Chapbook Project 2: January Is Over and Where Are We?

That’s the proposed title for my album of Death Cab for Cutie cover songs. But also, how’s the poetry chapbook project coming so far?

Well I’ll tell you –– when in doubt, I usually start with research. Figuring out what kind of book to make generally requires being familiar with books somewhat similar to what you’re trying to make. And fortunately for me I live in Seattle, home to Open Books: one of only two poetry-only bookstores in this great nation. (I got banned from the other one.)

At Open Books I attended a reading of feminist speculative poetry, and picked up a volume by one of the poets. The book is Unmanned by Jessica Rae Bergamino, and I got it because of one poem she read in particular. Well, really, the title of one poem in particular: “Self Portrait of Voyager Two as a Hologram of Princess Leia Imagining Voyager One in Drag as Han Solo Frozen in Carbonite.” It’s a good piece and an excellent premise, a series of poems written by the twin Voyager spacecraft cruising at the edges and beyond of our solar system.

"Frozen" by Scott Shingler Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

But before and after the reading, I flipped through their bins of chapbooks and emerged with two that seemed promising. The first was 66 for Starters, which I decided to grab because it met several criteria I was looking for: 

• Be written by a poet I’d never heard of before – in this case Serge Gavronsky. 

• The book itself should be simple: this one looked cheap, just letter-sized pages folded in half and stapled down the center.

• It cost less than $10: it was actually four bucks, probably since it had been published nearly twenty years ago.

The other one was Rae Armantrout’s Entanglements, which I picked up because it met several other criteria I was interested in:

• Be written by a poet I’d at least heard of (in this case I’d already read maybe a half-dozen of her poems).

• The book itself should be quality: this was a small, glossy volume with a fancy front and back cover, and even included a designer credit. 

• It cost $10 or less: this one was right on the money at ten bucks, since it had been published in 2017 after the author had already won a Pulitzer Prize.

So from this you can correctly guess a few things about me:

• I have opposite and conflicted feelings about what kind of chapbook to be aiming for.

• I often fall back on studying things instead of doing things.

• I am cheap, and would never allow poetry to get in the way of a bargain.

Over the last few weeks I read through ‘em and did some scribbling inside. I was looking for clues as to how I do or don’t want to move forward, finding some things I liked or disliked to help me get my bearings. Here are my brief descriptions of the two:

66 for Starters is a set of weird, disjointed and usually short pieces that often read like run-on sentences. Gavronsky tends to free-associate from one topic to another, and then circle back around. I kept a running list of the topics he kept returning to that included: 

beginnings

syllables

the dead

pictures

paper

Judaism

revolution

beards

Entanglements is a set of short, terse poems that focus pretty exclusively on quantum mechanics and astrophysics. Armantrout often lays out a set of scientific theories or facts, then switches gears to make tangential points that line up with the technical details already laid out. She has titles like:

Spin

Integer

The Emotional Life of Plants

Fundamentals

The Ether

Chirality

Given those brief descriptions, I would have guessed that someone with my interest in science weirdness (and my aversion to Beat Poetry) would absolutely hate 66 and love Entanglements. 

As it turned out, both have their strengths but I would actually rather re-read 66 for Starters. One of my notes on the book was that the individual pieces don’t so much stand on their own as lean against the others. You kind of have to keep going to make sense of it all, and the further you read the deeper it all goes. There’s work and craft and experience, but they’re hidden enough to make the book seem casual and throwaway.

Entanglements, on the other hand, is kind of labored to the point of exhaustion. The fact that the author included a freaking Preface in which she lays out what the book is about and why and which science texts she read that inspired it... Woof. It all feels laid on thick, like somebody who wants you to know that they have TOTALLY read Einstein’s seminal text Relativity and it’s super good and they’re super smart for having read it. (Incidentally, that book completely rules and you should read it. To be smart. Like me.)

There are good and bad moments in each, but I was more interested in the specifics of the books and how they were put together. 

66 starts out with a long series of eight-line stanzas, numbered in pretentious Roman numerals. But the rhythms are pretty tight, especially since he repeatedly refers to counting syllables in a kind of meta way. And breaking up a long text into short pieces really proves a huge help in readability (for the same reason that people generally don’t watch Gray’s Anatomy in seventeen-hour chunks).

He has an interlude that neatly separates the book in half, and provides a nice framing device to helps us see that he’s changing focus and moving from his contemporary life circa the year 2000 into a meditation on his Jewish grandfather who left Russia just after the Revolution. 

Here’s the opening piece, “I” (Roman numeral 1):

Beginning tonight at 8

count syllables eliminate

8 there left tonight at

beginning starting gun off

tonight knocked out then deep

solicitation break break ambulance

parked submarines urban beginning.

I really enjoy the sudden shifts, the opening end rhyme that then doesn’t recur anywhere else, the rhythms both loose and held fast by the seven- to ten-syllable lines. I dig the use of “break break” in the middle of a line. And the way it gives concrete images when it brings in the starting gun, ambulance, submarines… We don’t know where it’s going yet, but it seems like a fun ride.

And then there’s Entanglements. It both starts and ends with what I thought of as weaker poems, pieces that obviously meant something to the author but didn’t do much for me as a disinterested reader. That’s especially weird since everything I know about how chapbooks are put together emphasizes the importance of having really striking, effective pieces at the start and the end. (It’s like a pop song – if you’ve got a good intro hook and a good final chorus, a lot of other stuff can be forgiven.)

The book felt like a lot of ideas that were only lightly explored. Here’s the ending of the opening poem, “Accounts”:

The fading laser pulse

Information describing the fading

laser pulse

is stored

is encoded

in the spin states

of atoms.

God

is balancing his checkbook

God is encrypting his account.

This is taking forever!

It’s a fun idea, taking the quantum confusion of the micro-world and bringing it into the everyday boring stuff of accounting. But the last line is a complete tonal shift, and I can’t understand what it’s doing there or why. And the comparison between physics and banking doesn’t really… say anything, does it? It seems like it’s going somewhere and then just stops.

So all that to say, my research seems to be starting off well. I’m learning what I do and don’t want, what my own personal tastes might lead me to, and it’s doing the most important job: alleviating my guilt at not actually doing much work on my own chapbook.

Next time: how’s the work going on my own chapbook?

This post brought to you courtesy of:

• Procrastination

• Blogger, a Google product!

• Ego

• The letter “J” and the number “4”

• A desperate sense of panic at wasting one’s life

• The Poetry Establishment As a Whole

Chapbook Project 1: Riddles in the Dark

I’m making a chapbook this year. It’s January, the traditional time for new projects, and I’ve decided that this is as good an occasion as any to finally finish something. And I’ve been looking for a way get back to posting, so I’ve committed to documenting the process here.

Now, this may prompt several questions from readers who have stumbled upon this. Questions like, “What’s a chapbook?” and, “Who the hell are you?” and, “It’s 2020, why would anyone bother writing poetry – much less a blog about poetry?”

These are excellent and worthy questions. As per my usual, I’ll offer opinions overstated as fact and then arrive at the end of this post more confused than when I began. Do come along, won’t you?

  “What is a chapbook?”

In no particular order: a chapbook is a calling card, a guessing game, a brass ring, an appetizer, an entrance fee, and a hat thrown over a wall. It’s also a short book of poems typically printed in small runs. Some of them are handmade, some involve elaborate material design, some are by obscure writers, some are inexpensive. Like poems themselves, chapbooks tend to break as many rules as they follow.

What I currently aim to make is a physically small volume of 24 or so pages, made up of poems I’ve written over the last ten years or so, that address some element or other of a single theme. (All of the websites I’ve consulted tell me this is not a bad way to start.) Now to the questions:

  “Who the hell are you?”

If you’re one of the few readers to find this who doesn’t know me personally… I’m a near-middle-aged guy in the Pacific Northwest who writes poems and songs, as well as blog posts once every couple of years. A natural follow-up question would be, “So… why should I care?” 

You’ll have to supply your own answer, but I can tell you that I’m at a loss for any particularly compelling or persuasive reason you should.

  “It’s 2020, why would anyone bother writing poetry – much less a blog about poetry?”

Yep. I get it. Plenty of folks have the same feelings about poetry as they do about accordion music or creating an actual-play Warhammer 40K podcast: there’s probably SOME idiot out there who enjoys this, but it’s not for me.

Plenty of poets and teachers of poetry haven’t helped. We can get clique-ish or cult-ish, pretending there’s some arcane wisdom we possess, enacting elaborate rites to welcome novitiates. If your primary experience of poetry came from a classroom where you were lectured at about why the plum in the icebox is a yonic symbol of repressed desire… Ugh, I don’t blame you.

For me, both reading and writing poetry are games: there are puzzles and mysteries, there’s amazement and excitement, you can attempt challenges and unlock achievements, you can play solo or head-to-head (there can even be trash talk if you’re into that sort of thing). 

The equipment and training required are almost nothing. If you have pen and paper that’s great, but whatever device you’re reading this on will do just fine. There is a near-zero cost of entry to make your own art with creative use of language. It’s actually kind of bonkers that any widespread human activity has been so little commodified, marketed or incentivized!

Poetry famously “makes nothing happen”, has next to no economic profit, is incredibly niche and nerdy, and is generally derided by society at large. It’s basically LARP-ing with line breaks. (No offense intended to my fellow nerds who also happen to love live-action role-playing, all the best to you.)

So given all that, the people who “do poetry” frequently tend to get… a little obsessed with it. I figure that lovers of poetry (who are almost inevitably also writers of poetry) are a lot like fans of other cultural products and activities most folks have never heard of. Fans of obscure stuff like The Teardrop Explodes or “Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea” have simultaneously conflicting impulses. We want to share our love of this obscure artifact with the universe at large. But we also hold onto it desperately, cherishing the precious and fearing the ignorant, uninformed reactions of outsiders.

This is a way I can do both: rave to anyone who cares to listen all about the things that poetry does (and does to me), and do it in one of the most obscure and ineffectual formats 2020 can offer: a poetry blog.

  “What now?”

I’m going to be working my way through the process of making a chapbook of poems. I’ll talk through the research, selecting pieces, organizing and editing poems, submitting the final product to a few contests, as well as why I wanted to do any of this in the first place. 

So join me in this quest, fellow rogues, clerics and paladins. Hail and well met!

Recommended for: 

• Adventurous souls fascinated by the obscure and arcane

• Friends and family members glancing through this to humor me

• Poets seeking a shortcut to wealth and glory

• Poets seeking schadenfreude or how to make every chapbook mistake

• Spambots copy/pasting atypical verbiage to throw off malware filters

Kickflips and Magic Tricks

“No ideas but in things.” William Carlos Williams wrote that. Wallace Stevens has a similar quote, in fact it’s the title of the final piece in his Collected Poems: “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.” Here’s a link to it on the amazing Poetry Foundation website. (Don’t worry, it’s short.)

And you hear a lot of variations on those statements when talking about poetry, it’s a truism by now. I’ve often heard it used to mean, “Show, don’t tell.” Like, “Don’t tell us the soldier was sad, show us the frayed edges of the scratchy green blanket his buddy just died on.” That’s not bad advice, as far as it goes. It’s not good advice, either: it’s the poetry class equivalent of, “Wash your hands before eating finger foods.” It only helps when you haven’t tucked in to the meal yet. 

Speaking of classes, I took one with Pacific Northwest poet David Waggoner a while ago. One of my vivid memories was his admonishing us never to use the word “thing” in a poem. “It’s an empty word, a useless word. It gives you nothing you didn’t already have.” 

But it does, doesn’t it? “It gives you no thing you didn’t already have.”

(“Marvel Comics Superheroes Game Card 04 - Thing” by David Marriott, Jr. is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

I’ve always found “no ideas but in things” to be hypocritical at worst and self-contradictory at best. (Self-contradiction is always better because it’s interesting: hypocrites are inevitably dull.) Neither Wallace nor William actually included things in their poems! They’re not mailing the reader a twig or a copper coin, they’re not including a sprig of holly or a bird feather in the pages of their books. So maybe what they mean is, “No (IDEAS of) ideas but in (IDEAS of) things.” 

There’s this constant imaginative remove taking place, we’re always at least one degree of separation away from things. In some ways, that’s the beauty of it – we’re applying our experience or opinions to the proceedings. It’s never just a sunrise or a bird song or a kiss or a slap or a daffodil or a bell jar. Things are always what we make of them, an interpretive function.

("Der Ding" by James Vaughan is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

And what really flips my lid is that this is happening on both ends of the process! The poet is applying their own skill in composing, their tastes and value judgments, their ideas and opinions and free associations and childhood memories and half-formed logic. And the reader does this, too: taking the raw stuff the poem is made of, the scratches on the page, the spaces and punctuation, the line breaks and stanza breaks, the title and epigram, the margins and font, and using that as grist for their own mill of wonderment and transubstantiation. 

Plenty of academics in the linguistics field marvel at the fact that language can be used to communicate anything at all, given the gulfs that separate any two humans. It is truly strange that poems do what they do: poems have the same kind of appeal to me as a flashy kickflip on a skateboard or a daring stage illusion or a parkour video on YouTube. They’re things that shouldn’t be possible but yet here they are, doing the weird wild subterranean business of jointly creating meaning when it seems hardly likely such a thing could ever happen. 

It’s kind of cheating chaos, making something out of nothing when there really should only be nothing. And to prove my point, I’ll end with a creepy poem that proudly defies Mr. Waggoner’s sage advice. 

Hope things are good on your end.

A Reader’s Companion

Matt Quarterman

Please pay attention.

Read closely.

I have news for you.

You are being watched.

I am watching you

read these very words

even as I write them.

You have felt unafraid

for a very long time,

safe in your careless observation.

But I see you.

I know what you are doing.

Even ceasing to read

will not break my gaze.

Feel free to stop. Look around,

shake off the creeps crawling the skin

in the back of your mind.

Turn around,

turn around turn,

around and turn.

I’ll still be here

doing nothing else

but patiently waiting

to watch you do

whatever things you do

when you read this.

Even if the panic subsides 

and you can forget

the words you read.

Get comfortable.

Get used to it.

I’ve been here a long time.

I’m not going anywhere.

(“Something” by Pat Guiney is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

To Seem Beautiful Again, and Interesting, and Modern: Poetry in Advertising

Nobody loves ads. Oh, sure, there are those commercials with enough cleverness or star power or humor to make you not-quite-resent them. (The Old Spice campaign "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" comes to mind.) 

But in the end, nobody likes paying for things, especially when they have no choice in the matter. You've probably had that experience of loading up a video to show a group of people, only to have an interminable, unskippable ad play first while you chuckle awkwardly and wait out those 30 seconds that feel like eternity.

But between the ridiculousness of advertising and the sublime of poetry, there's a middle ground. (Ridiculime? Subculousness?) Presented for your consideration:



This is a video from Levi's "Go Forth" campaign from about 2009. It featured some well-photographed snippets of pretty young people mostly doing pretty young people things over pretty, nostalgic instrumental music. So far, so whatever.

But this campaign used spoken excerpts from work by American poets (all white, all male) like Walt Whitman and Charles Bukowski as their ad copy. The ads were created by Wieden+Kennedy and  here they are. Incidentally, one of the branches of Wieden+Kennedy also created the aforementioned Old Spice campaign.

I love that they even use one of the existent Walt Whitman phonograph recordings to score one ad spot. Because the audio is so scratchy and unintelligible, they provide subtitles to make the message clear:



I think what I love about these ads are how they subconsciously link a quintessential product of American capitalism like blue jeans with a litany of ideals, symbols and images that are shorthand for American identity. It makes buying denim seem patriotic, a re-affirmation of our existence in this space and time. There's a yearning at the heart of these videos, and that yearning can be easily assuaged by a run to Target.

It's not just jeans. Here's one from a pharmaceutical conglomerate that uses a stanza of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night":



I don't think this one is that great, honestly. (It kind of looks like the creators of "House M.D." needed to turn in a video essay for a poetry class.) But it does at least show the range of products and services employing poetry to do their work for them.

For my money, the best use of poems in commercials are reaching out for something larger and more ineffable. I think especially of this recent Apple ad using Maya Angelou's "The Human Family":



What works for me is that it's less about a product than about being a human in the world. The poem's emphasis on the joy of diversity and our essential common humanity drives home the marketing message that we're all people, we all love seeing ourselves and our loved ones represented in still and moving images. So why not embrace your humanity and buy an iPhone?

And then my most-least-favorite use of poetry in ads comes courtesy of this Infiniti car commercial in which Kit Harrington drives fast while reciting William Blake's "The Tyger" like an English teacher who's decided to break bad:



Everything about this is so hilariously tone-deaf: why the hell did they cast Jon Snow? Why the hell did they choose this weird, famous poem to shill for their car? Why did they direct the actor to sing-song faster and faster in an increasingly frenetic tone? And why for God's sake did they decide to end with the actor giving his best Keanu Reeves "Whoah"?! 

It's delightfully nonsensical, and I love watching it every time.

This trend of poems in ads hasn't gone unnoticed  There are quite a few articles remarking on, decrying or defending the rise of poetry in advertising. I feel that almost all of them miss the point: ads are going to happen. If not the lifeblood of capitalism, commercials are at least the respiratory system. And if advertising is an inescapable facet of contemporary life, we can at least demand that it do more than one thing at a time.

Sure, sell me your car insurance and dating sites and fast food and Shake Weights. But you're going to have to work at it – you can't just keep giving us CG animals saying some lame catch phrase. Give us poetry, some thought and attention to detail and craft and art. 

So I'll end with the defining example of my obsession with advertising and poetry: Don Draper reading Frank O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky." (Note: there is a commercial before the video plays.)



The best ads make me feel something. And isn't that the point of poetry?

Old Movie Credits

Old Movie Credits
Matt Quarterman

The fanfare swells no matter who
lives or who dies, what explodes
or is contained, red wire blue
she jumps, she's caught, he's dead
but she's not and neither
were really who we thought but
still the strings and horns clash,
tied at the wrist and locked
until someone submits and usually
it's us because finally
we can be told the hidden truth
we'd been waiting for without
knowing what it was and there
it is in terrifying flame,
ninety feet high to tell us
this is the end The End THE END.

To Want to Escape from These Things

I want to tell you about poetry and personality. There are a LOT of fun quotes from poets about poetry and what it does. (In some cases, I prefer the quotes to the poets.) Here are a few favorites:

"The poet is the priest of the invisible." – Wallace Stevens

"Poetry makes nothing happen." – W.H. Auden

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." – Percy Bysshe Shelley (And knowing what we do about legislators, that poet make nothing happen comes as no surprise.)

All of these are fun to think about, think through or think around, but the one I've continually turned over in my head is from that patron saint of curmudgeonly grumps, Uncle Tommy himself:

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." – T.S. Eliot

The not-so-subtle elitism doesn't impress me much anymore, but I've always tried to understand what he meant about escaping personality. What would that mean, especially in the context of writing? What would that sound like? Is that even something desirable?

I have to start with my belief that there's no-one alive who didn't at least begin writing poetry to express their personality: whether it's a love sonnet, existential angst, a political call to arms or an identity manifesto, we just need to get our thoughts and feelings out. We just need to be heard and, as the poet Madonna herself said: express yourself.

But I'm starting to change my mind. Maybe a poem is a way of creating something solid, completely apart from us. Maybe a poem is more like a chair: it has a purpose even if no-one's sitting in it. We don't need the craftsman's thoughts on life, her political perspective, even her signature, in order to participate in the reason the chair was crafted.

Now, I'm not doubting all of those aforementioned items inform the decisions that lead to the final product. It could well be illuminating and enhance my enjoyment of sitting in that chair to have a sense of the person behind it. But it's in no way essential.

Yet here's a fun thing: last year I read a biography of T.S. Eliot and it BLEW MY MIND how personal his poems are. In high school, I first read his late-period "Four Quartets" and I was impressed by the quality of the verse, the stateliness, the philosophical urgency:


What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden


But for all its strengths, I also thought it lacked the panache, the punch of earlier poems like "Prufrock" or "Ash-Wednesday." They seemed colorless, lacking a personal touch.

Except this bio describes specific days, specific outings, specific landscape features that Eliot was referencing! It's not just any old passage, any old door, any old rose-garden: he's describing one superlative day in 1934 on the grounds of a mansion in Gloucestershire with an almost-but-never-quite love, Emily Hale.

So on the one hand, this is the most self-indulgent impulse, the one everybody starts from, the stuff of embarrassing teen journals and cryptic Facebook posts. On the other, this is a poet trying to take the raw material of his life and REMOVE HIMSELF FROM THE EQUATION.

Or is he? It's hard to tell. He's tricky that way.

So all of this to say, today is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. Here's something from a couple of years ago that seems relevant both to the discussion and to the day.

The Prank

They ring the bell and run.

I should expect it tonight. It’s the night
our house covered in white paper
soaks up turned eggs and the flaming brown bag.
The gourd is crushed, tradition fulfilled.

There’s sugar on my hands
melted, waxy. I give it up
I offer it freely.

My clothing is changed, the harvest brought in.
Descend storm clouds, raindrops, leaves.

I carry my head in my hands
like an orange basketball, jaw framed
and candle lit, stuck deep in my mouth
silent, illuminated.

Children are dressed carefully, tended.
They line up at the doorstep,
the ghosts receiving my blessings
this year, this season.

I’m snarling. I’m howling at the moon.
I’m not a man.
I’m not weeping.

No Evil Star

There’s this podcast mostly (but not entirely) NOT about U2. It features a star of NBC’s hit show “Parks and Recreation.” It’s a little podcast called U Talkin’ U2 to Me?! I’d like to restart this blog with words made eternally famous by that program:

“It’s been awhile…”

So to catch you up, when we last met over TWO YEARS AGO it was mostly cheery talk about my grandfather and oldest friend dying within a few months of each other. Since then things have been mostly great: my wife got her Master’s, we vacationed in Hawaii and Portugal, we lost a pregnancy, so anyhoo… How are you?

But this isn’t about personal tragedy. (Except insofar as reading, writing, reading about poetry and writing about poetry could be considered a personal tragedy.) To quote another favorite podcast, Battleship Pretension – let’s get into it, shall we? 

I should preface today’s poem by saying that I have no idea what it means or why exactly it speaks to me. It’s one of the nice things about art that you don’t really have to calibrate your response as an eloquently framed argument – you respond however you do, and if you’re lucky maybe you learn something about yourself from the experience. 

Before I blather much more about aesthetics and critical response, let’s have the poem. It’s a doozy.

RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR

Anne Sexton

A palindrome seen on the side of a barn in Ireland

After Adam broke his rib in two
and ate it for supper,
after Adam, from the waist up,
an old mother,
had begun to question the wonder
Eve was brought forth.
Eve came out of that rib like an angry bird.
She came forth like a bird that got loose
suddenly from its cage.
Out of the cage came Eve,
escaping, escaping.
She was clothed in her skin like the sun
and her ankles were not for sale.

God looked out through his tunnel
and was pleased.

Adam sat like a lawyer
and read the book of life.
Only his eyes were alive.
They did the work of a blast furnace.

Only later did Adam and Eve go galloping,
galloping into the apple.
They made the noise of the moon-chew
and let the juice fall down like tears.

Because of this same apple
Eve gave birth to the evilest of creatures
with its bellyful of dirt
and its hair seven inches long.
It had two eyes full of poison
and routine pointed teeth.
Thus Eve gave birth.
In this unnatural act
she gave birth to a rat.
It slid from her like a pearl.
It was ugly, of course,
but Eve did not know that
and when it died before its time
she placed its tiny body
on that piece of kindergarten called STAR.

Now all us cursed ones falling out after
with our evil mouths and our worried eyes
die before our time
but do not go to some heaven, some hell
but are put on the RAT’S STAR
which is as wide as Asia
and as happy as a barbershop quartet.
We are put there beside the three thieves
for the lowest of us all
deserve to smile in eternity
like a watermelon.

Take a minute if you need one. 

No? Onward then.

I’ve mentioned before (to an extravagant, almost excessive degree) how much I love stuff about Adam & Eve or the Garden of Eden. It’s a surefire hook the same way a surf guitar riff or spaghetti western opening credits make me stop whatever it is I’m doing and take on a look of crazed enthusiasm. This Eden poem makes all the right moves: cynical, minimalist, barely sketching an outline of the scene but giving us weird details that fill things in. 

Some specific words that really work for me: “tunnel,” “blast furnace,” “moon-chew,” “pearl,” “kindergarten.” I notice they’re all nouns, which is one of those ten-for-a-nickel writing lessons a Yahoo! Answers page will give you: use descriptive nouns more often than descriptive adjectives. Your mileage may vary, please consult your doctor.

Then there’s the hint of repetition: “like an angry bird… like a bird,” “escaping, escaping,” “some heaven, some hell.” And the allusions: maybe some Leda and the Swan, maybe some Pied Piper of Hamelin, definitely some Golgotha. 

And the near-rhymes: “supper,” “mother,” “wonder.” There’s a lot of musicality here, and “musicality” is a word which in reference to poetry means: “I’m not sure what I’m talking about, but I like it!” Sexton is obviously a nimble, accomplished poet who uses the weird because she knows it’s weird. 

That doesn’t make it any less weird.

For example: while the palindrome obviously inspired the poem, why mention the barn in Ireland? Are barbershop quartets really an apt image for happiness? And the final image that seems to make the whole thing clatter to a halt: “smile in eternity / like a watermelon.” I’d say it’s a misstep but everything else in this thing is so assured, so effortless that it seems odd to say she just couldn’t stick the landing. It’s a visual metaphor, a slice of watermelon resembling a cartoon outline of a Cheshire Cat grin, but is that really the last impression she wants to offer us?

I don’t know, man, I honestly couldn’t tell you. Maybe that’s one of my telltale signs that something has art to it: a vague sense that it’s befuddling me but there’s something worthwhile behind it all. I think about Harmony Korine's “Spring Breakers” or Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of empty theaters or Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” – works of art that are baffling but somehow still deft, still capable. They at least give the illusion that there’s a key to unlock everything if I’m just patient enough.

Or maybe it’s proof I’m a sucker for a good mystery.