WEE reviews May 2, 2006

Gravity by Josh Hanson

Julie: Yesterday's Josh Hanson poem was too short for itself. Today's is fine, though I don't make a connection between the first three lines and the last two. I'm okay with that because the last two are really nice, but perhaps I would have thought them really really nice if I got the connection.

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Prose, I say, Plasma by Susanna Childress

Julie: This poem is an absolute delight on the tongue. I mean, just say these lines out loud:

Here we glee in paronomasia,

our forms of humor slowly colliding until the wide sun settles

That's just lovely. Lovely.

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Day-lily by Susan Stewart

Julie: I dislike most formal poetry that relies on repetition--pantoums, villanelles, triolets, and the like--but I love me some rhetorical repetition in verse both free and formal. This poem benefits from it. What hurts it is the spiky ugliness flinging me down the page. These lines are so short I have nothing to savor. Hurry, hurry, hurry. That goes against the effective tolling of a repetition.