EthicalDative

Consider this opening of “Minotaur” by Douglas Kearney:

MINOTAUR

The best part,
how we make to
part the beast
from its self.

The illusion fostered by the abrupt entrée en matière is that of a conversation suddenly caught on a hot mic. The reader is admitted to the “best part” of a narrative which has developed out of earshot.

Of “parts” there are two: one nominal, one verbal; a piece of a whole versus an act of separating.

In the odd phrase “how we make to” (a regionalism?), what work does “make” do in performing the act of parting the beast from “its self”?

Speaking of selves, one of my favorite affectations is exploding the English reflexive compounds into their constituents: “itself” —> “its self,” “themselves” —> “their selves,” etc. I thought I had invented the cheeky gesture!

Here’s the poem’s ending:

Take the bull […]
finding a way,
reeling, through new
bewildering appetites.

The finale evokes a taurine monster inflicting undisclosed appetitive havoc on virgin terrain. Does the wind-up seem a tad… rushed? It’s because I’ve left something out. Cleaving the 2 segments I’ve cited above are 21 lines of parenthetical intercalation. Bulkwise, most of the poem resides in the aside. There, speaker invites reader to get down and dirty in imagining the bull whose head the minotaur’s got:

Take the bull
(whose head it’s got.
Now, conjure you—
the offal, bovine throat,
a veiny tract meant
for an alfalfa pasture, […]

The poem traipses through a trampled garden “got at” by the beast, decorative, human-centric blooms “chomped down,” then takes a turn that still puzzles me:

and there: a tendril
coils from your skull,
then petals split
the temple, come
to bloom. See, how
now the bull face,
stricken, blinks), […]

Who is the “you” behind “your”? In reading “Now, conjure you” at the sentence’s start, I took the “you” to be the subject of the command. Could it be instead the direct object, inviting the reader to be, in the reader’s own head, the bull? It’s a rare poem that doesn’t leave such swinging doors to a never-mind space banging in directionless breezes.

The blink, a sign of life, where unexpected can have a jolting effect. Remember how “Nothing looks back, // blinks twice,” in Kevin Young’s “Usher” ? Such is the case here with the “stricken” bull face. We’d been lulled into visualizing a skull split by blooms. Then… it blinks.

In “Minotaur,” Douglas Kearney swings a come-to-Jesus wrecking ball at the fabulous man-bull graft handed down from the back of beyond. It’s an impish gambol and cunning typographical stunt, meant to be disruptive, to stand symbolic, awesome, awful folderol on its fool head.

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

By all accounts poetry was the first literature of the sundry peoples. It predated writing, so rhyme, rhythm and alliteration helped rhapsodes and minstrels hold it in their heads.

In contemporary lyric rhyme is absent (thank goodness), alliteration rare; rhythm lingers, though not metered. There are notable exceptions. Context clues and clearcut statement give way to in-your-face compression and figure-me-out phrasing. It takes multiple readings to sniff out a gist. Verse texts disdaining syntactic cohesion register as utterance rockets firing aspirational poetry thrusters.

Imagine my surprise when Ocean Vuong described how he first learned to write a pantoum. It’s as if a pole vaulter described learning how to crochet. I’ve encountered “pantoum” perhaps three times in my reading, have looked it up every time. Invariably, I warm to the form’s description until I read instances, then it seems, like the villanelle, too showboaty to take seriously. Or am I wrong?

Witness the psychic boost I glean from the merest modicum of mastery over highly formal Classical Arabic poems. These ingenious monsters predate Beowulf and use language largely still extant! In their thrall I’m drawn of late to test even the chill waters of a Milton or a Pope or a Dryden. Whence this impulse and whither tends it? Point of reference? Port in a storm? Can it be that ostensibly remote poetries have affair with one another and can lend us help we desperately seek in confronting the ostensibly modern?

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

Can a person swear for joy? It’s what I do. My reflex on encountering a poem that triggers a rush of involvement on first reading is to let fly a putatively disobliging epithet. It’s a reverb from the salutary shock delivered by luminous words arranged in crystalline structures.

I’ve no license to quote Li-Young Lee’s entire poem titled “From Blossoms”; you can read it here. Let me just excerpt constructs from the first 3 strophes, unspooled from their lineation (is that sacrilege?), and quote the last strophe integrally, with its tolling as of a poignant recessional:

From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches…

From laden boughs… comes nectar… the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,… to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

The penultimate line, driving a swoop to the impossible, flaunts a specimen of truly purposeful enjambment in free verse.

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved