Things of the Weather
by Wendy Barker
Pudding House Publications, 2008
30 p. $10
Reviewed by P. Nelson
In a mood*, it can seem Poetry is under assault-and “the Perps”?-- its best friends, poets. The old bromide that more people write poetry than read it (stale news by at least 1600) has reached a more toxic distillation -- more poets write than read it. Here, Cher Reader, you’d be right to ask “how can you possibly know such a thing, Pew Poll perhaps?” But proofs can proceed by theorem; thus: IF poets were reading work worse than they write, THEN they’d write better by repulsion, if the same quality, they’d write better by competitiveness and if reading better quality, by aspiration. And so by a series of reactive reformations, the curve of poetry would be rising, which isn’t the case.
Many contemporary poems are really short-short stories, yearning for the bulked up lineaments of prose. The leading cause of poetic pallor is “trope-ic anemia” (sometimes called Levine’s Disease or Updike’s Disorder) but which critical clinicians properly call “metaphorosis”.So it is good to be able to present a healthy specimen, Wendy Barker’s “Things of the Weather”.
Condensation Nuclei
Sea salt, pollen and smoke./Particles the air / needs to form a cloud./A pebble in the palm./Phrase dropped on a plate./Your words I’ve collected/ and lined up like bowls/of ash, or sand, /stared at, and wept /or like our lidded glass/containers: oats, wheat,/ and opalescent grains/ we use to knead/our bread, yeasty /loaves with raisins./Rain, relief, the irritants/washed back to loam./Saliva, the body’s/juices that digest /grit between our teeth.
There’s a coolness here, a detachment and distance, the “personal” almost off stage, oblique, toned down. The attraction is in the elusiveness, the allusiveness. Baker, a “makeur” gets it: a poet (ever, optimally, a title conferred, not claimed) is not a maker of poems (almost anyone can do that) but a shaper of language; a distinction that is (and should be) critical.
High Sky
The sky has slipped its stitches,/the feathered cirrus, wool of cumulus,/ gauze shreds of layered stratus /gone with the unexpected guests/who left this morning/after a night of pelted rain./Now the sun flashes and shears/the few seams left/ till bare skin bursts through/and we’re down to ourselves,/ Two loose threads, the knot undone.
Now this is perhaps not as coolly removed as some might prefer, composure here softening into comfort. But the important thing is this : a poetic organization that is essentially vertical and harmonic rather than prosaic, horizontal and narratising. Harmony over melody, i.e., anybody’s “Late Quartets”.
Because, really, nobody cares about the raw testimony of your personal experience except your mother and the courts. The relationship of “experience” to poetry is like that of clay to pots, substantive but not defining.(Experiences, rhetorically rendered and imagistically enhanced are another thing entirely.)[See Susan -Jo Russell’s review of Soot.]
If I’ve inadvertently taken poets to task, I don’t mean to privilege critics and reviewers.
Reading reviews is like watching French people talk on Euro TV, never mind the jabber, it’s the gestures! Turn down the sound and watch the hands. As to major critics, its time that lowers the volume. The great critics- Burke, Richards, Empson and Auerbach are less recalled than rusting hulks of battleships. Perused by, at best, a lifeboat’s worth of professors,what’s enduring is not what they said but what, in urgent words, they were pointing to. What Fiddler Crab does with its own little claw.What we, the memorious remnant of readers, can turn to and briefly look.(Put another way, the long term value of criticism, provided it makes the proper signs, is indicative rather than constitutive.)
A bone, too, to pick with some responsible party. The cover engraving, as apposite as the properly cited titular epigram, isn’t credited. While its style is so individual as to be widely recognized, not one reader in a hundred will connect the cover with its only begetter, that typically short lived and unhappy 19th century genius, J. J. Grandville ( aka Jean Ignace-Isidore Gerard) whose plate 70 from Un Autre Monde of lightning rods grounding thunderbolts should perpetuate his fame.
Finally, lest Barker’s chapbook seem shorted in these critical circuits, one of its pleasures is its organizing and titular mechanics, chiefly cloud names that befit these definite but shape shifting poems. Turning pages, I was reminded more than once of days passing and more than once needed to consult,with delight, Day’s classic reference work, “ Clouds and Weather.”
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*See Richard III, (I.2, 248)
