Betty Adcock Poem in Shining Rock Review Online
Now We're Getting Somewhere
By Kim Addonizio
(W.West. Norton Visitor, 2021, 81 pp, $26.95)
Spanning virtually thirty years and accumulating numerous awards along the way, including the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Honor, a Pushcart Prize, and Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, Kim Addonizio's poetry proves itself a descendant of the poetic voices of Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, and Anne Sexton. However, describing and analyzing her work co-ordinate to the prosody of those poets would be inaccurate. While Kim Addonizio's work contains elements of her predecessors' poetry, specially razor-sharp wit, she confronts misogyny, racism, classism, climate change, and pollution while delving into the personal problems of everyday existence, such as depression, loss, and loneliness, in poems that vary in way and register. Her new collection— remaining true to form and a career's worth of expectation—surprises, questions, teases, and satirizes with a voice as vibrant and as clever as ever. In a give-and-take, Now We're Getting Somewhere is eclectic: as funny, powerful, and philosophical. Indeed, Addonizio demonstrates her eclecticism throughout the collection. Epigraphs from Leonard Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor appended before the table of contents setup a scale on which the poems fall, from the deeply personal to the outright political, only this is non to say that these poems lack nuance. Instead, the pieces in Now We're Getting Somewhere complicate each other and deepen already profound moments.
For instance, the start two poems of the book, "Dark in the Castle," from which the first section takes its title, and "Blackness Hour Blues" prime the reader for a collection that will invoke form and formlessness in means that will mirror the extremes of the public and private, the political and personal. Find the first six lines of "Night in the Castle" stretch across the page, a technique which Addonizio began incorporating with Tell Me, suggesting C.K. Williams's essay-like poems, with images galore and personal asides, and, to a lesser extent, Whitman's poesy:
I'thou not sure what to practise near the scorpion twitching on the wall
Mayhap I should slam it with this volume of terrible verse
or just read aloud to it until it dies of histrionic metaphor
haemorrhage out on the ancient stones in a five-octave aria
If I go a picayune drunker I might attempt to murder it with my sandal
I gave up on mercy a while ago
Though the lines are reminiscent of Williams and Whitman, Addonizio makes this style her own. By eliminating punctuation and depending on capitalization to betoken new sentences, she characterizes the speaker, highlighting her meandering mind, which allows the poet to explore such themes as entitlement, loneliness, and depression through a serial of turns before returning to the scorpion that symbolizes and so much, including control, decease, and sexual desire:
Meanwhile the scorpion is still in that location twitching blackly
Reciting something about violence & the prison house of ego
& I tin can hear the clashing armies on the broad lawn outside
Sinking downwards into history & then continuing up once more
Addonizio's outset poem expands ever outward, preparing her reader for a collection filled with possibilities that, given the allusions to Rumi'southward "prison of my ego" and Arnold'due south "Dover Beach," tin be spiritual.
By the next poem, Addonizio has her reader thinking that every slice will sing jazz-like— crescendos and decrescendos, accelerandos and ritardandos, improvised for the moment, and subsequently taking in the whole drove, she delivers on that promise. Analyzing the volume poem by poem showcases the poet's mastery of formal limerick as well as free poetry. In "Black Hour Blues," Addonizio writes a nonce version of the blues poem form in which she repeats the word "black" in every line until the final 2 lines of the poem, instead of having a traditional refrain, and equally the poem lists the means that black people, the indigenous community, immigrants, the surroundings, and the poor run into disaster, the rhymes unravel to reverberate the ways that the Western earth has failed them. She accomplishes this without losing the class's music:
Black Deepwater Horizon pelican and dolphin.
Through Standing Rock a blackness worm crawls.
Black Baltimore Mali Republic of iraq Sudan Kingdom of cambodia Sinai Selma Uh.
The darkling beetle raises its blackness dorsum and runs
Through the black Ghost Ship and Grenfell Tower ruins.
Black Syria Somalia Ferguson Uh Attica Gaza Republic of yemen Huh.
Though the verse form lacks consequent stresses per line or a meter that one would expect in song, Addonizio maintains the poem's structure through anaphora, assonance, alliteration, and rhyme. Though some readers might recollect that the author'south list leads to confusion and fails to expand upon those tragedies, she does so deliberately to emphasize and bring attention to the injustices. The poem ends on a annotation of invocation to justice: "Blindfolded goddess, long sword fatigued / nowhere in the Oh come down come up down."
In the infinite of just two pages, Addonizio presents the reader with the aforementioned poems, which fall on dissimilar sides of the personal-political spectrum. Their proximity might also suggest that no separation truly exists between the two. This pattern continues through the book's beginning section, which contains then many gems—"Animals," "Grace," and "High Desert, New United mexican states," to proper noun a few— but the diverseness of themes and subjects maintains a reader's interest throughout the drove.
"High Desert, New United mexican states" transitions from the hum of capitalistic epicenters to the natural earth and examines human being existence from its point of view, its value in our spiritual lives:
Temple of the rattlesnake's organized religion.
Deluge and heat-surge. Crèche of the atom's
Rupture. Night blackens like a violin
And bright flour falls from the kitchen of heaven.
The imagery deepens with meditation, and the reader realizes that the world, though darker with age like the varnish on a violin, also finds redemption. Flour falling from heaven'south kitchen alludes to the idea of manna and spiritual nourishment, which unites desolation with growth, and Addonizio adds to the religious experience past employing monorhyme through the sonnet, expressing the interconnectedness of what humankind divides into the natural earth and civilisation. Insisting that human nature and nature are the same, she writes that ane can "well-nigh forget the shame of beingness human. / Fume tree. Sage. Non everything is broken." Bringing in more of her own poetic influences and centering on finding the divine in nature, Addonizio alludes to Dante: "…Carelessness / your despair, yous who enter here forsaken. / The wind is saying something. Listen." The poem never arises to the level of sermonizing, nor does information technology scold. It illustrates and implores.
Written from 2015 to 2020, during the Trump era and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the collection can be read through the lenses of isolation and frustration, pervasive feelings across the Us—giving the title, At present We're Getting Somewhere, a secondary, ironic meaning. The most useful way to read this collection is analyzing it from both the political and personal, a weaving together of the public and private worlds that create our realities, but Addonizio does non pander to political in-groups or obscure her work with esoteric allusions. Her collection's exploration of public and private lives underscores an accessibility establish throughout her career, making this drove read near equally a long-awaited conversation with an old friend.
Directly addresses to Whitman in "Animals" and to Keats in "I Can't Terminate Loving You John Keats," and even 1 to her ain guitar make the personal seem fifty-fifty more so to poet-readers, who tend to have similar relationships to their influences. In an interview with Fringe Magazine from 2010, Rachel Dacus asked Kim Addonizio, "What is the purpose of poesy?" She responded, "What is the meaning of life?" As a poet should, Addonizio answers subjective questions and the feel of living with poems, not soundbites.
At times, exploring life through poetry can lead to contradiction, but the poet does not shy from it. What the reader discovers in "Loftier Desert, New Mexico" opposes the argument the speaker has with Whitman in "Animals." Beginning with a Whitman epigraph, "I call back I could turn and live with animals," the speaker of "Animals" proceeds to lampoon the quotation:
O Walt you were wrong, they aren't placid or self-contained
I just watched a spoonbill make carpaccio out of a frog
& crocodiles dining on wildebeests trying to cross the Maro River
It's incorrect to say O in poesy these days
which makes me desire to have a loud orgasm right here
in an unashamed animal way
Through humor, Addonizio satirizes herself through Whitman. The tongue-in-cheek poem, while on some levels contradictory, proves that people may be but as driven as animals are by impulse and instinct, despite culture.
Even if one reads such poems every bit inconsistent, the disagreement between them exemplifies the sometimes contrary means people can perceive the globe and this is especially true when it comes to the personas in unlike poems, which allows Addonizio to embody a Dylan-Roof-type bigot in "Grace," reminiscent of Patricia Smith's poem "Skinhead," and also affords her the flexibility to write from the perspective of a person who explores despair and ennui through the phrase "in bed," originating every bit a joke made by calculation the aforementioned phrase to the end of wisdoms found in fortune cookies. This versatility permits poems like "Résumé" and "To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Side by side Stall" in the second department, "Songs for Pitiful Girls," to surprise the reader, like a note bent only so in a guitar solo.
Written later on Dorothy Parker's most famous poem of the same championship, "Résumé" takes Parker's witty poem concerning suicide and envisions it as reasons 1 should drinkable. Besides providing the collection additional humor, the slice offers the reader a momentary suspension from the more serious pieces that precede it and offers a formal, lighter poem between costless verse, irresolute the tempo of the collection:
Friends are distracted;
Aging stinks;
You'll soon exist subtracted;
You lot might too drink.
These modify-of-pace poems tend to be amid the almost memorable, calculation to the eclectic experience of the book, but Addonizio not only changes styles or speakers to direct and renew attending to the poems merely she also modulates theme among poems in the same section then that the reader never senses a lull in the poetry. For example, she counterbalances "Alienmatch.com," a humorous take on online dating with one of the book's near touching poems, "To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Side by side Stall," which Addonizio refers to as a "fourteen-liner." The poem, at first glance, appears to be like so many other free-verse takes on the sonnet, but Addonizio's use of line breaks and spare punctuation propel the reader into the spiraling misery of the woman the speaker addresses. 1 feels the poet is speaking directly to her heartache and devastation, that the reader is the subject of this poem. We are. Notwithstanding, the poem does not simply spiral out of control. Through assonance, half-rhyme, anaphora, and alliteration, the poet structures what seems to exist entirely chaotic:
if yous swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed upwardly
to watch the moon swallow the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why non if yous remember nothing &
no one tin can / listen I love you joy is coming.
Of class, words like "river" and "ran" immediately resonate, but further inspection reveals more ingemination. "Swam" and "sang" sally, every bit do "stayed," "dominicus," and "stitches," but "microphone" and "moon," forth with "nil," "no" "can," and "coming," are also present. Though some might argue that a few of these words need to be closer to each other to hear the alliteration, they are fewer than x syllables apart, many others beingness much closer. The persistent second-person pronouns also reverberate, demanding the reader's attention. Ane also notices the assonance present throughout the poem. The long "o" and short "a" sounds occur throughout the piece, echoing the sobs of the poem's subject, and half-rhymes like "nix" with "coming" and "sang" and "stayed" create the structure on which the music can shut. The result of such conscientious crafting is a powerful bulletin that remains with the reader—that someone in the world loves you, that happiness is on its mode.
"Confessional Poetry," the book'south third section, arrives as the biggest surprise and change of pace. Addonizio spreads ane poem of thirty-five lines over xiii pages. These pages, with no more than than five lines of poetry floating on each one, provide ample fourth dimension to meditate on the words and explore why the poet chose such an experimental approach to layout. The white space acts equally a kind of tacet, a long period of residuum or silence in a musical limerick. Addonizio seems to imply, in a John-Cage-like way, that the reader's own heed becomes part of what confessional poesy is. Though the poem itself is more of a short lyrical essay on what constitutes the confessional verse form, the slice besides subverts and satirizes the confessional style—the poetry itself and the reader:
I woke up this morning from uneasy dreams & put on iii pairs of tiny
…….high heels
Embed me in plastic, pass me around
Put me onstage and so I can stand over a grave trap
& a homo can explain what's wrong with me
Rape me by the light of the moon shining over a nuclear reactor pool
Is in that location a single thought in my pretty little caput?
Lets take another cocktail & discover out
while I remove these viscid bandages
The risk of dividing the verse form over then much space makes sense considering it allows the reader to interpret the speaker in two ways: the speaker as ane person on a journey or a series of speakers that transition from page to page. Indeed, the poem itself could be mistakenly interpreted as a series of smaller poems for this reason, but the poetry works better equally a divided whole because many of the pages practise not work every bit single poems, nor would the poem work if the white space were removed. Without the added space, the poem would stagnate, become one-dimensional. The additional ways to read the verse form pay off only considering the poetry needs it. If the slice had been lineated according to a traditional layout, the speaker'southward lists of what confessional verse is would fizzle into "sloppy, slow, grotesque, unfuckable feelings," which only stresses the point Addonizio is making: that confessional verse is hardly individual and, in many ways, a cooperative enterprise between poet, poem, and reader; therefore, a confessional poem is similar whatever other: "No, the confessional is a mode amidst other modes."
By the quaternary department, "Archive of Contempo Uncomfortable Emotions," the sprawling verses of the first section return. The subtle bookending tricks the reader into thinking that the collection returns to the aforementioned emotional spaces visited in "Night in the Castle," but the last section expands on those spiritual and self-exploratory themes. "Ex" recounts a past relationship that the speaker merely remembers every bit if it had been "a hangover [she] sweated out," just the poem goes across the memory of the relationship, what she thought it was and could take been, and she permits the reader to see how such significant moments in our lives tin come to mean picayune to us and yet be a testament to our endurance:
Mostly I think nigh how little I recollect about him now
similar he was but some decorative saltwater display in an overpriced lobby
or a hangover I sweated out in a unmarried depression-bear on cardio weight routine
when once he was the beast who swallowed me whole
in a huge religiously significant way
Through biblical allusion, Addonizio reminds us that even our little-remembered failures shape us, resulting in wisdom and growth nosotros neglect to recognize. The poet reminds us that many experiences test the faith we have in ourselves and God.
"The Miraculous" works as a mirror image of "High Desert, New Mexico." Instead of a tranquil desert setting, Addonizio sets "The Miraculous" in a bar populated by an untalented band and drunks, all sinners in their own way. The speaker then talks almost her brother's failing liver and near "someone's loud lover / swearing to Christ and the bar to get sober." As the poem progresses, the setting transitions to the natural world, representing, among other things, the speaker's body, the cost of human "progress", and the spiritual world, making this poem an amalgam of the political and personal:
…I go downwards to the oral cavity of the river
ugly with waste. Yellow cream and trash. A tanker
crawling the horizon. What does information technology behave—
oil or chemicals. I was taught a homo could walk on h2o.
That if I listened, and unhinged my eye, I'd hear
a presence stirring the air. And I do: God, the murderer
making things perfectly clear.
Through a polluted river mouth, a tanker at sea, and the wind, the speaker hears God, and similar "High Desert, New Mexico," the sonnet employs monorhyme to establish the divine interconnectedness of the natural, spiritual, and human worlds, making them one, even in audio. Given those connections, the poet leaves the reader wondering if the speaker blames God or humanity for the tragedies she witnesses in the poem. Again, Addonizio surprises us because the resolution of the poem ultimately points to a culpability in everything and everyone, including the reader. Of course, this slice, like so many in the collection, focuses on the struggle of being alive and the innumerable ways arduousness, whether spiritual, political, personal, or social, finds the states and how people, peculiarly women, can live with it.
"Stay," the last poem of Now We're Getting Somewhere, closes the collection with another twist. Afterwards witnessing bigotry, loss, sexism, ecological disaster, temptation, spiritual awakening, and a crisis of faith, Addonizio provides condolement to her reader:
Please look for the transmissions, however faint.
Mind: when a stranger steps into the elevator with a bouquet of white
……..roses not meant for you,
they're meant for you.
Again, the poet finds the spiritual in the mundane, and she arrives at that spirituality through an exam of the ugly parts of living, requiring multiple lenses, an eclectic mixture of styles, voices, and poems to arrive at her message.
Now We're Getting Somewhere reflects living, its profound moments of grace and disgrace, and the collection's power comes from the poet's ability to observe beauty in the same things that terrify u.s.a.. The work, painfully funny and solemn, provides poignant wisdom during a time when wisdom is in short supply.
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Joshua Eric Williams
Joshua Eric Williams is from Carrollton, GA. He graduated with an MFA in Poesy from Western Colorado Academy in Baronial of this year. His poetry has appeared in Measure, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Sonic Boom, and many other print and online journals. In 2014, he won the Eclectic Poetry Prize. His contempo honors include the selection of his poem "Barriers" for publication in an anthology of pandemic writing, The Corking Isolation, and his collection, The Strangest Conversation (Ruddy Moon Printing, 2019), receiving an honorable mention in the Haiku Society of America's 2020 Merit Book Awards.
Source: https://www.literarymatters.org/13-3-kim-addonizios-eclectic-wisdom-a-review-of-now-were-getting-somewhere/
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