The end of the chains

Finishing off The Poetry Chains of Dominic Luxford, something happened time and again. I would have a poem read, turn the page and find more poem. For a lot of the poems in which this happened it's a big problem since each was stronger in my eyes before the page was turned.

Poetry is about brevity. There can be long poems, but as I wrote in the previous entry on this collection of poetry, long poems run the risk of overcooking the idea or the feeling that they're getting at. Epic poems are possible, still, I think, but even they vary their ideas, characters, and viewpoints enough to keep the material fresh - even for thousands of lines.

It's possible that each poem that presented this sort of false end was planned. It's not outside the power of the poet to make decisions about how a poem appears on the page. But each time I discovered what I thought to be the poem's end was false, what came later was just an explanation of the emotion or idea that I had already gleaned from what of the poem had come before. In other words, these poems are examples of their poets nattering on a little too long.

A professor in my undergrad once said that when you've written a poem and feel that it's finished you should cut the last two (or three or four) lines so that instead of resolution, the reader's left with loose threads. Not because good poetry is vague or somehow hard to read by nature, but because good poetry shouldn't need to explain things with elaboration; word choice, word placement, sentence structure, and/or enjambment should be used instead.

That said, C.D. Wright's pieces are what I look for in poetry. There's music in her lines, and reading the two poems she has in the penultimate chain offers just enough to grasp what she's saying. Or, at the least, to feel like you grasp it. Nonetheless, I have to say that Linda Tomol Pennisi's "Doll Repair Shop" is still the best piece of the entire collection.

A chain of clay before a chain of gold

Disappointingly, the poetry chain from issue 22 of McSweeney's that starts with Michael Ondaatje is quite lackluster. Some of those within it are good poems, but most just lay the poetry on far too thickly.

Instead of kneading an idea and letting it bake up, nearly all the poets in this chain treat poetry like a person with a mouth of sweet teeth treats syrup: it's laid on every idea to the point where that idea's no longer recognizable.

Kay Ryan, on the other hand has exemplary poems in this collection. They're punchy and rhythmical.

Sarah Lindsay also has two good poems in this collection, Though "Cheese Penguin" is particularly brilliant. Its steady pace is the perfect vehicle for its bizarre story. A story that wouldn't be out of place on a They Might Be Giants album.

Poetry window shopping

McSweeney's The Poetry Chains of Dominc Luxford: Ten Poets Pick Ten More And So On continues to be a rewarding read.

Not because every poem's a gem, but because for all of the great poems in a chain there is often an amazing link in a series of chains. From chains four to seven this standout poem is Linda Tomil Pennisi's "Doll Repair Shop."

A prose poem, "Doll Repair Shop" draws its strength from the surreal connections made between dolls wounds and various things and actions. Pennisi's placing the things and acts in brackets and prefacing each with "Think:" amplifies the power of these connections. Why? Because it doesn't just present them, but tthe imperative makes you think whatever follows the colon.

Even on repeated readings "Doll Repair Shop"'s effect hasn't lessened.

With another four links to go, "Doll Repair Shop" has a good chance of being my favourite in the collection (A. Van Jordan's comic book-inspired poem "The Atom Discovers String Theory DC Comics, June - July 1964, #13 "Weapon Watches of Chronos" being a close second).

Shiny chain links

The idea of a poetry chain is a really slick hook. You choose a poet, take two of his or her poems, and then get him or her to choose the next poet in the chain who does the same and so on and so forth. It's a great way to build a collection of poems practically automatically, from an editorial standpoint.

The poetry chains found in McSweeney's Three Books Held Within by Magnets are, so far, mostly made of iron links. Good, firm poems that are neat expressions of states of being or qualities, but that are just there. They hold the chain together and that's that. Some are shinier than others though, like those of James Tate, Brenda Shaughnessy, Lynn Emanuel, Brandon Som, and francine j. harris.

The poems of these poets that appear in this collection do a bit of mind bending, which is just what a poem should do. Describe and express away, oh poetry, but Poetry will be over here bending minds with nothing more than the power of its printed words!

Heading out of Oulipo

McSweeney's The State of Constraint: New Work from Oulipo is a grand introduction to the method. Particularly intriguing are the Calendar form and the Antonymic Translation.

Calendar, here exemplified by Michelle Grangaud, takes events from fact and fiction that are known to have happened on certain dates and puts them side by side in a list that aims to tell a new, chronological story. It definitely strikes me as something very literary and high-browed, what with all of the allusions and such. Yet, I can't help but wonder if the same could be pulled off with science fiction or with fantasy.

The Antonymic Translation - writing out the opposite of a previously written text sentence by sentence - really reads like something revolutionary. Lynn Crawford's antonymic translation of Ernest Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not" is definitely worth a read. The same thing could be said here, too, antonymic translations of genre fiction would be wild. Though, because of the form's nature, some speculative bits do come into play even in Crawford's piece.

Though the shortened tongues that show up in it restricting speech might be physiologically accurate, shortened tongues restricting people to singing only is pretty fantastical, and gives world builders and writers a whole new way to keep spoken magic in check.

Where the Oulipian binary trees are lovely

I admit it. I sat and stared at Harry Mathew's "Thirty-Five Variations on a Theme from Shakespeare" for five, maybe 10 minutes, before I grasped what he was doing with "To be or not to be, that is the question."

The concept of Oulipo's sinking in made the way for actual enjoyment of these otherwise weird pieces. They're also healthily suffused with sex. No doubt that's just because they're generally written by French authors and poets. Anyone whose read Baudillaire knows what I mean.

Though I found it strange that what's just a "choose-your-own-adventure" story is considered an Oulipian work. The biggest difference that I could see between Paul Fournel's "Once Upon a Colony: A Tree Story with some Ramifications," and the books I devoured as a kid, was that the latter's dragons and witches and castles were replaced by social commentary, truths about changing culture, and - again - mention of sex.

The whole "Tree Story" thing makes me wonder why some people still refuse to believe that video games are art. What's a good video game if not a kind of interactive text, and what's a great game if not an interactive, sense-immersive binary tree story?

The weird for the sake of weird piece

As someone whose absorbed a lot of medieval fiction and poetry, it's heartening to know that metaphor and allegory are still alive in the modern short story. Having finished McSweeney's collection of posthumously realized Fitzgerald ideas, nearly everyone had conflicts and figures that could easily be read metaphorically. Especially the two stories based off of the idea "Girl and giraffe."

The first of these two is easily placed among medieval and renaissance beast fables, and the second seems to have something to say about English colonialism in Africa.

The weirdest in the collection, though - and the shortest - is definitely "For Now, I Was Tall," Diane Williams' entry. This one's based on the idea "Play about a whole lot of old people - terrible things happen to them and they don't really care." With hardly enough text to cover a single face of a single page, and more mentions of "President of the United States" than a presidential address introduction on 24 hour loop, it's dense to the point of incomprehensible. It reads like it's about a woman who's dying which I suppose is terrible, and she doesn't seem to care, but so little is concrete that it's difficult to pin much about it down.

On the whole, this is a solid collection of short stories. Hopefully, it's a good introduction to the madness that is form-constrained Oulipo writing coming up in part two of McSweeney's Three Books Held Within by Magnets.

Breaks in voice

As I make my way through the collection of short stories based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's ideas, I'm struck by how different the writers' voices are.

True, Miriam Toews' contribution is a one act play (and a very Canadian piece of drama at that), but even with the other short stories there's a definite difference between them despite the goal of the collection being writing the stories that FSF could have written.

John Beckman's "Clear Channel" and Tom Lombardi's "The Bear" standout from this latest bunch.

Beckman's story is liable to catch the attention of anyone interested in the perspective of an allegedly crazy person. His is also the least FSF-like that's been read yet. There's no real concern with social class, there's nothing to do about the bohemian/the buttoned down, and no one is heading for any roaring parties. Instead it's just a girl who can tune into radio channels in her brain and her alleged uncle driving to some sort of place where all of the nation's radio waves converge.

Possible influences of Marian Engel's Bear abound in Lombardi's piece. About a bear who is strangely attracted (sexually?) to a woman camping with her boyfriend, this bear is also able to speak to humans. It also, allegedly, knows what it means for two humans to love each other and claims that Gary (the boyfriend) bears no love to Lois (the girlfriend). Its ending is strange and open-ended, much as the ending of "Returned" is.

Breaking the magnets' hold

Seven years after its release, the 2006 collection of prose and poetry from McSweeney's (McSweeney's Three Books Held Within by Magnets) is under my nose and in my sights. The idea for the first part of this collection is almost relevant again, as Baz Luhrman's adaptation of The Great Gatsby is just leaving theatres. Yes, it's the collection of short stories based on ideas from one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks.

So far the stories have ranged from a beast fable about god and understanding the world, to a modern take on the dramatic monologue based on the final moments of the man 'who kept the idea of tanks out of England.' The most outstanding entry to this point though, is Salvador Plascencia's Returned, based on the snippet "***** ***** running away from it all and finding that the new ménage is just the same."

Plascencia takes the premise into a surrealist world where a woman, seeking to escape the sea and the tragic memories of a brother lost within it, moves in land only to fatally find that she has brought the sea with her. His writing is direct and simple, but that voice belies a tale as intricate to watch unfold as seeing the Fibonacci sequence matched to various plant patterns.

With a story from Canada's own Miriam Toews up next, expectations are high.