The Standardized Carter-Westling Empirical Weirdness Evaluation Engine

Sunday, April 30, 2006

WEE reviews April 30, 2006

Getting Kicked by a Fetus by Martha Silano

Julie: There is no subject for a poem less likely to get me enthused than pregnancy. I'd rather read about anything else. I'd rather read a poem about the ingredient list on a package of beef jerky. That said, this poem had some intriguing lines and the consistency of image helped keep me wondering what was going to come next.

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When Red Becomes the Wolf by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Julie: I think there is a typo in the first line, "fired" for "fried" which bothered me. It's not fair to hold it against the poem, but it made my eyes twitch. I don't think this poem works, though it has some effective juxtapositions and I enjoyed the ending. The tone is inconsistent. It also made me want a fried bologna sandwich, a staple of my childhood in Appalachia, but only if it has the wedge cut in to make it fry flat.

Friday, April 28, 2006

WEE reviews April 28, 2006

Haircut by Henri Cole

Julie: I should hate this poem. I should. But I don't. I like everything about it, from the diction to the images to the spacing to the linebreaks. No, this isn't earth-shattering, but it's simply perfect for a sunny Friday in April when my sinuses are the size of Gibraltar and my week has been just short of entirely crappy. Some poems catch you at just the right time, and this one caught me today when I needed it. I'm not going to reread it soon, perhaps in a month or two, when it won't hurt me if I don't like it any longer. Today, though, it makes me happy.

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The Professor's Lover by Victoria Chang

Julie: This poem nearly gets away from Chang a few times, but she reins it in and brings it to a satisfying close. The voice is a good one, though some of the questions it posed didn't really interest me. No, if you offered your eyes to me I'd shriek and run away. Fast. The two forces in the poem action/imagery and contemplation are at odds. I preferred the imagery side, which is par for my course, and I thought the structure of the poem really helped make this worth reading. The choppy sentences nestled in more-than-bitesized strophe gave a feeling both of directness and of expansion. I was tugged along, knowing this narrator had more to say.

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Special by James Grinwis


Julie: After yesterday, this poem is nothing but disappointment for me. I'd be interested to learn from the editors at No Tell what their method is for deciding which poems come where in the week. Not that I'm quibbling. This is a Friday poem, in a way, a getaway day poem. But something in me got a little smushed.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

WEE reviews April 27, 2006

Woofer (When I Consider the African-American) by Terrance Hayes

Julie: This is a flat poem on occasionally enlivened by some unusual and vivid plot:

making love among the fresh blood and axe
and chicken feathers left after the Thanksgiving slaughter
executed by a 3-D witchdoctor houseguest


It was enough to keep me reading, but not enough to inspire me to seek out more by Terrance Hayes.

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Mini Buildingsroman by James Grinwis

Julie: By far my favorite of the Grinwis poems this week, though the constant end-stopped lines trudged very heavily down the page.

A messianic squaw bit into a raspberry and said ow.


Did she ever!

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

WEE reviews April 26, 2006

Pangur Bán trans. by Seamus Heaney

Julie: It's a charming but slight traditional Irish poem. I like how this translated poem seems to be about translating something. Not much else to say.

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Terracotta by James Grinwis

Julie: I have to say that while I'm not blown away by James Grinwis, dude is never boring. Today's poem is very appealing to me with its piling up of off images, though I think the final simile of a siren twirling "like a kicked fruitcake" is just terrible.

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Testament by Megan Gannon


Julie: The first 8 lines are throat-clearing. I don't want to suggest rewrites for these poems. They are done, complete, not posted in a workshop, but damn. I'd cut those lines and start in with

You are learning

backwards. There's hardly time.



Those lines would have pulled me in. The current opening pushed me away.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

WEE reviews April 25, 2006

Corsons Inlet by AR Ammons

Julie: I don't have anything against prose. Write it myself. I give a hearty thumbs up to prose poetry, generally, and have no issue with blurring lines between various art forms. But I dislike prose with linebreaks being sold as a poem. And this work by AR Ammons is prose with linebreaks and fancy pants indentations. It can't disguise the flat language and the lack of affect.

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Nerve Sequence by James Grinwis

Julie: Ever have someone tell you that if you didn't like a poem, you just didn't get it? Well, I thought this poem was okay, but the getting it? Not so much. Which means that my "okay" is a highly provisional one and that it's worth, well, nothing.

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Undid in the Land of Undone by Lee Upton

Julie: More prose, but this time at least the words weren't boring. There's cleverness here, perhaps the wrong kind, summed up by the final lines:

What I didn't do took
an eternity —
and it wasn't for lack of trying.


Yeah, that's cute.

Monday, April 24, 2006

WEE reviews April 24, 2006

Aubade by Idra Novey

Julie: Enjoyed the first four lines and then, er, no idea whatsoever.

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Wrapped in Dust Mites by James Grinwis

Julie: My read early this morning disappointed me. But since Blogger wouldn't let me post, I didn't bother writing a review. My reread a while ago pleased me strangely. There are a lot of things going on in this poem, lots of disjointed images that I pretty much liked without reservation. So, this morning boo. This evening yay. You be the judge.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

WEE reviews April 23, 2006

We Argue about Regret by Laura McCullough

Julie: I was charmed by this poem, though it took a while to hook me. To be honest, I would only have skimmed it were it not for my new review shoes. Something about the way it sat on the page made me think of rigidity and I spied quotation marks (my nemeses!) right off the bat. But I did read it and was happy to have done so. Not a big flashy poem for certain, but one that captures something real. And it has a linebreak I love:
tell, the best truth includes one
lie.


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Keel of Earth's Axis
by Mong-Lan


Julie: This poem has some lines I admire, but the whole ends up not striking me. Granted, I haven't had my caffeine yet today, and it's Sunday which my brain has claimed as a day of rest (along with the majority of the rest of the week). Strangely, I didn't get the sense the poem would reward further reads.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

WEE reviews April 22, 2006

Hoops by Major Jackson

Julie: You can't unread a line in a poem, so if you encounter something amazing, it will irrevocably change the poem. I was pleased with this poem, and then I encountered:

the rusted

base of pole where life
snakes an open cut
up to center court, there lay
Radar enfolding his heart.


And I was blown away.

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Adoration is Not Irrelevant by Hayden Carruth

Julie: I can't say that I really thought this was a good poem, but I did enjoy the read, the over-the-topness of it. It was affective, effective, infective, even.

Friday, April 21, 2006

WEE reviews April 21, 2006

Day two at WEE reviews.

Hotel Narrative (06 APR 1996) by Eileen R Tabios

Julie: For the second day, this poet ends a sexually charged piece with a bit of very "poetic" diction just sort of tacked on. It puzzles me. This poem puzzles me. Certain sections (2, 4) aren't pulling their weight. The airy formatting is trying to give it space, but it seems that the poem is equally about distance and shut-innedness. Like yesterday's poem, it has a violence to it that sours me.


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Tale by Emily Moore

Julie: Romancing a pony leaves me with a very discombobulated feeling. I assume from the ending pun that this is supposed to be taken lightly, and as such I think it works. If it went on longer, I would have become very bored but I wasn't yet.


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X at Sea by Tom Hansen

Julie: I've read this poem before. Not this exact one by this author, but very similar poems. I'm not really complaining about that. Lord knows I've walked on very well-trod ground myself. But reviewing it is hard. My exact reaction: "Okay." The same way if my husband said we needed to go to the store. "Okay."

Thursday, April 20, 2006

WEE reviews April 20, 2006

This is our inaugural edition, so we're still working out our format.


The Segregation of the Senses by WR Weinstein.

Julie: I think the poet had an ending line and wanted to get to it. Unfortunately, the poem ends up treading water until then. It doesn't have any emotional pull for me. Flat language, blanket statements, few images. Not my cup of tea.

Gabriel: The language is flat and the linebreaks largely arbitrary. The disjointedness of the language is ineffective because it is not a series of fractures related to the segregation of the senses, as the title might suggest, but instead is merely random.

In terms of structure, there was little to write home about. Why “neuroscientist” (Line 4) deserves its own line, for instance, is simply because the linebreak is being used as comma and to force a 5 line strophe. The gimmickry used is uninspired and doesn’t really go anywhere. The ana/epiphoric sense listing in the second strophe, for example, serves no function and is punctuated by a lame joke in Line 9. This gesture winds up emphasizing the absence of touch and taste, the two senses that the poem problematically neglects.

The poem has a sexual/political agenda that is both obvious and mundane. The poem brings nothing new to the table, nor does it do anything particularly interesting by poking at, with purposeful selectivity, tired discussions that are not adequately explored.

In the end, the work mistakes its own perception for profundity and hopes that presenting the language in the form of “being a poem” will somehow help the reader to forgive the fact that nothing significant is said.

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From Epitaphs by Abraham Sutzkever, trans. by Jacqueline Osherow.

Julie: It's hard to say if the distance in the poem is from the original or from the translation. In a way, it works as something "written on a salt of a railway car" which is a pretty distant sort of communication. The poem ends up slight and bland, but with an overarching heaviness. The biography at the bottom was more affecting.

Gabriel: Firstly, let me say that I am at best ambivalent about the translator’s note. I think it is interesting biographical material, but set up as a companion piece to be read in reflection immediate to the poem felt like emotional extortion. Ah well, moving on.

I think that the language maintains a pathos that is amenable to the tone throughout. I have mixed feelings about the use of the dash, I think that it is an interruption that is sometimes effective and sometimes stumbling. On the whole I thought that the language couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to be simple or sagacious and so tried to do a bit of both.

I felt the openness of the conclusion was interesting. Structurally it behaves as a conclusion should and creates a “closed” sort of feeling, but the avenues for interpretation are really quite wide open.


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Cancer by Eileen R Tabios.


Julie: I find myself definitely not wanting to know how nipples might curdle. I have a weird dislike of direct quotation in poetry. It always drags me out of the moment. Can't explain. Shouldn't try. I find myself flailing a bit for something to say about this poem.

Gabriel: How to tackle this? Well, the sexual politics are problematic to say the least, and the language brings this to a point of crisis frequently throughout the poem. Consider for example the subtext of “anxious thighs” (L 5), which suggests both expectation/longing and also fear.

The male sexuality in the poem is rapacious. The violence of the male gaze in the third strophe was particularly troubling, as well as the themes of domination, objectification, and rape that run through the poem. The male sexuality in the poem is literally murderous. Clearly destructive throughout, as seen by desire to “tear” the female mouth, and every interaction which involves the male identity, in lines 18-20 the rationale behind the title declares itself. L 20 “as if life-generating air still flowed, between our bodies” which is to say that life-generating air does not flow. The male identity pulls the speaker into the absence of air, ergo, murderous. The male sexuality in the poem wishes to possess sexually by domination and violence, and in the act of possession destroy the thing (let's not mistake the objectification here) possessed.


What struck me most about this poem, even more than its pornographic nature, was the profound naïveté of the speaker. Whether it borders on or goes well past idiocy is difficult to say. But the idiocy of the speaker is required by the poem, for the most part. In order for the horror of the poem to be communicated effectively, the speaker needs to not only dramatically fail in the role of person, but also romanticize her own failure of personhood. This comes through in passages like the “Master, you always let me be so innocent / I could offer fearlessly, ‘Whatever You Want.’ ” (L 21 - 22) demonstrating how the speaker perverts the meaning of “innocence” to apply to that which is passively, perpetually, and most disquieting appropriately/deservedly violated.

The speaker is never the sole possessor of action in the poem. The only instance where she could be said to be an instigator in the poem is in the final strophe, which presents the apotheosis of the male aggressor (which has a whole mess of implications on its own), however the speaker’s explicit destruction subverts any agency her action might have afforded her.

At first I had wanted the language to be tightened up in some places, but on further consideration I wonder if the campiness of the romanticized language communicates the abjectness of the speaker more completely than more condensed diction ever could.