Karen Pittelman--poet, author, musician, activist, and writing coach extraordinaire--guest reviews for us this week. Thanks Karen!
It's the mark of a good poem when you absolutely must pull it out of your bag in the middle of the street and start reading out loud to a friend. Which is what I found myself doing last week with the title piece of Katha Pollitt's new collection, The Mind-Body Problem. As I recited her lines on the body's struggle to assert its simple desires--"wanting to be touched the way an otter/ loves water, the way a giraffe/ wants to amble the edge of the forest, nuzzling/ the tender leaves at the tops of the trees"--my friend and I slumped contentedly against the wall of the corner grocery and sighed. Who says poetry has to be esoteric? Pollitt's language here is as lucid and accessible as the prose in her well-known essays. Columnist for The Nation and author of four books of essays including the recent Learning To Drive: And Other Life Stories, Pollitt also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 1982 collection of poems, Antarctic Traveller. The Mind-Body Problem heralds her first return to the form since then, and it's about time.
Pollitt has a masterful way with the details of daily life. More than just graceful observations, these are the moments on which her poems turn. Casting an unflinching eye on a world at war, "a world whose predominant characteristics are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment," the poems nevertheless search ceaselessly for moments of everyday beauty strong enough to sustain us. There is "a woman coming out of the subway carrying an immense bouquet of white lilac wrapped in white tissue paper, like a torch." In "Near Union Square," peddlers sell "Windex-blue ices" and "three-dollar lime-translucent sandals," and "suddenly out of nowhere the roof of every/ flaking office building flares gold." People are still, "saved every day/ by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth." Even the dead are drawn to return, in the poem "Visitors," "not to startle us with fear or guilt or grief," but just for the simple pleasure of "hefting and sniffing cantaloupes at Key Food."
In her essay, "Webstalker," from Learning to Drive, Pollitt writes of the "small ordinary word, like 'orange' or 'inkstain'... that people use so often and so unthinkingly that its specialness has all been worn away, like the roughness on a pebble in a creek bed, but... if you hold it to the light at just the right angle you can glimpse the spark at its core." That's a good explanation of what is at work in these poems, the quiet glint of life and language she is mining here as fuel for a more passionate engagement with the world. It may not always be enough. Still, in one of the book's most powerful moments, "Trying to Write a Poem Against the War," Pollitt reminds us, with a bit of a sly smile, that though the task may be as futile as "mailing myself to the moon/... yet what can we do/ but offer what we have?"
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The one in the first paragraph....is that the whole poem? Or is there more after that dependent clause?