KATHA POLLITT AND "THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM"

The Mind Body Problem To call any art form 'accessible' conjures up the worst: framed posters of Monet's water lilies and ice in your pinot. But when it comes to poetry, accessibility is a way in. Billy Collins, former poet laureate and champion of accessible poetry, is a master at this. He locates the reader, providing a surface much like our familiar everyday world, and then manipulates plain speech and quotidian images and observations. Like the disorientation of waking up at the end of a long car trip, you bring your eyes up from the page, confused and in another town, with everything sadder, deeper or more refracted.

While Katha Pollitt is not quite so ready and beguiling as Collins, her plain speech and razor-sharp observations are what make "The Mind-Body Problem", her second book of poems, sing. A columnist at the Nation, she brings the columnist's role of insightful friend and confidant into her verse. Her poems reveal something worth seeing--about her, or the world, or both. Take the titular poem:

It seems unfair, somehow, that my body has to suffer
because I, by which I mean my mind, was saddled
with certain unfortunate high-minded notions
that made me tyrannize it and patronize it
like a cruel medieval baron, or an ambitious
English-professor husband ashamed of his wife--
her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles
and regional vowels.

The relationship between the professor and his wife is most achingly and incisively rendered, but in comparing it to her own body, Pollitt opens up new ground, a new complexity of feeling.

In an interview with Powells.com, Billy Collins said: "I don't think people read poetry because they're interested in the poet. I think they're [sic] read poetry because they're interested in themselves." This seems true; many poems, both of the observational and introspective varieties work because the author knows when to hang back, letting the poem be about the reader too, what they see, how they feel. In another poem, "Silent Letter" Pollitt achieves this:

So too the leisure seeming
of a girl alone in her blue
bedroom late at night
who stares at the bitten
end of per pen
wondering how to write
so that what she writes
stays written...

Here Pollitt lets the reader become the well-described girl, even as it is plain that she is the girl herself, meditating on the act of writing.

With the exception of a middle section, "After the Bible", which just seems too high concept to be truly successful, Pollitt has done much to ensure that "what she writes stays written". Her book is filled with often humorous observations and images that light true the minute you read them, and then shift as you move to take them in. I'll leave you with an excerpt from my favourite in the collection, the poem "Integer Vitae":

that's how we'd live
if living were enough:...

These do not wake in tears
nor does deception drive them
down to the blue pond
where the beaver, prince

of chaos, who appeared
alone as if from nowhere,
is tirelessly constructing
his dark palace of many rooms.

"The Mind-Body Problem", by Katha Pollitt (Random House), out now

~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI