In his interesting, informative introduction, Gioia writes that the most popular topics of the 10,000+ poems he read were, in order, Family, Childhood, Love, Poetry and Nature. He notes an interest in the sonnet form - "The poetry wars of the late twentieth centry have been forgotten. Form and free verse are no longer viewed as mutually exclusive techniques". He points out that in assessing the status of poetry nowadays, it's difficult to interpret the statistics, because "what they measure isn't what currently matters ... No one fully understands what is happening because poetry and its audience are changing too quickly in too many places". For example, poetry appears non-condescendingly in TV series like "The Simpsons", "Bones", "Elementary". He says he only chose poems that interested him, though he also tried to capture the variety of current (even contradictory) poetry styles.
Good to see non-US "The Dark Horse", "Ambit" and "Southword" represented. And Met Magazine (Manchester Metropolitan University)!
As usual for this series, poets have half a page of so to write about their pieces. The write-ups don't supply the answers to all my queries -
- Andrew Bertaina's "A Translator's Note" looks like an unimpressive Flash Essay (micro text, etc). In his write-up he makes no claims for its classification as a poem.
- Susan de Sola - "The [anapestic] rhythm evoked for me not just the sharp points of knives sailing through the air, but a high-wire trapeze act, a man and a woman swaying dangerously back and forth"
- Jonathan Galassi's notes were unpretentious and useful - "a contraption of opposites ... a satire in a Horatian vein"
- Donika Kelly's "Love Poem: Chimera" begins with "I thought myself lion and serpent. Thought/ myself body enough for two". The notes begin with "The chimera I'm thinking of in the poem is the one with a lion's body and a serpent for the tail". Surely that detail could have been added to the poem.
- Aimee Nezhukumatathil's "Invitation" is beyond me. Even more so after I read the notes - "an ars poetica ... a manifesto"
- Hieu Minh Nguyen's notes say mostly - "For the most part of my life, it seemed impossible to want the things I wanted. I thought, if I couldn't have it - the boy outside my window, the surprise serenade in the bleachers - I could at least, be in proximity to it. If I couldn't be deemed beautiful, I could stand next to beautiful things"
- I wish more notes were like Nkosi Nkululeko's. It mentions that one image alludes to a scene in The Matrix. I hadn't noticed, but I think it's a fair allusion.
- Sheana Ochoa's feels minor. Her notes say "A poem's ability to reflect the temporary, ever-changing mind-set of the reader is miraculous" and describes how, reading it, it's now a different poem. And she's different too.
- Jacqueline Osherow's "Tilia cordata" is over 8 pages of loosely rhyming couplets - in the notes she writes "I chose rhyming couplets ... because I hoped they'd lend all this intensity a bit of restraint. I'm accustomed to writing long poems in terza rima and, to some degree, I see these rhyming couplets as a sort of austere, displined, perhaps foreshortened terza rima, replacing the forward-reaching intervening rhyme with silence". It's a pleasant enough read, though not dense - "I badgered my mother after hearing snatches// of unassimilable whispered conversation/ and wouldn't take a shower until I was seven,// worried gas might come out. That's what my mother/ had told me: gas came out instead of water// when pressed for what those whispers meant."
- I liked Jason Schneiderman's Voxel, but why is it in short-lined couplets? Why not long-lined 4-liners? "the smaller your [sic] become,/ the more powerful you will be" says the poem about voxels, but that doesn't apply to lines of text
- A.E.Stallings' notes are informative.
- I didn't think much of Natasha Trethewey's "Shooting Wild". The notes say that she's been working on it for twenty years.
I liked "Ghost Ship" (Sonia Greenfield), "Into the Mystery" (Tony Hoagland). I wasn't by "Walking home", "We lived happily during the war
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