Plume is a tastefully understated online poetry monthly featuring some of contemporary poetry's luminaries. This month's edition, Issue 19, includes, among others: poet, novelist, and film-maker Sherman Alexie; award-winning poets: Tom Sleigh, Phillis Levin. Ron Smith, William Trowbridge, Maureen Seaton; and poet, essayist, and novelist Jay Parini.
Plume's editor—poet, Daniel Lawless—is a self-described Francophile with a fondness for the prose poem, a tradition-breaking form introduced to French literature by 19th century French poet Aloysious Bertrand, and later taken up by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé.
With the advent of free verse, (thank you, Walt Whitman, and others), the defining elements of poetry have been up for grabs. The “standard” prose poem, with its neglect of line breaks, makes no attempt to impersonate a poem. To be sure, a successful prose poem can have poetic elements: metaphor, simile, and even rhythm. In some cases, we may also find what appears to be a poem, yet reads flatly as prose.
Prose Poems
Three pieces in this issue appear in the standard prose poem format.
Sherman Alexie's prose poem, “Dear Bathtub,” explores the pleasure and sense of escape he finds “from my wife and kids, from this whole damn life” while soaking in the tub. Like the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Charles Simic, Alexie seems to delight in the numinous quality of every day phenomena. His other two poems in this issue appear with intentional line breaks. “Spectacle” is a touching, 4-line poem that animates a couple's eyeglasses lying on their bed “with their bare legs entwined.” The poem, “Freeway,” is a more sobering reflection on the inherent, but generally ignored, dangers of commuting: “We are not drivers / As much as we are survivors / Of a dozen potential wrecks.”
The prose poem, “Ars Poetica, With Cow,” by Maureen Seaton, describes a country girl's fascination with cows, particularly the body of a cow decomposing in a ditch. Like a character out of a Flannery O'Connor short story, this odd girl, alone in the fields of “a state three times the size of Ireland,” is wholly at one with nature, carelessly leaping from tree tops, “brave behind the dying and the dead.”
“The Gifts,” by Daniel Bourne, though presented in prose format, reads with the stark, impenetrable quality of a surrealist poem. A meditation on entropy, “The Gifts” opens with the image of a closet where communion wafers, used in a game of backgammon, decompose and become food for hungry mice. In the second paragraph, Bourne writes: “All objects when abandoned develop a talent for self-loathing.” From there, he makes the dream-like leap to the final two sentences: “How else could the elbows wear so thin? How else could the bird fly into your mouth.”
Poems Per Se
The rest of the poems in this issue of Plume present themselves as poems with intentional line breaks, though some are more poem-like than others.
Phillis Levin's, “On Either Side of the Word Lie,” is a riddle that coaxes the reader into searching for the answer within the poem. The first lines continue from the title... “The letters that must be taken away / To find the word nestled inside / Or not yet born.” Whether one finds the answer or not, this poem manages to teach us that bits of meaning (morphemes) can be found not just in words, but within them, as well.
The poem with the best line in this issue of Plume would have to be Annette Barnes' “Without Apology.” The world seems to be falling apart in smallish ways: a promised meteor shower goes unseen, Underground passengers are rude, and the drinks inhabited: “The fly we fish from our wine glass is / a recovering alcoholic, can't walk straight / but remembers how to fly.” The poem takes a darker turn when it's revealed that, for one of their company, the world is indeed fragmented: “We feel him feeling this world's / a fearful place.” Their friend manages to flee unseen, but is caught and restrained and questions surface: “What is it called, / salt shaker, person, weather? Why does hair / grow from his ears, why aren't his trouser's clean?”
Cynthia Cruz's poem, “The Birthday Ceremony,” conjures a jaded view of an opulent birthday bash. Both the setting and Cruz's liberal use of enjambment provide a jarring sense of irony: “Seventeen rooms of long maroon / Tables of endless / Raspberry cream cake, / Cheap California / Champagne, and stacks of magazines and childhood / Photographs / On the pale pink plush.” If this weren't enough to convince us of the less-than-glowing impressions of the event, the poem ends with one last jab at ceremony: “The mansion of childhood / Is shattering. / A sentinel, I stand at the entrance / To the burning fortress.”
Poetic Referents
A surprisingly large sample of poems in this issue either take inspiration from, or make some reference to, works of literature or art.
In the poem, “Morgellons,” by Australian poet and editor, John Kinsella, we find what appears to be a poem, but reads as flat prose. The least poetic of the pieces in this issue, “Morgellons” references the gifted 17th century English author and scientist, Thomas Browne, the above poet, Daniel Bourne, and Jorge Luis Borges while discussing the controversial dermatological condition of Morgellons Syndrome. This piece more informs than seduces with language as we learn what connects these three persons to the subject of Morgellons, described by many health professionals as a psychosomatic skin disorder.
Jay Parini's “Poem with Allusions” is exactly that. Lifting lines from Sandburg, Eliot, Keats, Pound, and most likely others, Parini evokes the bleakness of Eliot's “Prufrock.” The narrator addresses a lover: “I've made my way through Chapman's Homer / and watched my hands, like ragged claws / crawl over you at night.” This piece illustrates the powerful influence that using another poet's lines can have on the tonality of the work. Near the end of “Poem with Allusions” Eliot appears again, this time from “The Wasteland”: “I'd not thought death undid so many.” What we are left with here is a poem by Jay Parini with all the memetic overtones of T.S. Eliot.
In “My Lovely Garonne” Jessica Greenbaum draws a comparison between the river where she lives to the “Lovely Garonne” in southern France—a reference to contemporary Polish poet Adam Zagajewski's collection, Unseen Hand, wherein the Garonne River makes frequent appearances. We find Greenbaum's river “fibrillating / at the end of the block” a symbol of life that shines through “our despair about the destruction / people have wrought against each other and the earth.”
Romanian-born poet, Nina Cassian, living in the US since 1985, has two poems in this issue—both of them terse, meditative reflections on phenomena. Her poem, “A Withered Rose,” like Parini's poem above, begins with a literary reference, this time, Gertrude Stein: “A withered rose is a withered rose / is a withered rose” and ends with two lines that suggest Emily Dickinson: “My head also contemplates the floor / where nothing grows.” Cassian's other poem, “Purity,” is a Zen-like contemplation on becoming one with the surroundings: “The lake is an immense cloud / made of mother-of-pearl / I am the mermaid of the lake. / – I am an infinite melody / like the murmur of the rain.”
“Seventh Circle,” by the much-acclaimed poet, essayist, and playwright, Tom Sleigh, is a three-part poem that takes it's cues from Dante's Inferno, specifically Canto XII. “Seventh Circle” explores the nature of testosterone-fueled aggression—the victors, the victims, and the complicity of those who bear witness to the brutality. Sleigh takes us from a school yard brawl where combatants are seen as “fighting giants” to the Dante's river of blood: “Another day of life when you theorized / that the current of the blood-boiling river / could make you the terror. Or the terrorized.”
In his poem, “The Caravaggio Room,” Ron Smith gives us an irreverent tour of the Ufizzi Gallery in Florence. We begin with Caravaggio's “Bacchus” and the opening lines of the poem: “'Yuck,' you heave in front of that sick boy / with the gray face. 'Bacchus, my ass,' you say. / 'Caravaggio's,' I say. And so you smile / grimly.” From there we visit the lush Renaissance painter's subjects of David and Goliath, St. Jerome, Madonna and child, catamites, and satyrs—all building to a smoldering eroticism: “Let's get the hell out of here. / I need a Negroni / and a long, slow taste / of your salty flesh.”
William Trowbridge takes his inspiration from an album cover of Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf in his poem, “Wolf.” Trowbridge uses alliteration skillfully throughout, but particularly in the first few lines: “Ink black, shark-toothed, slithering / serpentine off the cover of my album / Peter and the Wolf...” The Prokofiev album is only one of the things the young boy explores in the family basement. There's also “...the old cathedral radio, with its glowing / green eye...” and “...Dad's forbidden / stash of 40s girlie mags...” Here, as with Ron Smith's “The Caravaggio Room,” one thing leads to another and we end with arousal: “...as bold face invitations from the spreads / in Whisper, Show, and Eyeful / raised the fuzzy wolf hairs on my neck.”
The amazing thing about Plume—besides featuring some of the best contemporary poetry out there—is that it is freely offered, no subscription necessary. A glance through the archives points to even more great poets to read: Jane Hirshfield, Robert Pinksy, Sharon Olds, Ellen Bass, and Mary Jo Salter. Plume is a poetry lover's goldmine. As a translation of the website's subtitle, (by French poet and screenwriter, Jacques Prevert), says: For those who loved it, the garden remains open.