The Semipop Poetry Review: Ink drying like blood spilled this American hour
“Review” may be less accurate than “Copy-Paste”
Here are five poets I’ve dug recently. (Substack is bad at preserving indentation and line breaks, so click on links (or buy books) if you care about that sort of thing.)
Jericho Brown
The Tradition is the best new poetry book I’ve read in maybe five years: extremely direct words on race and sexuality, showing a vast expressive range without a hint of overwriting. “Bullet Points” is the one that went viral (as much as poetry does) after George Floyd:
I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trashbag, and if I do,
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home…
There's plenty more anger and pride in there, but there’s also an engagement with the black body as something that lives as well as dies. Hard to talk about it without sounding academic, whereas he makes his points while eschewing jargon:
Where I am my thickest, I grew
Myself by squat and lunge, and all
The time I sweated, I did not think
Of being divided or entered, though
Yes, I knew meat would lure men,
And flesh properly placed will lead
One to think that he can—when
He runs from what sniffs to kill us—
Mount my back trusting I may carry
Him at a good speed for a long distance,
And to believe, believe that
When he hungers, I am able
To leap high, snatch
The fruit of the tree
We pause to hide behind and feed, feed him.
Too new for the book but absolutely worth grappling with is his inauguration poem. Again it uses deceptively simple language to emulsify a bunch of contradictory feelings, without letting them resolve into mere ambivalence; that shit's for kids.
We were told that it is dangerous to touch
And yet we journeyed here, where what we believe
Meets what must be done. You want to see, in spite
Of my mask, my face. We imagine, in time
Of disease, our grandmothers
Whole. We imagine an impossible
America and call one another
A fool for doing so…
Su Cho
A Korean Midwesterner, she writes linguistically straightforward poems (apart from the odd Hangul character) that capture in telling detail how diaspora experiences are just different from monocultural ones. “Hello, My Parents Don’t Speak English Well, How Can I Help You?” takes a fun form—the abecedary—and uses it to give a light touch to some fairly heavy stuff about ye olde generational differences in identity:
I’m sorry, I say back to the voice.
Just do it, just once, and I shrug, listen to my mom saying she’s sorry,
Korean, yes. She stumbles over the practiced phrase, please
Listen to my daughter
My English
No good.
Once I called her stupid for
Packing my field trip lunch with
Quick sesame rice balls even though that’s what I
Requested. This isn’t true. I called her
Stupid after she hit me for low grades in English class.
“밤 (v) to give death (n) chestnut, night” has chicken violence for a good cause (porridge):
He hit trees with a long wooden rod
and chestnuts fell from the sky.
His palms broke the spindly shields
when knives couldn’t split the burr.
John Ashbery
Parallel Movement of the Hands, edited by his assistant Emily Skillings (who in her intro remarks that Ashbery gave his poems letter grades—one of us!), contains five unfinished works: photography one, music one, Bible one, fragment, pulp one. Most of this feels like late Ashbery but slightly off, almost like a young writer trying to imitate Big John and not quite succeeding, in an interesting way. This might be more valuable than discovering more polished late Ashbery (there’s a lot of polished late Ashbery.) Pick is the photography one from 1993, more evidence (as if you needed it) that he was one of the great writers on visual art.
First, the animated equestrian film:
it’s true, all its feet are off the ground
simultaneously, its fetlocks
and withers waving triumphally in air, the end
of gravity, that insulating dominance.
There was no rider in that instance, but later
one is glimpsed in the background, then
in the foreground, a jockey of moonbeams, soon
to occupy center stage in the struggle for aesthetic significance
as it grows sluggish and weedy in certain tracts or vistas
closer to our trees.
Dorothy Chan
What a title: “Triple Sonnet Because Boy, You’re Starstruck and I’m a Wonder”. The ending barely counts as a twist this day and age, but it’s still immaculately executed.
Boy, you’re starstruck. I love the way you rub
the red lipstick off above my Cupid’s bow—
how you call it the halo of my face, because
girliness equals goodness equals godliness
equals, let’s be real, Oh My Goddess, like that
moment when Hades and Persephone meet
in the fractured Greek myth, and the Goddess
of Spring chugs her can of pomegranate soda,
because her future lover is oh so fine, and check
out that ass. They don’t make stories like this
anymore, do they?
Jorge Luis Borges
Lucas Fagen pointed out Jens Lekman’s “How We Met, the Long Version” was an adaptation of “Las Causas”, but have you noticed that Tenacious D’s “Tribute” was inspired by “Parable of the Palace”?
At the foot of the next to last tower the poet, who had seemed removed from the extraordinary sights that so astounded the others, recited the short poem that we now link indissolubly to his name—the composition that, according to the most discriminating historians, brought him immortality and death. The text has been lost. Some say it consisted of a single line of verse; others, of a single word. What is certain, incredibly, is that within the poem was the entire, enormous palace, in every detail—every piece of fine porcelain and every design on every piece, all the shadows and lights of twilight, each and every moment—happy or unhappy—lived by each dynasty of mortals, gods, and dragons that had dwelt there since the farthest reaches of the past. Everyone fell silent, and the Emperor exclaimed: “You have taken away my palace!” The executioner’s iron sword terminated the poet’s life.