TWO SIDES OF A COIN

I was reading an essay today on Poetry Magazine online--"Information Thy Nemesis is Reverie"--and was particularly struck by the way Ange Mlinko describes Linda Gregg's newish collection of poems "All of it singing":

And so with her language: compressed but unadorned, it recedes into the horizon of what can be called prosody. Almost always ending on a fade rather than a bang, her poems insist on tranquility and evanescence, on instinct over intellect. Seldom does a line or image call attention to itself. You could say, in Gregg's aesthetic, the materiality of words is to be resisted.

Mlinko draws particular attention to the atmospheric "Summer in a Small Town", in which each small word in the poem hangs together to create a languid and lonely sense of place.

When the men leave me,
they leave me in a beautiful place.
It is always late summer.
When I think of them now,
I think of the place.
And being happy alone afterwards.
This time it’s Clinton, New York.
I swim in the public pool
at six when the other people
have gone home.
The sky is grey, the air hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses
so completely it leaves my heart empty.

As Mlinko observed, the poem's lack of materiality gives it a seamless quality. Gregg has rendered an image so clear you can smell it, even have that sense of something welling up in your chest. Some good poems work like this: they capture little feelings in a jar.

This week's New Yorker has a poem of the opposite sort: "As I Was Saying" by Bob Hicok. This is the type of poem with a few lines of unabashed verve that draw attention to themselves; fur-coated observations about the world, of the best kind.

...a neighbor man
...tied a cherry bomb to a pigeon,
it flew furiously until kaboom. Feathers
and bits of what made the pigeon go
landed on the Smitky twins playing hopscotch,
they looked up, I looked at them looking up,
two of everything the same, as if their parents
knew the odds of needing a spare.

The "odds of needing a spare" is a moment of cleverness you notice--not atmospheric, but funny and resonant. Sometimes these are the lines in poems that don't mean anything, but simply sound nice. Here it seems to really work. There's a a vein of family and lessons running through the poem. A shiny penny of a sentiment set off amidst surrounding lines, a line that might echo
in my head for the day.