i have new poet crushes!

I think I’ve found one of my new favorite poets. This is huge.

Lisa Asagi’s work takes me by the throat. She nails isolation, I mean really freakin nails it. Is her series of dated prose poems (April 14, 15, 22) part of a larger book? The acknowledgments say yes, that they first appeared in Twelve Scenes from 12 A.M. Incredible! Just incredible!

In “April 14,” Asagi sucks me in with her authoritative but delegating tone. She requires the reader to be responsible, she expects the reader to be comfortable without hand-holding and instead trusts us to read through the fragments easily as if we were following her through her sister’s house to the child’s room. Everything changes with the line, “And I wish it could stop,” referencing the plastic fish bobbing mechanically in circles. Before we even reach the following line (equally jarring and vortex-like), she transforms the color of the space from childlike to dark and very adult. I find it interesting that Asagi writes “could” instead of “would.” The phrase, “I wish it would stop,” which I find myself saying often when the dog next door won’t quit barking or when the craziness of scheduling rolls out of control, implies that whatever is happening is physically capable of stopping. That it can happen. When Asagi writes “I wish it could stop,” the room shuts down. She implies with one word a new level of intensity, of impossibility. The poet stops talking about the fish or the room in that moment. She speaks of something much bigger and immortal.

By the next line, we understand this futility, that the ability to stop is rendered hopeless. It expands from the room to the “motion of this living.” Bam! We climax here, this is the moment the poem has been building toward. And surprisingly, she eases us back out. I find that endearing and wonderful; most poets will bring you to the edge and leave you.

I thought a lot about how reading this particular work and others in this week’s reading has already changed my writing. I’m watching what they’re doing and absorbing the directions they’re giving me. I feel like I have new routes to travel, new and more exciting ways to arrive at similar spaces. This is exhilarating. These poets (and Asagi in particular) have rewired tiny parts of my brain, directionally. Even in “April 22,” Asagi writes “But it feels like one by one ropes are being untied and tossed onto a boat I am standing on.” How many times have you known that feeling but not articulated it in a way that makes sense to someone or hasn’t been done a million times? God, I’m in love.

Other poets that are teaching me things:

Agha Shahid Ali, in the poem “A List Memory of Delhi,” re-introduces me to film on the page. The poem reads as if each stanza is a clip from a movie, a series of short scenes in which we get a larger story with ineffable motion. We are literally moving through the poem, we are the camera lens. (This is also really helpful to me for selfish reasons in that I am currently writing poems about memories for which I was not present, much like Ali’s retelling of a time when he was not yet born. Awesome.)

Brandy Nalani McDougall’s poem “How I Learned to Write My Name,” is using similar techniques, but feels more like a single camera angle that moves in and out of focus between the foreground and the background. While she is remembering how she learned to write her name, she’s using this foreground to tell the real story of her father stealing from her mother and leaving while her mother is in the shower, in the background. The distraction is what tells the story, the poem sits at the fuzzy place in between foreground and background. Such a smart and beautiful poem.

Similarly, I thought a lot about how I might learn from these poets’ particular stylistic choices. I’ve already expressed my conflicting feelings about this idea of  “published = finished” on the blog, and I by no means intend to try to edit or workshop these poets. Still, I look at Vandana Khanna’s poem “Alignment” on page 83, for example, and wonder at the job that the asterisks are performing (all the while knowing Elmaz is secretly cringing, hah). I wonder why space is not enough to separate these stanzas and think back to my own work, wondering if & where such punctuation (is an asterisk a punctuation mark?) might function, much less benefit, the poem. I’m also looking at that last stanza where it is mentioned that the parents of the narrative voice met with an astrologer to see if their “stars were aligned.” Could this be a physical/visual enactment of that stanza’s intention, that all of these stars (four sets of three) are aligned neatly & reliably? Whether or not this is the case, I begin thinking about different ways to accomplish the same affect without using a symbol like the asterisk. Khanna has me thinking stylistically and I appreciate it.