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!