Continuing my aforementioned project of writing unintelligently about poetry — this book made me think about what marks a poet’s specific style, what makes it identifiable as theirs, and where the line is between that and a gimmick (no, I haven’t read Sianne Ngai on the gimmick yet; I will, I will). I thought about this because I found myself sort of grumpy, reading this book, about what seemed like ‘the thing’ McCrae kept doing, or maybe it was a few things, and sometimes it was incredible and I loved it, but sometimes it felt overused. Can I name the thing? Aha, this is trickier. Looking back over the book just now (I finished it weeks ago), it is more elusive than I thought. But I think it’s a way of jumbling word order and using line breaks or big gaps in a line to snag you, but also repeating words and phrases, so you’re sort of disoriented and confused, and it seems like you’re catching the meaning but then also realizing that it’s not exactly what you thought. Here’s an example, from my favorite poem in the book, “Nowhere is Local” —
I’ve never anywhere I’ve
Lived before wanted to be buried where I’ve lived
But have ignored live-
long all my life the longest part of my life
I love this, the way that it makes you reconstruct the sentence and notice the different ways you could do so, and the slight variations of meaning between them (I’ve never wanted to be buried anywhere before; I’ve never lived anywhere I wanted to be buried; I’ve never wanted to be buried where I’ve lived, etc). I love how the wording and lack of punctuation makes you read the sentence in one long ramble without stopping but also creates this friction where you’re almost dragged through the line, trying to double back and understand the meaning as you trip along. The repetition buys you time, but also shifts the ground beneath you. It’s so cool. Let me die here where I don’t want to die. It seems like a contradiction or a mistake but it isn’t; it’s the point.
It’s the kind of poetry that makes you go whoa, how did you do that? But because it also depends, I think, on formal complexity and difficulty, it can feel worn out after a few poems; or maybe it’s just that I didn’t connect to some of the poems in the same way, they were missing some other component that I don’t realize is necessary (for me). So the book felt uneven, but also sort of frustratingly not varied enough. But the parts that worked, wow, were they spectacular.
Kasia Reads 