Poetry insider

Once a month I take my copy of Poetry mag and write inside it, as there is a lot of white space to fill. I never write on directly on a poem or on the space a poem occupies, on those rare times that there's a real poem, as those spaces are sacrosanct. To be able to write on the white spaces inside Poetry mag. once a month is pretty much the reason I subscribe.

Here's what I've written in the white spaces of the November, 2017 issue:

Best title for a poem (in recent memory): Queerodactyl, a poem by Roy G. Guzman. 

Anne Waldman, Balm and Lamentation (p. 130), writes like a poet whose club you think you might want to join primarily for its exclusivity, but suspect you don't have the contacts to get into. I went to an Anne Waldman poetry reading once and heard her read one of her long poems and can still remember becoming almost angry at having to listen.

I thought they'd fucked up the Rumi poem (p. 128) "Where did the handsome beloved go?" (Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz, translators), but I was wrong; they didn't fuck it up, as my second reading proved.

The poems of Rae Armantrout (pps.115-117) seem to self-consciously counter Wordsworth's claim that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotions recollected in tranquility. Under Armantrout's purview, poetry is the stage managed damming up of vapid observational twaddle: it aspires to poetry by pandering to pretentious literary allusions from the age when it was fashionable to write poems devoid of anything resembling a heart.

The extended riff on Rilke's "Les Fentres", (Windows, pps. 158-176) by Sumita Chakraborty, concludes with the words, say   enough. (the period is mine). It's a truly extraordinary poem, close to being an event! I've never read such a poem before, and I never will again. 

Elaine Equi has a charming sequence of word/picture pieces--they're sensational. One of them, a picture of two white figures, a man and a woman, silhouetted in a window, is titled, Nice Neighbors. The caption below the picture: They don't play loud music./They don't have a dog./I think they're both mimes.