Link to the Show / Show Notes
Jay Snodgrass and I were in the same workshop last fall. I only got to see a few of his poems which wasn't enough to really get a sense of him. And when his poems did come around, as with all of us, there was such a serious logjam that we buzzed through work at top speed. A shame really, given how much I enjoyed his reading. From his birth among the loblollys of Florida (or palms or crocodiles), to the Tokyo of Godzilla(!) where he grew up, we come to learn that this poet has lived diversely. His first book, Monster Zero, from which he read a number of poems is clever and humorous and to borrow an earlier verb: buzzing. Many of the poems contain Godzilla which becomes synonymous with his childhood, or they contain some sense of childish verge-of-discovery (which paradoxically and simultaneously is the verge-of-loss). This occurs beautifully in "Seventh Confession" when the poet wonders what happened to Christine Inoue, " ... She was the first time/ I fell in love ... " By the end of the speaker asks, " ... Where did she go?/ Stray freckles on her thigh,/ High up under her skirt,/ Under the steel desk?" And further along we all wonder how "Godzilla Sits Down to Watch Cable" or why "Godzilla Leafs Through a Crate and Barrel Catalogue" and how we come to care so much about him. A compelling and terrific start to the evening ...
Which brings me to Sandra Simonds who, along with (as in: just as) Jay, has been widely published and although on the surface they couldn't seem more different (when Sandra took the stage she emphatically warned us, "My poems are not funny"), they were just different by degrees. That is, how they presented themselves was different, but at heart all good poems are sheep and wolves in each other's clothing. And she was right: her poems weren't funny. In fact, they were so textured, so sonically rich and intellectual, and precisely in control of the line, the break, the page; that I was dying to see the poems in print. Not only did I want to examine them, but I wanted to speak them to myself again. To rediscover images like, "honeydew light in March," "when the dusk hawk stares the ocean down" and "forget-me-nots dunked into steam soup." To look again into the poem "Vivre" which has a figure both in and alongside its life staring it down like a lesser animal. It was a reading that by the end definitely made me feel like the lesser animal. Brava!
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