"America, I love you except in practice."
My college friend John W. Evans has published the "Poet's Sampler" in the May/June issue of the Boston Review. Most of the poems are in print and online, and two poems--"The Five-Dollar Shirt" and "Meliorists"--are online only. A few days ago the Review arrived in my mailbox, after a few fruitless searches at bookstores in Berkeley. Thanks for sending me a copy John!
The accomplished poet Campbell McGrath introduces the collection, offering a taut and vivid appraisal of John's work. McGrath admires "how deeply he [John] drinks from the wellspring of compassion" and argues that he is a naturally humanitarian rather than a self-consciously political poet.
While I am no poet at all, the humanitarian route does seem like the road less traveled in contemporary American poetry. It is easy to find political posturing, and harder to locate real empathy and keen observation. But that's what you'll discover in this sampler.
To take two examples:
1. In the prose poem "Windows Update," an Islamic interlocutor argues that the Bible is like Windows 95 and the Koran like Windows 2000--an updated and improved version of the old time religion. The narrator recognizes the gulf between himself and his companions, in regards to the question of religion and (really) all other fundamentals of life. Building bridges between cultures is a monumental challenge, and there are many false starts for every success.
In a lecture I attended as a student, Classics professor Martin Mueller stated that, eventually--whatever the issue--one had to take sides. It's hard to stay in the middle forever, even if you can see all points of view. Mueller said this wistfully and with sadness, enough so to penetrate my 20 year old brain. "Windows Update" reminded me of that moment.
2. "Laureate" contains the immortal line, "America, I love you except in practice." This is mischievously (but profoundly) ambiguous--does the narrator try to love America but fail? Or is it America that doesn't live up to its ideals? Or both?
The close of the poem speaks of:
"the Sound full of pinfish, all the
usual
bullshit about boats, divorce and solitude."
Another ambiguity--which Sound? Long Island? Nantucket? Does it matter? With one word we're somewhere in the upper-crust Northeast, tuning into predictable and tiresome conversations.
Who would want to be a laureate for this crowd? Someone who is speaking tongue in cheek? Or someone who is more viscerally aware than most of us of the gap between what is and what could be?
Both.
The accomplished poet Campbell McGrath introduces the collection, offering a taut and vivid appraisal of John's work. McGrath admires "how deeply he [John] drinks from the wellspring of compassion" and argues that he is a naturally humanitarian rather than a self-consciously political poet.
While I am no poet at all, the humanitarian route does seem like the road less traveled in contemporary American poetry. It is easy to find political posturing, and harder to locate real empathy and keen observation. But that's what you'll discover in this sampler.
To take two examples:
1. In the prose poem "Windows Update," an Islamic interlocutor argues that the Bible is like Windows 95 and the Koran like Windows 2000--an updated and improved version of the old time religion. The narrator recognizes the gulf between himself and his companions, in regards to the question of religion and (really) all other fundamentals of life. Building bridges between cultures is a monumental challenge, and there are many false starts for every success.
In a lecture I attended as a student, Classics professor Martin Mueller stated that, eventually--whatever the issue--one had to take sides. It's hard to stay in the middle forever, even if you can see all points of view. Mueller said this wistfully and with sadness, enough so to penetrate my 20 year old brain. "Windows Update" reminded me of that moment.
2. "Laureate" contains the immortal line, "America, I love you except in practice." This is mischievously (but profoundly) ambiguous--does the narrator try to love America but fail? Or is it America that doesn't live up to its ideals? Or both?
The close of the poem speaks of:
"the Sound full of pinfish, all the
usual
bullshit about boats, divorce and solitude."
Another ambiguity--which Sound? Long Island? Nantucket? Does it matter? With one word we're somewhere in the upper-crust Northeast, tuning into predictable and tiresome conversations.
Who would want to be a laureate for this crowd? Someone who is speaking tongue in cheek? Or someone who is more viscerally aware than most of us of the gap between what is and what could be?
Both.
Comments