EthicalDative

My treatment of Mitchell Glazier’s “The Gazing Ball” (Poetry, May 2025) wasn’t fit for purpose because it came across as testy and dismissive. I’m not equipped nor disposed to be a poetry critic, only a consumer with thoughts. And my thoughts were unruly.

A standard I try to uphold if I’m to sound off is to take a writer seriously. Doing so entails allowing myself to be roiled and provoked by what’s pleased to call itself a poem, having cleared the bar of editors pleased to call themselves poets. It’s not my remit to mock or satirize or deride a text which I find inscrutable.

Approaching a poem confrontationally is to mount resistance to ostensibly impervious utterance. Trying to articulate to myself how or why it gets under my skin implements a working assumption that getting under a consenting reader’s skin is what poetry’s meant to do. It’s easy to lose sight of this premise, because reading aggressively is strenuous and time-consuming. You and I have only the precious moments allotted to us. 

Negativity is indifference, not indignation. I have found that sometimes, when I’ve incurred the sunken cost of wrestling with an infuriating text, I’ve begun willynilly to internalize one or more aspects of it, to reach what I call an accommodation, paying it at least a grudging respect.

Just to revisit Glazier’s poem for a moment, I uphold the potential of these utterances to linger in my head, perhaps become memorable:

Absence roughs up / My dead dog in the blood / Of babysitters
Little porcelain / Poppet, hand / The tureen of blood / Now to papa
I’m a gentleman / Dressed in pink paper / Ballooned assless chaps

“Assless chaps,” by the way, are an accoutrement of the working cowboy. The following line is “Float the violet quarry,” which I let stand subjunctively on the model of “Cry the beloved country,” exercising reader’s discretion when the text itself isn’t dispositive.

What I have still failed to do is extrapolate a framework in which the elements of “The Gazing Ball” cohere in the service of a unitary message. That may not be an expectation the writer intends to meet or which I’m entitled to have.

I’m stuck with the bias that reading what I call “verse objects” when they’re refractory and I don’t know (or care) if they’re poems or not sharpens my faculty for recognizing, processing and assimilating newness. The only person who need care what I make of the objects is me. Anyone else who does is surpassing kind and someone I want to know.

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

What the hell is going on in “The Gazing Ball”?  I had to lock horns with Mitchell Glazier’s poem (Poetry, May 2025) and break it down robustly in order to reach a fragile accommodation. I’ve come to expect having to do this with much verse filtered through Poetry’s reading committee. My approach is to fall back on the godliness of syntax. If the writer respects language half as much as I do, chaos is dodged. If the writer doesn’t, we never met.

Fortunately, what scans as jabberwocky in “The Gazing Ball” does have structure once you look below the bizarro surfaces and cracked lines.

Consider the first 18 words of the poem:

Queenly swans nudge eternity figs
Yellow rose fire

Lit by a ghost breath
I’ve eaten you someplace before
[…]

Wrap your mind around the base assertion that “swans nudge figs.” An obvious-enough adjective describes the swans: “queenly.” A curious adjective describes the nudged figs: “eternity” A flagrant metaphor placed in apposition to those nudged figs further characterizes them: “yellow rose fire lit by a ghost breath.” (The reader must intuit a full stop here.) Figs whose hue is like the fire of a yellow rose — radiance blasted by a fastuous flower — is rather pretty. Go figure what kind of illumination “a ghost breath” casts upon that fire, but the expression’s metaphysicality gives it a certain staying power. In the next assertion, a speaker apostrophizes (talks to) the swan-nudged eternity figs: “I’ve eaten you someplace before.”

Let me go straight to paraphrase in order to save you and me time. Next, several unlikely subjects conjointly “nip” something and “curtsy” to something else. The subjects (actors, agents) are “venom,” “chops” (lamb? pork?), “novels” and “peacocks.” The venom is that of a “terrapin” (a freshwater turtle); the chops are “heart-shaped”; the novels are “beautiful [and] rare”; and the peacocks are “bedlam,” denoting uproar and confusion. The terrapin venom is making a mess on someone’s clothing, “sopping cream suits.” What these several creatures and objects functioning as subjects of the sentence engage in nipping are “limbs”; indeed, “nip limbs a-rosy” is what they do. Leaving them pink? The thing venom, chops, novels and peacocks curtsy to is “the apricot cross.”

Terrapin venom
Sopping cream suits

Heart-shaped chops
Beautiful, rare novels

Bedlam peacocks
Nip limbs a-rosy

Curtsy
The apricot cross
[…]

There’s more than half the poem yet to parse and construe. You take it from here (the link’s up top). Dozens of other new poems await my grappling and I’m out of time for this one. I’ll only remark that the “The Gazing Ball”’s last line is stated so baldly, in contradistinction to what precedes, that it fluoresces:

The poets who offed themselves
Have formed a small country

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved