The Poetry Section: Kimberly Grey
Today in the poetry section; two new poems by Kimberly Grey, of the fine borough of Queens.
To Grieve in Other Verbs
Tie the ribbon around yourself & see how long it holds. You are alive
& have just begun to wrestle. There are other ways to fly. You're trying
to marry human & loss, trying to shape & peel the wound. Find a place
to house large things. The walrus lost its hands to evolution, so it taught
itself to roll. Now, you hover over the earth. You're barely. The ground
did soften & forgive & still, you're winter. There's no shame in wanting
to be useful again. You yo-yo & furl. You dress in other people's clothes.
And the light? It can not tell you from a hermit or horsefly. Today in
Manhattan, not a single person died. How's that for hope? You must
understand the history of loss did not begin with you. You've got to spit
out this thing that you chew & chew. To hurt is a way to love, I thought
you knew.
Only a Moon to Soup Her
Improper you could say, the way we use light
to awe each other. But there, a waxing gibbous
haught in the sky and her on the bed, full
and waist-ful. It is wrong to think that only
a fish could glow like this. We are like
Schenectady when Edison arrived, a center
of energy and brightness. And don't forget
either, her hand against the pane. If the moon
were wrong side out and halved maybe the earth
would be hotter than us. But seven swoons
and sighs later, she melts into sweet broth.
Oh, of all things floating and how can it float?
The moon hangs outside the world and we let it
into our lives. Lunatic, I say. Guppy, Guppy.
Clean up this light. We're filthy.
Kimberly Grey's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Linebreak, The Brooklyn Review, DIAGRAM, and Opium. She lives in Queens and will be teaching contemporary poetry at Adelphi University next year.
You can reach the editors at poems@theawl.com.
no comments huh? that's too bad. these are good. i wonder how many people read poetry. it's pretty much all i read. which is odd, i know, but i love reading and i have little time for prose. so many prepositions! so much explaining! no time for such. i love words so poetry is the best of painting and music. did mention that i like these quite a bit?
I want so badly to be excited that my favorite lurking-at-work read has a poetry section, but this looks like an unnecessarily high ratio of seemingly profound Sentences-Announcing-Themselves-As-Poetry to actually compelling use of language. I don't know why people and/or publications with radical interests in other parts of culture like such normal poems?
This seems like a mean comment when there is no discussion happening otherwise, and I should say it's aimed more at my overall impression of the Poetry Section to date rather than Ms. Grey's work specifically!
Yeah, that's kinda where I'm at too. Granted, I have a pretty traditionally-accessible-archform sensibility, and I do understand there's room for more. But as a not-professional fan of poetry, it's very hard to tell with a lot of contemporary, lesser-known poets whether they've actually put together a worthwhile poem and I lack the context to appreciate it, or whether they've just, as you say, strung nice-sounding words together. You pick up Frost or Eliot or Gary Snyder or Sexton or Mary Oliver — or any of the poems in a Garrison Keillor Good Poems compilation, which collections deserve more attention than maybe they get — and the relatively casual reader can say, "Yes! I see how the language and the sounds resonate with the theme here! There's an apparent structure!" Which is enjoyable.
I dunno, it's kind of like I feel about Björk: If I didn't know she could work in the standard pop-rock format — catchy verse-chorus-verse — I'd be suspicious that some of her out-there stuff was pure wanking. As it is, she's given me a reason to trust her (although even so, I sometimes still think she's wanking). Beyond that, I think mastering accessibility (without recovering the same old ground) is challenging, and it would be fun to see more new poets who aimed for that. And it certainly seems like it'd be good for poetry's place in the current culture, too.
"it's very hard to tell with a lot of contemporary, lesser-known poets whether they've actually put together a worthwhile poem and I lack the context to appreciate it, or whether they've just, as you say, strung nice-sounding words together."
i kinda understand where you're coming from, but not? what's the difference between stringing nice sounding words together and a worthwhile poem? if you feel like your missing something, then you probably didn't really like it too much. i'm not sure your missing anything.
Well, as I understand it, what generally separates poetry from the stringing of nice-sounding words together is that in a poem, the sounds (and the rhythms and the organization*) of the words somehow reinforce and resonate what the words are saying. So, like, Langston Hughes's "Drum" is a pretty straightforward example. Or Frost's "The Master Speed", which conveys rhythmically the same sense of rapidly escalating movement and then abrupt but graceful stillness as it describes.
Granted, again, there is surely room in the long, long tradition of poetry for poets who master this stuff and then want to try things outside the box. What's unclear to me, as someone who reads poetry for enjoyment but isn't at all connected to whatever academic poetry scene there might be, is how many contemporary poets have mastered the meshing of description and sound and have moved past it, and how many are just stringing nice sounds together and assuming most people don't think there's much difference between that and poetry.
*Although all these things are more or less inextricably intertwined.
These are wonderful poems.
I want badly to like these, but they lack for cohesiveness and rhythm. The individual sentences are generally nice – I like the one about melting into sweet broth – but I want my poetry to sound pleasing when I read it out loud, softly enough so that I don't wake my roommate. This is barely different from one of those interactive art pieces that harvest random sentences from the internet and put them together based on shared subject matter.
But more poetry – yes, please, thank you.