The Potomac Brings the Poetry

When I was in high school, I thought of poetry as a form of torture that boring people had invented so they could torment the rest of us with their boringness. Every poem I read supported this thesis until I encountered T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in freshman comp. Regrettably, I wound up failing that course--professors have an unfortunate tendency to give F's to students who skip half the classes as well as the final--but I got what I unknowingly came for: poetry. "Prufrock" cranked my mind and my heart wide open, and for the first time in my life I thought that maybe poetry wasn't a complete waste of trees and ink.

Lo these many years and pixels later, poetry is now what I want to read most. In its compressed meaning, sculpted language, and compact beauty, a good poem is like a superb bonbon: "a world in a grain of sand" indeed. Fortunately for us all, Web del Sol's own The Potomac offers a strong selection of poetry in its newest issue. And when I say "strong," I mean that I genuinely had a hard time choosing poems to write about for this post. Here are three poems that caught my eye among the many good ones in the July 2010 issue:

• Roger Netzer's "Three Tough Girls" is a compact gem of autobiography that elicits subtle shades of emotion through telling description and a pleasing rhyme scheme. There's a sense of humor here, and tenderness, and a touch of ribaldry, all in three short stanzas:

When giving the finger Jackie Schmidt
aligned her minor knuckles, so.
She had the looks and smarts to know
more tricks than good girls publicly admit.
In due course she broke my heart.

• At first I was not inclined to like Valerie Wallace's "The Pope's Poop" because of the title. Religious leaders make easy whipping boys and straw men for us literary types, and I wasn't interested in reading a poem whose raison d'etre was to shoot a very big fish in a barrel all by itself.

But such was not the case here. Wallace displays amazing lexical dexterity as she depicts images and events both vividly and evocatively; that is, the lines and sentences convey meaning forcefully as written, but they also resonate with allusive, etymological, even mythological implications long after the poem is finished:

Swaddled, the baby pope poops yellow sweet
jello. Chocolate pudding, chocolate stream. His face
grimaces red as a little napkin'd sugar beet.

In the forest, the boy pope finds a nest of leaves.
He rolls like an animal, grunts, then cowers. When
he poops he's a toad, about to leap. He's Adam. He's Eve.

The tone is gentle, arch, veering from the archaic to the playful. This pope is a human character in a drama larger than any one human. He is recognizable, yet not so, like any of us when viewed in the proper light, such as the light of poetry. I really liked this one.

• The two poems by Jane Crown are completely different from each other, and they are equally effective in completely different ways. "Photo Collage" is a tender but muscular elegy for a deceased brother. Fresh images and original metaphors let the pain of grief come through, but without a shred of sentimentality.

He was tattooed with crosses, and bearlike, and drank too much
but he was mine, and his stolen light still stings

He was found in his car on the side
of the road, and I miss him like spiders under the porch

I won't tell you much about Crown's "Dinner" except that it's a sinfully delicious treat, short and sweet and so good to eat. Enjoy.

Believe me when I say that I haven't come close to exhausting the good poetry in this month's The Potomac. Or don't believe me; see for yourself!

You Know What We Need? A Politically Oriented Literary Journal, That's What

But wait! We already have one: The Potomac, published by Web del Sol. Phew. I was starting to get worried there.

The Potomac's July 2010 issue just came out, and it's a heady mix of poetry, essays, reviews, and flash fiction. I don't know about you, but I seem to be getting busier with each passing moment, which is one reason why I love flash fiction so much. Good flash gives you all the high literary quality you could want, but in a very short time frame. A writing professor of mine once said that she thought the short story was a higher form of art than the novel, and I agree. (Then again, I've written lots of short stories, but I failed abjectly the two times I tried to write a novel, so perhaps I'm biased.) By that token, it might be the case that the flash piece is a higher form of art than the regular short story. And The Potomac has flash aplenty, including a really good flash-fiction piece titled "The Incident," by Wendy Skinner.

I'm not sure exactly why I like "The Incident" so much. It's not a character-oriented piece in which someone changes, or fails to change. It doesn't have a plot-oriented climax or payoff at the end. I'm not even entirely sure what the piece is really about, although my guess would be something about U.S. car culture, as hinted at by the opening paragraph (which deserves to be quoted in its entirety):

The gas station attendant on the corner was the first to realize a connection between the car accidents and later deaths. Two of his regulars, Mr. O’Leary and Mrs. Gonzales, had been involved in a rear-ender the month before, really just a honk and a scratch hardly worth mentioning. He’d witnessed the accident while checking a taillight. Both of his customers had emerged from their vehicles and exchanged driver’s licenses with no apparent discomfort. However, a day or so afterwards, the attendant ran across their obituaries in the paper: one “suddenly with the Lord” and the other “unexpectedly taken from loved ones.”

There you have it: a solid opening sentence, straightforward prose, and clear description of events; yet these workmanlike tools of the trade are married to a subtly ominous tone. The feeling of ill portent grows as the piece continues, and the story partially disregards the rules of realism as it concludes--not with an epiphany or an event, but with an image. You come away from it with that unmistakable feeling of having just participated in a good piece of literature.

I want to point out one other feature on The Potomac, and it's weird of me to even mention this piece: it's Ryn Gargulinski's review of the book The Second Elizabeth, by Karen Lillis. In other words, I'm doing a review of a review. But I really enjoyed the review because it's written in the style of the book that it reviews, and apparently the book is pretty strange:

This is a review of a book. This is a review of a book and the book reads like this. This review, and the book, both read like the ocean. They read like the swirls in an eddy. They read like the overlapping waves.

I mean, geez, what's not to like about that? "Overlapping waves." Beautiful. The whole review does indeed read that way, and it really, really made me want to read the book. Another brief excerpt:

At first it made me mad. Not mad but annoyed, like the first time I read Shakespeare or my first bout with Clockwork Orange. It was hard for me to follow. Shakespeare made me cry. But then I embraced it.

And now I want to embrace it as well, and I bet you will too if you get on over to The Potomac and see what's on offer this month.