The Book Corner: Poetry Time (Charles Bernstein & Obama Poems)

 Yes, it's poetry time, boys and girls. Don't worry, it won't hurt you. Remember "Sticks & Stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me?" Well, there you go. Words might help you, though, and give you some new thoughts and ideas you hadn't considered before. Come to think of it, that can be scary, too. But seriously... you won't get hurt. You might even like it...

1. ALL THE WHISKEY IN HEAVEN: SELECTED POEMS (Charles Bernstein, Farrar Strauss & Giroux)

Charles Bernstein loves words. He loves the sounds words make, and he loves the effects the right words have placed in correct conjunction with the right words. Sometime he likes to place them in ways that have clear, distinct meanings; on other occasions you might get a headache trying to puzzle out the significance of what they mean. And sometimes, they'll even make you laugh, because Bernstein is by no means a pretentious poet or filled with self-regard to such a degree he can't take himself and his work lightly.

What he HAS made his major reputation as, however, is as a writer of work that cleverly plays around with the English language in a way few other poets ever have. In a Bernstein poem, you'll often start out going down one path, then right in the middle of a line switch to what seems like a completely different poem for about two or three lines, then to another. But pay attention: even with all the changing paths, he always knows what he's doing and what he's trying to achieve. And if you follow carefully, you'll see that what appear to be radically disparate parts really do make a cohesive whole.  But that's not all: In poems like "Azoot D'Puund", Bernstein fills pages with what seem to be completely nonsense words, not identifiable as having any meaning in English or anywhere else. But remember what I said about him loving the sounds of words: even these "nonsense" verses are far from random: whether you "understand" the poem or not, you have to recognize the sheer poetry of the SOUNDS these words make. Bernstein is a genuine magician with the language, and nowhere are these abilities more apparent than in poems like these.

But as I said, he's also a very humorous poet. You probably can't go more than a few poems in a row in a collection like "All The Whiskey In Heaven" without encountering a line that will make you laugh. And I genuinely don't think I've ever encountered any writings on 9/11, in poetry or any other format, that capture the impossible-to-define mix of emotions that everyone was feeling following that day as well as Bernstein's incredibly powerful "Report From Liberty Street".  He gets intensely political in "Girly Man", and in a couple of poems writes from the point of view of a reader who is constantly demanding to know what each little detail of a poem "means",  right down to why a comma is placed where it is. The message, of course: yes, any given poem probably does "mean" something, but it really is not essential for every reader to always know what that is.

If you've never read Charles Bernstein before, it would be difficult to imagine a better way to become introduced to him than by "All The Whiskey In Heaven: Selected Poems". It contains a broad, representative sampling of all the types of poetry that this remarkable writer has composed over the past 30 years or so, and in a single volume will educate many to the incredible breadth of subjects and styles that poetry can deal with. If you have any set ideas about what poetry is or can be, this book will probably change them.

2. STARTING TODAY: 100 POEMS FOR OBAMA'S FIRST 100 DAYS (edited by Arielle Greenberg, University Of Iowa Press).

This book, on the other hand, is very specific. The poems were originally composed for a blog of the same name, where 100 different poets were asked to contribute a poem each that would be ideally written on the same day it was published. They didn't have to directly write about the new president, but they had to have some sort of connection to the concerns and worries of the nation as the new leader was beginning his term. Some of the contributors used the occasion to really stretch the concept of "political poetry", others... not so much.

Roughly half the poems... actually, maybe a little more than half... are very direct, with Obama's name right in the title, and the names of his family and colleagues scattered throughout the verses. I'll admit that for the most part, these are the ones that didn't quite work for me. The best poetry occurs when the poet is able to be completely free to create whatever they feel compelled to create, and to tie a poet's hands and provide them with a pre-conceived theme doesn't often result in very inspired work. Whether you like Obama or not (and I'll freely admit that while I have some quibbles with his policies sometimes, I did vote for him and have no regrets about having done so), you'll probably not feel very inspired by 5 or 6 poems in a row that amount to "I hope you do well, Mr. President". Though I was surprised by the creativity of the poem that kept drawing parallels between the wife of Michelle Obama and Paul McCartney (who wrote the song "Michelle" shortly after she was born) and Stevie Wonder (who of course recorded duets with McCartney).

What I DID appreciate, though, were the poets who rebelled a bit against the limits of their assignment and wrote works that address the concerns of a new president in more indirect ways. These are poems that, if you read them in some poetry journal instead of a book with this theme to it, you would probably not make the connection with the new president. But you would realize what strong works they were. And of course placed where they are in this volume, they do fulfill the writers' "assignment" while still allowing their creators' creativity to roam free. I wish there were more of them in "Starting Today" than there are, but still, there are enough of them to make the book a very interesting read. Just not enough for them to make it a great one.