Installment #4
Wide Tree (short poems)
Chris Tonelli
Kitchen Press 2006
The poems in Chris Tonelli's chapbook are tight, dense, and smart. They weave threads of humor, self-deprecation, and self-awareness into a patchwork collection that accomplishes everything from ironic laughter to the honoring of Robert Creely. The poem dedicated to Creely is especially innovative because the poem is actually about itself, and Tonelli uses the title to indicate the tribute to Creely:
For Robert Creely
March 30, 2005
I'm flying
my poem at
half-mast.
The poem is a single stanza located in the middle of the page, literally flying at half mast. The focus of the poem is the poem (which Creely would have appreciated), but the idea behind the poem is obviously paying tribute to Robert Creely.
What I appreciate most about this collection is that the poems are blunt without being overdone or underdone. Tonelli strikes a delicate balance between asking questions and providing answers. The poem "To The Stranger On The Train Looking Over My Shoulder At My Notebook" is a snapshot out of Tonelli's stop motion collection of (inter)active poems:
When people ask me
why I am vegan,
I tell them because
I wouldn't kill
the cow myself,
so I don't expect
anyone to do it
for me. The better
question might be
why I don't eat humans.
While the poem is short and simple, it also contains elements of complexity because it states a question. Tonelli states what the "better question" might be rather than actually asking it as a question. This idea/form is repeated later in the poem "Elegy" which ends: "Maybe people should / have been trees." Both poems make declarative interrogatory statements, and while "Elegy" has a more serious tone than "To The Stranger...," Tonelli is able to use a similar approach as a perfect ending to each poem.
Other highlights of the collection include a nod to Imagism, and pretty much every poem not mentioned here. Tonelli furnishes his poems with birds, trains, automatic toilet-flushing sensors, and other everyday objects, but the connections between these objects is where he excells. The chapbook's opening poem, "Wide Bird" reads:
A robin hops around in the grass
near where I've sat down. Holds
his ear to the ground-listening
for worms I assume. What if he hears
the rumbling beneath us, plunges in
his beak, and pulls out the train?
Tonelli's chapbook does not dissappoint in its attempt to identify the "rumbling beneath us," but it's up to each reader to plunge into the poems and pull out the train.
The next installment of A Kitchen Press November-December will have a look at Elisa Gabbert's chapbook Thanks For Sending The Engine.
15 comments:
These questions, a)when read in conjunction and b)if taken to work together, as a communicative system, might seem mean or judgemental. THEY ARE NOT INTENDED TO BE SO; moreover, they are intended to stand individually, generally, to spark response:
1) Why are these (the Chris Tonelli featured above) "poems" and not "clever sentences"?
2) Matt, will you only review things you like here, or will you lambaste something sometime?
excellent questions indeed, Kate. and in response i would say:
1) these poems are more than clever sentences because, on a formal level: the line breaks are important, the physical locations of the sounds on the page are important (whereas in prose sentences the locations of the sounds as well as the line breaks are dependent on wordwrap, not the poet's placement). These "short poems" also fall into the verse category for me because they show much more (leaving much to be discussed) than they tell (whereas prose might discuss similar ideas in a far more descriptive manner).
2) as far as reviewing texts on the blog that i like...i generally tend to use the blog as a space to share with other poets/writers/interested/disinterested-onlookers texts that i particularly enjoy. i guess that one day i will read/encounter/view/hear something that pisses me off to the point of "lambasting" in this space (excellent word choice).
moreover, thanks for the comments. i wish i could get more people to enter into a dialogue on this blog! you rock, Kate.
--I want to say that I *love* the idea of a bird plunging its beak into the sod and pulling out the Uptown Express, by the way. That image deserves a book, and this book,therefore, has a well-chosen title.
--BUT--back to #1: that vegan poem. Why, exactly, are the breaks important? What do they do? I've read it aloud to myself a couple of times, and maybe I'm thick, but...why the line breaks?
--PS I mean, maybe the answer is "so it looks like a poem, so I can publish these clever sentences in a chapbook," but I feel...hoodwinked...by the line breaks in that poem.
listen to the sounds of the end words:
"me" - "vegan" - "because"
"kill" - "myself"
"expect" - "it" - "better" - "be"
"humans"
for me, it's the sounds of the end words and the slant rhymes. i don't know if i would be comfortable with these poems as prose poems simply because of how compact and tight they are. i think the form matches the content
kate,
in your defense...these are anti-poems for the most part (i was reading nicanor parra at the time). very unpoemy. but instead of proving their poemdom, i might ask you the opposite question...why aren't these poems? or...what is a poem to you? and what poets/traditions of poetry is your definition leaving out?
thanks,
chris
ps - kate, you're not alone by the way. the first time i read these aloud in austin, tx at an off-site reading at the awp conference, a heckler shouted "epigrams aren't poems, douchebag!!!" which of course, by definition, they are. i think he meant epigraphs.
thanks to Chris for jumping in. i persuaded him to throw in his two cents. i'm interested in creating a dialogue, and anytime we can incorporate the author's voice amidst the comments, i'm all for it.
matt
To Chris--
Oh yeah,yeah,yeah I am all for a prosaic poem, and Matt helps me realize that I should rethink the original question #1 and make it "why are these poems not prose-poems?" I guess I just think...why not a sentence? Do sentences--meaningful units themselves--have to be fluffed up with spaces in between so that they can "stand tall" next to paragraphs? I am getting silly, here. That last sentence was just for the sake of fun personification. But still.
To Matt--
Actually, I think your end-word argument works better for meaning/content than for any sort of sonority. What exactly are you proposing happens with the sounds?
Are poems not made of sentences? I'm confused. And I think we should start discussing this in terms of poetic lineage. Who would you point to as someone who does/doesn't do what a poem should do in terms of prosaic-ness/the sentence? Since I came to Franz Wright while at NC State, it might be appropriate to discuss his work, especially THE NIGHT WORLD AND THE WORD NIGHT, since that was the book of his that most influenced me, and probably these poems. Or Nicanor Parra's Poems and Antipoems. Or Alan Dugan. I guess even Frank O'Hara. Not that I am by any stretch comparing myself to these giants. But they seem to do with the sentence what I was attempting to do.
Right--you are absolutely right. Poems are sentences, very often, more often than not. And I like poems. I usually don't wonder "why the broken up sentences?" Hmmm. I guess I just don't like *that* poem. Maybe that's all it is. Maybe something about it made me think "hey, this is just a preachy sentence or two standing upright." You mention Franz Wright. A favorite! And the man most certainly breaks up sentences. This sentence thing is, apparently, not my complaint. (I apologize—I’ve made a half-hearted comment, mostly on a matter of taste, and here I am defending it to the author, and it is indefensible.)
So why don't I like that poem? (I hope you saw the big compliment to your stuff as image-container. But the poem in question is not an image-container. That might be the whole answer, right there. And that’s a matter of taste.) I guess the reason I offered “clever sentence” and threw down the ugly “not poem” kid glove is that I don’t see much room for interpretation. That one poem—the vegan poem—is didactic, I guess. I don’t feel the play of implication and ambiguity…I don’t feel much freedom as a reader. I don’t see the “complexity” that Matt does in this “declarative interrogatory statement.” I would argue that there is no question here at all.
So that’s what made me call it a sentence standing up. Sentences (good sentences) can say “I think [insert blunt political point here],” and still have subject, predicate—there it is, a sentence. And, AHA! I am taking back one of my earlier claims—no, not a prose poem. If this poem were laid out in sentence form, I would not call it a prose poem. I would call it a preachy sentence!
Wow! All of this trying to back up a glib comment has made me a bitch!
Of course, you can call me out on that one, too. Some of my favorite poems have a clear message (ugh—did I just SAY that?)…“Politics” by Yeats, for instance—but I doubt I would love that poem as much if I didn’t know all of its context, all of his crazy, ambiguous (and sometimes didactic) work.
And I don’t know all of your work, either Mr. Tonelli. I just picked that one out to dislike.
i don't think Chris is concerned with defending his work. that's not why i asked him to jump into the comment stream. so don't worry about that, kate.
however, i have to agreeingly disagree with one of your assumptions, and that is that "To The Stranger..." is didactic. the first part of the poem is, of course, didactic, but the whole point is that the blunt sentiment: "I wouldn't kill / the cow myself" & the whole "vegan" argument sets up the question statement at the end which is straight up hilarious. the didacticism of the first 7 1/2 lines sets up the rug-pulled-out-from-under-you feeling of the final 2 1/2 lines. so: didactic? to what end? i still feel uncomfortable with that word for this poem. didacticism has a connotation of a lack of self-awareness for me that i don't think applies to this poem. but both of you are probably more right on about the whole sentence thing than i am.
kate,
i think this is a fair-er assessment than the whole "why not a sentence" argument. and i totally respect you not liking it. it is a grumpy, voice-driven poem. it is supposed to be funny/political (it is about veganism afterall). but yeah, though i think it succeeds in doing what it sets out to do, it isn't the most ambitious poem in the collection by a long shot.
WHEW! (wipes brow) Another internet conversation crisis averted. Did not irrevocably offend some poet.
And I laughed out loud when I read "it's a poem about veganism, after all." THAT aspect of the poem DEFINITELY worked. Maybe that's about as poemish as you can get on that topic. No, wait! Here's a haiku:
margarine, butter
tofu vegetable protein
can a chicken wink?
I should write a Tanka in response.
hi all,
just want to put in my two cents here.
kate, i'm glad you're responding so intensely to the poem. to me, regardless of what your ultimate verdict on it is, your need to discuss it is a testament to its power.
but i want to respond specifically is your comment about not seeing "much room for interpretation" in the poem. as a stand alone poem i would say you're right, there perhaps isn't much room for interpretation in the traditional sense of the word (though, as you'll see, i think there is significant room for interpretation). for me, though, poems (and this poem in particular) are things to be lived and experienced, not just interpreted for meaning and then moved on from (which is not to say that that is your reading style, or that if it is it is somehow wrong). this poem, and many of chris' poems in general, will randomly pop into my head at various times as i go about my daily life. and when they do, i almost always realize something about them, how they speak to a certain kind of interaction with the world, and how strange and accurate and beautiful and real the interaction in the poems feels.
to some extent, that may come down to taste. on the other hand, though, it says something about these poems' ability to stand a certain test of time. they aren't timeless (yet) but they are so far lasting.
but there is also something very interesting linguistically and rhetorically happening in this particular poem that is solely reliant on the line breaks and would be complpetely non-existant were the poem just a prose sentence.
(now here's where (my) interpretation comes in.) one has to imagine that each line is taking the sentence and drawing attention to that particular phrase and exploring its possible meanings and implications in the context of the poem as a whole. so, for the sake of an attempt at brevity, let me quickly sketch out a few of the lines as i read them:
"why I am vegan" - an explanation of a serious ethical stance/belief the poet subscribes to. at the same time, though, the poet sort of questioning himself: "why am i vegan?"
"I wouldn't kill" - another serious ethical stance/belief (thou shalt not kill). while we can probably guess what he is going to say he won't kill animals, at the this moment in the poem we can't know for sure. perhaps he's going to say "i wouldn't kill a person." this solely a result of the line break.
"the cow myself" - here's where things really get rolling/interesting. if we take this as an individual statement (which at this moment it is) the poet is aligning himself with animals. he himself is the cow (which echoes satan's proclamation "i myself am hell"); i.e., the poet is an animal just as the cow is an animal, which establishes a pathos and ethos, a connectdness (or at least the hope for or gesture toward) a respect and love for all (of god's?) creatures. at the same time, though, in the echoes of satan i alluded to earlier, there is (if rather implicit) an acknowledgement and foreshadowing of the fact that the speaker himself is not neccessarily a good person. he does, as we find out by the end, despite his beliefs, suggest (even if jokingly) that it could be ok to kill a human, and worse yet, eat one (a high sin indeed). (in another poem in the book the poet describes himself as "a miserable dive of a person.) to take it a step further, there is a kind of judgement going on, of humanity and the poet himself as part of humanity, but at the same time a feeling of levity. he sees the evils of humanity (we not only kill animals, but people, which, in the end, are animals as well.) (when we kill anything we are killing ourselves?!) as well as evil within himself for his wrath toward humanity. the levity is in the fact that, for one, the poem at first glance does appear to simply be "a clever sentence," but also in its tone, which, to my ear, is (darkly) humorous.
so what we have then is actually amazingly serious and complex. a poem that is a pledge and questioning of extremely profound personal (even religious) beliefs, an indictment of self and humanity, but at the same time tempered in tone, balanced, because otherwise the poet would come off as far too preachy so much so that he'd be better off writing a sermon or essay than a poem. (that this is a poem and not a sermon, to me, makes it all the more human.)
so, between the tone and underlying subject matter, the exploration and questioning of it, this poem, in my mind, is striving to fall into the grand tradition of being timeless, but at being of its time and ina way rejecting the past methods of becoming traditionally timeless. the latter, i think, is why it HAS to be an anti-poem (as chris himself calls it).
does any of this make sense or am i just rambling? (i'm at work and sort of dashing this off.)
i should point out two further things. one, as the editor of kitchen press and publisher of this book, i am very biased. i think it's a great book and is very near and dear to my heart.
secondly, chris is a good friend of mine and, in my mind, a great poet. we went to state together and have been reading each others' work for nearly 10 years now. i have an unfair advantage, is what i'm saying.
anyway, i hope this was helpful in some way for you. thanks for chiming in. these kinds of dialogues are completely and utterly essential.
best,
justin marks
Okay sure. I'll buy it. Also, Dr. Lisk has loaned me the book; it WILL help to consider the poem in the context of a collection/voice.
And:
IN CYBERSPACE WE HAVE NO SHOULDERS
I wear nothing
but leather. I wouldn’t
make polyester
myself, or harvest
the fiber required
to knit a covering.
I don’t cotton
to all that picking.
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