Following the Links

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I read a poem by Anne Boyer that two people simply love.

why simply? why not complicatedly?
why not complexly? why not ornately?

I love him ornately, curlycues in every crevice.
I love the poem ornately, every syllable, no,
every letter. I read every letter twice
before moving on.

The poem, I suppose, is experimental, which these days seems to entail using nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns or in some cases adjectives as nouns, verbs and other parts of speech heretofore undefined.

I do not love it simply, or ornately. I cannot love what I cannot decipher.

That sounds like I can’t love mystery, yet mystery is what I love more than anything. So I was lying when I said I cannot love what I cannot decipher. It sure sounded good, though. Instead I should say

I can’t be bothered to ponder
this particular mystery. Maybe
tomorrow.

If Anne Boyer assumes unpopular political views, broadcasts them, and becomes controversial, she might win the Nobel prize. Kinda like Ezra Pound. Otherwise, I suspect her audience is, and will be, limited.

My suspicions are often proven wrong.

If she marries a poet megastar, or lands a teaching position at Harvard, she will likely be pronounced the next great thing to hit American Literature.

I’m a bit of a cynic regarding poetry and proclamations of greatness. A bit.

Regardless of my impressions of Anne Boyer’s poem, I’m impressed that two people simply love it, so I search for more of her and her work, trying to find what to love.

She writes a feminist blog. She publishes a journal. I find three other competent poems and an interview in which she names “Utopia” by Bernadette Mayer as her current favourite poem. (This was a couple of years ago.)

I immediately like Mayer more than Boyer just because she was born in 1945 not 1973.

I also notice that Boyer names poets Weiner and Porter as great and I wonder if she’s noticed she has a thing for poets whose names end in “er.” Like hers. I shall look for poets whose names end in “ins” like mine, and I shall extoll their virtues.

I can’t find Mayer’s “Utopia,” but there are many scholarly papers about it or about her. She’s a bigwig, apparently.

I wonder if she’s related to John. Mayer.

I am not a utopian, so I may not like her poem. I like some others I found, though, such as “I was one of the skunks.”

Mayer is an experimentalist, or has been, like Boyer. At least two of her experiments have been to chronicle the minutiae of her day-to-day, in narrated photographs or in journal form. Joycean, I suppose. I would have to read or see these installations before I could venture an opinion as to whether they are interesting or not. The photo exhibit was critically well-received and established her place in the experimental art world, according to one source. I only know that I personally can’t presume that my own minutiae would be of the least interest to anyone. They are barely interesting to me.

So why am I writing this? It started out in poem-form, with line breaks, because I thought I would write a very long stream-of-consciousness poem since I have the impression that very long poems are the ones most likely to be named as great or “favourite.” I am writing it because I’ve become interested again in what makes a poem great or favourite - a sign, perhaps, that my cynicism has lost its sheen, for the moment, that I’m willing to try again.

I de-poemized this bit of rant, though the beginning could possibly become a poem. I have written some six or eight first drafts of poems in the last couple of weeks. I feel revitalized by this, and I hope I can keep it up.





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