I find this to be such an apt and honest summation of one element of human experience — that desire to surrender one’s life, to chalk it all up to error, and to try again, but this time without the complexity of human awareness. To be. Just to be. And let life happen that way.
I was in my local library on Tuesday and happened to see Gabbert's new book on the shelf. I snagged it and took it home read through it and surprised myself because I basically hated it. As you know, I read poetry widely and often advocate for experimental approaches to poetry and thinking, but I found these poems to be self-indulgently slack and discontinuous: the method throughout the book seemed to be to jump from thought to thought in a way that felt unfiltered and arbitrary. That may have been the point, I guess, but the progressions did not have any payoff for me as a reader. What was supposed to be happening in the gaps between the lines? Where was the poetry in these poems?
I've been at this long enough to know that when I am reading something I "don't get" there's a strong likelihood that I need to try to find a different way to read it. Then I happened upon this post of yours, which I had not seen before. It helped me re-frame my expectations to some degree, and I'll go back and give this book another shot. As yet I'm still not convinced. I think you can get away with having one poem of this kind in collection of poems that include other kinds of experiments, but having an entire book of poems pursuing the same more or less whimsical musings and wonderings continues to bother me. I'll try again, and maybe light will dawn on Marblehead. The one poem I did like more than the others on first reading was "Random Assignment." I printed it out and thought about it some and put it aside. I thought it might serve as a model poem for a certain kind of writing exercise. And I suppose it might still serve as a stepping stone for me to find my way into the others in the book.
That much said, I thought the passage in your post about the way that the approaches of your attention feel detoured and about your efforts to forestall that seemed to be completely understandable and relatable and precisely stated. So thanks for that as well.
I’d like to do it all again
In silence now, in darkness,
A wasp in a fig.
I find this to be such an apt and honest summation of one element of human experience — that desire to surrender one’s life, to chalk it all up to error, and to try again, but this time without the complexity of human awareness. To be. Just to be. And let life happen that way.
I was in my local library on Tuesday and happened to see Gabbert's new book on the shelf. I snagged it and took it home read through it and surprised myself because I basically hated it. As you know, I read poetry widely and often advocate for experimental approaches to poetry and thinking, but I found these poems to be self-indulgently slack and discontinuous: the method throughout the book seemed to be to jump from thought to thought in a way that felt unfiltered and arbitrary. That may have been the point, I guess, but the progressions did not have any payoff for me as a reader. What was supposed to be happening in the gaps between the lines? Where was the poetry in these poems?
I've been at this long enough to know that when I am reading something I "don't get" there's a strong likelihood that I need to try to find a different way to read it. Then I happened upon this post of yours, which I had not seen before. It helped me re-frame my expectations to some degree, and I'll go back and give this book another shot. As yet I'm still not convinced. I think you can get away with having one poem of this kind in collection of poems that include other kinds of experiments, but having an entire book of poems pursuing the same more or less whimsical musings and wonderings continues to bother me. I'll try again, and maybe light will dawn on Marblehead. The one poem I did like more than the others on first reading was "Random Assignment." I printed it out and thought about it some and put it aside. I thought it might serve as a model poem for a certain kind of writing exercise. And I suppose it might still serve as a stepping stone for me to find my way into the others in the book.
That much said, I thought the passage in your post about the way that the approaches of your attention feel detoured and about your efforts to forestall that seemed to be completely understandable and relatable and precisely stated. So thanks for that as well.