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Sublime Wild Nights,
New & Selected Poems,
Kim Addonizio, (191pp, £12,
Bloodaxe) |
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I am taken back
to when I was suggesting to students that poetry was spoken before it was
written, and very likely before spoken sung. And that after early in my life
hearing Welsh poetry rising if not to song, then to a form of chant or call,
to a voicing, I came to hear the same, as it seemed, in Birmingham when I
heard poets voicing poems in Urdu. This even to the point of sensing that
these voices were way, way back related. In the 21st
century we may still be hearing strains of this, while also there are new
voicings, new poetry voice musics. Kim Addonizio's
'One Night Stands', in this book, can be heard on YouTube; it isn't sung, or
is it? 'Lush Life' is spoken in waves by her voice instrument with trumpet
backing. Here is Diana Whitney recently on Twitter
writing about her: These poems get inside your
head with the insistence of a moving train. This quote is
from the San Francisco Chronicle and you can read the poet's own tweets. It all
moves so fast, while the book lays fixed on my table as does any other book.
Who is reading books of poems now? Reviewers; and now I become more aware how
small the print is, so that the voice seems faint, distant. But they are
talking, these poems, they arrive as voice. Having said all
that, the poems on the page - in the 21st century - look conservative. So did
way back Allen Ginsberg's. Her poems don't roll the way his did but they do
forward roll, they have that energy. 'Like that' opens, Love me like a wrong turn on a
bad road late at night, with no moon and no town anywhere and a large hungry animal
moving heavily through the
brush in the ditch. Love me with a blindfold over
your eyes and the sound
of rusty water blurting from the faucet in the kitchen
leaking down through the floorboards to hot cement.
Do it without asking, without wondering or thinking
anything, and continues
on down and over the page. For the readings on YouTube she is reading from
the book, which seems contradictory, and into a mike. The performance looks conservative. As from a good
composer, the pacing varies, as does the matter; this opens 'News': Because no reporters came to my
door wanting to confirm my opinion of the Bush administration, because not even the Jehovah's
Witnesses who can usually be counted on to arrive each Saturday bearing informative articles on
Satan's wiles and the hour of judgement can be counted on this
afternoon, and, there
being no full stops, I am leaving it in mid flow, to bring in the opening
three lines of 'You Don't Know What Love Is': but you know how to raise it in
me like a dead girl winched up
from the river, how to wash off the sludge, the stench
of the past. I would
heartily recommend this book to teachers: Kim Addonizio, while American in
biography, is present in life, in language, with a much wider range of form
and matter than can be indicated here. If a teacher really wants to take on
the whole sublime there is, of course, much more to be found elsewhere, but
none better, I think, and for some compare and contrast for discovery and
practice, read and consider alongside her, J.H.Prynne, another Bloodaxe
author. © David Hart 2015 |