledge, still declares knowledge to be his “ultimate end.”   The knowledg...

  Ferns and Foam Rubber consists of 10 short prose pieces, each of which is accompanied by a tattoo-like drawing of an anthropoid, but also insect-like, creature in various states of transformation. These drawings usefully provide an inroads for visualizing the book’s “characters” (Halifax, Narli, Shila, and its first-person narrator) who are either sprites, humans who have shrunk, or an altogether new species enduring earth on the way to its submergence in a detoxifying soup (the book's last line is “Bile will rise”).   The book begins rainily in winter sometime after “the world changed.” Here, glowing mushrooms walk in the company of reindeer and the creatures around whom the “plot” transpires have lungs that are transforming into frilly gills merging with those of the pea pods in which they will soon hibernate:   We hibernate in the pods during wintertime with anus and mouth tied together the way the mouth and anus of a fetus are tied together. During this time o...

  God Wave  is “a book-length prose poem with no end punctuation,” composed of 51+ pages of 31 lines justified to both margins, with no capitalization other than “I.” Reading it, I sought some instrumental analogue for reference. Repetitive, muscular, dissonant alto saxophone (such as Evan Parker’s  Conic Sections )? However, I found that music was not a useful analogue. Music has texture and rhythm, whereas Lara’s work is “no material.”   “No material” writing, in the context of  God Wave , aspires to divest language of referentiality in favor of what Lara terms in an  interview  “the purely creative aspect of the purely creative aspect of language.” Thus, whatever memories and judgments come up in the work are not the reason  for  the writing; instead, they are the material becoming no-material, vehicles for the words’ flight towards a pure point of generativity:   I now address the subtitular epitome of divine relenting the restless l...