Contemporary Poetry - An editorial from my pal, John

On 8/23/2010 1:37 PM, John wrote:

Hey guys,

This is from Sweetest bleeding by Karen Volkman:

Sad sirens burn and sigh,

caressing the umber inner of a thigh –

unfolding in the flimmer of their hair

the swimming timbre, the wakeful stare

loosens its wooing, and wakes to die

drowning mutely, hollow as the sky.

I used to read a lot of poetry. I wrote some. Published a little. I still read books of poems occasionally. But, lately, I’ve attempted to read some contemporary poets, such as those published in Poetry, a magazine I subscribed to and then dumped when I realized after two years of monthly publications I only “understood” or “enjoyed” 1 (one) poem.

Is it just me?????

We go to critics and reviewers for understanding. And guidance. Read the above poem fragment by Karen Volkman. I have no idea what is going on. So I turned to a critic/reviewer (in the 9/08 issue of Poetry) and this is what I got:

The project is Symbolist, with the “opacities,” “limpidities,” and “polarities” of Symbolist abstraction; the book is the densest, most obscure I have read in a long time, though that is not to say it has a simple or antagonistic relationship to meaning. The poems have a ratiocinative component, where the obscurity is obscuring something, and a Steinian component where it is not. In the former there is a centripetal tendency in the syntax, form, and recurrent vocabulary, and one senses that the writing is in fact taking the shortest path between some two points, somewhere. While I cannot supply a reading for phrases like “cardinal animal in an ordinal net” and “fallow nominal of a touchless near,” they somehow succeed in suggesting they have one.

Got that? Very instructive, eh? What the f--- is up with this shit? Why am I sitting around reading this stuff? Is this what has become of the “Liberal Arts?” Life is short and this kind of thing makes it both short and uncomfortably turgid.
-Johnny