Oct 15, 2021

RICHARD THOMPSON FINDS HIS VOICE

It seems to be a reasonable expectation that people of genius with extraordinary lives and stories to relate would be able to tell their tale in a manner as robust as the lives they’ve lived. A slight sour truth to accept is that not all extraordinary songwriters aren’t the best…

The Eagles take over the City Dump

The first thing that one has to do is give the Eagles their due, which is their ability to write tunefully, maintain tight harmonies and sustain an impressive level of musicianship. To their credit, these guys have always had a sound that makes them stand out in a crowded field…

AGAINST NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

Well, yeah, I’m grumpy some of the time, and I’ve been accused of being a curmudgeon in regards to National Poetry Month, the annual dedication to an elusive art with a small audience that itself is divided among several hundred-seeming schools of thought as to what is genuinely worth reading…

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Picture of a Gone Poet

Lawrence Ferlinghetti passed away last month, at age 101, and what we’ve lost is a great American voice. His poems were written in a wonderfully amorphous American idiom, his rhythms were light, quick, jazz-like; his patois seemed to come from anywhere in 50 states. His poems were vocalizations of the…

A few poems by LOUISE GLUCK

You do get the feeling that there is a submerged attempt to marry myth archetypes with the sweltering and restless subconscious tensions that confront us as we, a race, reconcile the glory and agony of love and death, but Gluck boils her worries to an arhythmic, unmusical aridity. Think of…

A Darker Side of Donovan

There’s a telling scene in Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s grainy 1967 documentary of Bob Dylan’s stormy 1965 tour of England. Dylan is in a hotel, filled with tour members, local celebs, musicians, and varieties of hangers-on. …

REMEMBERING JOHN LENNON

This coming December 9th was the 40 th anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination by that ignoble cipher Mark David Chapman, and as much as one wants to deny that they remain obsessed with the great glory of their fiery youth, a day of this kind makes me none the less…

BEND THE NOTES

Rumor has it that I’ve been playing blues harmonica for near fifty five years , give our take a half-decade, and that in the time it takes to destroy several generations of Hohner Marine Bands with slippery attempts to master the diatonic scale and achieve something near what my first…

WHO WAS HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ?

Mank, the new David Fincher directed feature film which recently debuted on Netflix, answers a question for many fans of the Orson Wells masterpiece Citizen Kane, who exactly was Herman Mankiewicz, the screen writer? Effectively portrayed by Gary Oldman, managing to be both flamboyant, folksy and occasionally enigmatic , the…

VERY LITTLE OF KAY RYAN GOES TOO FAR

Meghan O’Rourke offered a credible description and defense of our of past U.S. Poet Laureate, but as much as I enjoy the reasoning, I find the idea of Kay Ryan , Poet, more interesting than Kay Ryan’s poetry. I’m not a fan of ornate language, since most poets do it badly, even those who are praised for it as a default remark, including our drifting poet Laureate Derek Walcott — if similes were empty wine bottles , he’d have drunk himself to death — but I would like some elegance and lift in the briefer lines as well, some polish besides the formulations Ryan offers us from the page.

The poems are lean, yes, clever with their internal rhymes, slants, conceits and all the rest, but there isn’t the stamp of a personality to enliven these dry dictations. She is compared to Dickinson rather excessively, since Ryan’s aim is to move toward a point she’s cutting through the underbrush toward; she seems to know before hand what she’s driving at, and for me so much of what she does amounts to seeing a neighbor park their car in the same spot for years after the work day is over.
Dickinson’s minimalism is a slippery stream to wade into; her habit was to meet herself coming the other way while on an investigation of a nuance; she contained and expressed her own contradicting assertions. Dickinson is the more interesting poet for all the material she implies, suggest, touches up with the minimum of space her poems consume; the dashes and asides still bother us, provoke discussion. Ryan is of the generation that thinks poetry has to have a point to make , a purpose to reaffirm. This makes her work, finally, fatally forgettable.

I’d be pleased if a poet preferring small matters to large themes became our Poet Laureate, but in the matter of Kay Ryan, I find her work malnourished, under muscled, simply lifeless and still as a rusty coin in a cushion crack. She is part of what is termed The…

Ted Burke