550: Alcosser

Perhaps I’m overgenerous, but for each piece (or author) that I read, I genuinely try to like it or to find something worthwhile or interesting in it. If I should find this difficult, then I try to see why someone else would (for someone obviously did). This is what I had to do with Sandra Alcosser. And of course, if you try hard enough, you can surprise yourself. For the first few poems, I was, admittedly, quite lost. I couldn’t seem to find a foothold (other than the obvious Southern setting, exploratory and almost adventurous nature of the speakers), and I didn’t like finding myself in the stifling humidity amid unsettling images and thoughts. The South is not a place I have fond memories of or want to return to, and Alcosser paints it vividly, luridly, grotesquely, pulling you into it and yet pushing you away at the same time. I felt as if I drowned with her there. But even by the end of this section, I was growing accustomed to her voice and able to honestly appreciate some of the poems, “In the Jittering World,” in particular: “Perhaps we are both lost in our landscape, / woman and chameleon always changing to save our skin” (20). So then, you can imagine my relief when the next section’s introduction whisked me away to another time and another place, and when upon looking ahead, I saw reference to my beloved Mission Mountains and indications of a much more genial and familiar setting. I’m not sure why this should make a difference, but it did.

Side note: I can’t decide if Alcosser owes a debt to the surrealists or if there is something else holding her seemingly scattered verse together. I am not always able to follow her leaps. Perhaps I’m not meant to.

The bittersweet nature of “Possessions” (21) and “The Red Dress” (35) gave both of these poems an interesting take on nostalgia and both the patterns and unpredictability of the people we think we are close to. Though I have to admit that I’m a little baffled by the idea of prose poems: I don’t quite understand how they are poetry instead of vignettes or short stories. Plenty of other authors write prose poetically but don’t call it poetry. So, of course, off to trusty Google where I find that the form originated in France in the 19th century from whence it was borrowed into English. Modernists like Pound and Eliot rejected it while Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson embraced it. The only line between prose poems and short fiction (particularly flash fiction and short short fiction) appears to be the choice of the author in naming it. Rachel Barenblat of In Posse Review (online) puts it this way, “if a writer calls something a prose poem, then it's a prose poem,” and that’s that. This mingling of genres and frustrating of expectations is a positive movement in literature as far as I’m concerned. I almost wish we didn’t have to name and categorize everything and that this could be a non-issue, but that is, of course, not the case.

Subversiveness seems to be a common element of the prose poem in both its paradoxical name and form and in its content or attitude. It is purposely breaking rules, and thus, while some may try to constrain it for a while and define it (I found some rather restrictive definitions in my internet search, laughable, actually), it repeatedly defies definitions, continually evolving. I can see its beauty and its use, but I am still a little confounded by the notion of prose poetry or perhaps just by the naming of it. Though I find it interesting that at the bookstore where I worked until recently, sudden fiction and flash fiction collections grabbed people’s attentions and sold remarkably well, while “poetry” sold rarely. Is there something in the familiarity, the appearance of a lack of pretense, the approachability of prose poetry that (like Billy Collins) will draw in unexpected readers to poetry while sometimes rebuffing the more snobbish elements of the literati? I have to admit that of all her poems, Alcosser’s prose poems are the ones that stick in my mind the most. But even then, they didn’t feel as poetic as I perhaps wanted them to. I didn’t encounter the kinds of metaphors and use of language in them as I did in her poem poems, and for this, I am slightly disappointed. I wonder how the process of writing these is different and/or similar to the process of writing in a recognizable versified form.

I also read some poems by the three authors listed on Dr. Keeler’s website, and I don’t quite know what to do with them yet. I think that, especially with poets who are writing unconventional poetry, I have to become acquainted with them in order to really understand what they are doing and what they are saying. I guess I have to make the Other not so Other by forging a familiarity or a relationship with it. In Alcosser’s case, after reading her whole collection, I got a feel for her style and her preoccupations. I got comfortable with her and was thus better able to appreciate that which I didn’t understand or didn’t like before. I was able then to feel her feminism, her sexuality, her relationship with nature, the way she explodes myths while sometimes still embracing her essence (this I found to be particularly the case in “The Intricacy of the Song Inverse to the Dull Lores” [61]), the way she explores the humanity in nature and the nature in humanity, as when she expresses envy for the “Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel” (65). I was particularly struck by the end of “Trajectory” where she writes, “like orbiting / the planet on a tempered glass // windshield, one crash / and all would shatter, not shatter exactly, / but fracture full spectrum, like life / as we know it – radiant beyond rescue” (68). This is beautiful, sad, and true; it paints a vivid picture and says something recognizable in a way I had never experienced before. As I have only read a handful of poems by each of the others, I have not yet been able to grasp their voices or appreciate their choices, although I did find them interesting and provocative. They are still Other to me. And while I know that each poem should work on its own, I also think that the context is important. A book of poems can become its own (relatively) self-contained universe wherein each piece has its place and can build upon the themes, images, feelings, and rhythms of the ones around it. I didn’t expect to like Alcosser at first, but this experience of a whole and the way the sections fit with each other or contrasted or complicated each other has given me an appreciation for her poetry that I might not have had if I had encountered just one poem singly.