What's a Poem

Notes for this entry compiled by Becky with assistance from Josh.

WHAT’S A POEM?


Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Poems in the form of 240 numbered essays or meditations. "Bluets: Maggie Nelson on the Color Blue as a Lens on Memory, Loneliness, and the Paradoxes of Love"

At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my CV it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette. One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.


"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" by Michael Ondaatje

Described as a short novel, but actually a collage of imagined interviews, poems, prose, and photos, adding up to a biography of Billy the Kid

These are the killed.
(By me) —
Morton, Baker, early friends of mine.
Joe Bernstein. 3 Indians.
A blacksmith when I was twelve, with a knife.
5 Indians in self defence (behind a very safe rock).
One man who bit me during a robbery.
Brady, Hindman, Beckwith, Joe Clark,
Deputy Jim Carlyle, Deputy Sheriff J.W. Bell.
And Bob Ollinger. A rabid cat
birds during practice,

These are the killed.
(By them) —
Charlie, Tom O’Folliard
Angela D’s split arm,
and Pat Garrett
sliced off my head.
Blood a necklace on me all my life.

"Tender Buttons" by Gertrude Stein

Good faith demands that I include this, but full disclosure, this woman sucks. Okay, that's not fair. A lot of my resentment is that everyone around me always loves her. I have had professors describe her as their "spirit animal." And I am happy to get you their contact information. Because I do not get it. My experience with Gertrude Stein has been like being the only sober person at a party. I end up standing in the corner wondering why everyone else isn't bored. That said, she does something that really sets the fire for some people, and you can't fake that. In the interests of description, I will say that it is considered a modernist masterpiece that uses repetitive language to make the mundane become unfamiliar and uncanny, or so I am told. It's kind of like that thing where you say a word over and over until suddenly it has no meaning. And it's true. That is a thing you can do.


'The Narrow Road to the Interior" by Kimiko Hahn

A poem written as a journal, in this case as an Asian pillow book.

"That This" by Susan Howe

Cross-genre “patchwork poems” – combining, for example, the writings of Cotton Mather and other Puritan ministers, the captivity story of Mary Rowlandson, old bird books, Thoreau’s journals, old municipal histories, and the poetry of Longfellow and Emily Dickinson. Additional article: Susan Howe "Patchwork Poems"

"This Is Not a Novel" by David Markson. Poem as research – communication through data

"The Glass Essay" by Anne Carson. Poem as memoir