Little Boxes Made of Darkness and Light

Marni Ludwig’s chapbook, Little Box of Cotton and Lightning, explicitly references the interplay of darkness and light in Joseph Cornell’s box art—each poem reads like a modest package of whimsical sense & sinister intention—but the title also reminds me of Malvina Reynolds’s song “Little Boxes,” which offers a grim portrait of suburban conformity under the guise of a catchy folk song. That also seems to be a characteristic of Ludwig’s poems—the subtle ways they plunge a knife into the sentimental, the socially familiar, the whole time singing and laughing.

The erotic often bears down on Ludwig’s poems, and the lovers in these poems tend to be dark, austere, and somewhat inarticulate. They possess a gravitas that is both mystical and severe. Take, for instance, this example from “Clinic”:

We trade our shadows for days
of suddenness. A bird got in my blood,
a tricky one, with a split tongue.
Now it doesn’t get dark
because you shut your mouth.

Both the speaker and “you” are enveloped in shadows that seem instantaneous and inevitable, and the bird in the blood speaks both to a poet’s sensibility (we poets often think of ourselves as birds) and a sense of being infected. The poet’s curse as an avian infection—Ludwig masterfully twists the cliché, illustrating what being a poet feels like in contemporary terms. Yet the dynamic between the lovers is classic: the “you” controls heaven and hell, makes both for the speaker.

Going back to boxes, which recur in the poems and as poem titles, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my favorite poem in the collection, the simply titled “Pill Box.” This poem meditates on what it means to be a woman, and far from being overly familiar, Ludwig manages to mix Sexton’s quiet contempt for the artifacts of gender with a Bishopian eye. Simply put, some lines are seething protest, while others are almost sterile in how they account for the speaker’s sense of location.

The first line—“Every wife is a still life”—is both; it’s flat in its pronouncement, yet blistering in its critique. The message is simple: women with men being frozen, stuck, beautiful decoration for the homes they occupy. Ludwig gets a lot of mileage out of a few words. Fitting, since most of her poems are content to take up a single page. “Pill Box” ends with a stanza reminiscent of Plath’s “The Mirror,” a terrific poem about the terror women have, or are taught to have, for aging:

How agreeable you are,
lying cold on the bathroom floor
thanking your mirrors and corners.

The pileup of “r” sounds at the end of each line drive the severity, the cutting-to-the-quick home. The domestic space is captor and tormentor, and women entering it develop Stockholm syndrome for all the pretty, delicate accoutrements that surround them. They can’t tell that they’re cold. They can’t see the menace shimmering just below their reflection.

Marni Ludwig:: Little Box of Cotton & Lightning:: Poetry Society of America

Meat on the Mind

If it isn’t immediately clear from the title, Kevin Simmonds’ debut collection, Mad for Meat, is as delightfully messy as it is archly profane. The meat Simmonds is mad for isn’t the sort certain pop stars drape their bodies in; rather, the meat Simmonds is mad for is likely the same meat that gets Dr. Tobias Funke excited.

Despite the title, Mad for Meat isn’t populated by poems with cheeky double entendres (though I hasten to add that you will find many such poems here); the collection deftly explores the relationship between sex, race, place, and the body. One of the traits I most admire about Simmonds is that he isn’t shy or elusive when discussing the bodies his speakers desire, and what those bodies desire in him. The contrast between his unbridled bravado and careful meditation generate productive insight into the way the poet envisions connections across bodies very different from his own. Simmonds’ book isn’t all about desire, but the complicated relationship his poems have with desire is what interests me most.

“Color Me” describes Simmonds’ hookup with an Asian man who tells him “Your black body is so beautiful / God I want you,” which Simmonds allows its own stanza—his speaker is turned on and revels in this man’s slight objectification of his body as a black body. Along those lines, the title of the poem could be read as the speaker’s willingness to be seen as colored, to be desired precisely as an “other.” What follows, though, pushes the poem into more interesting, ambivalent territory:

God knows there’s a Have mercy
just below my Adam’s apple
when I’ve gotten an Asian man
into my hands
but I don’t say

Your tiny waist
hooded bite-size purple-vaulted dick
Your willingness to let me beat
the drum of you

I don’t say that
I just beat the drum

Simmonds’ speaker is clearly uncomfortable with being verbally labeled, with being told that his own blackness contributes to his sexual desirability. He’s not refuting fetishized attraction exactly; he’s refuting the acknowledging of it, even as he acknowledges his own fetishized attraction to the reader. Simmonds’ speaker acknowledges how problematic it is for him to sexually objectify someone because of his race since the same thing is happening to the speaker. The consciousness is splitting on objectifying and being objected, and desire is doing the cleaving.

Kevin Simmonds:: Mad for Meat:: Salmon Poetry

Prodigal Queering: When Fathers are Lovers

Frank O’Hara begins one of his many poems titled “Song” thusly:

Is it dirty
Does it look dirty
That’s what you think of in the city

The speakers in Ed Madden’s Prodigal: Variations would likely reply: Yes, Yes, and not just in the city, but in the country as well.

That’s because Madden’s debut collection is, in many ways, a filthy book. It’s not replete with curses and smut; it’s dirty in the sense that the poems seem to be infused with grime, with dirt, with a raw, meaty sullenness that leaves the reader dripping and stained.

Madden’s poems occupy a hermetic space wherever they exist, be that the farmland of his boyhood, or the less defined, vaguely urban arenas of his dark dreams. Viscera, shit, and sex abound in this collection but never tip over into the sensational-for-the-sake-of-being-sensational; quite the contrary, the poems are kept grounded by the speakers’ emotional and perceptual clarity. To be clear, though, no dirt is sacrificed for it.

Madden’s poems are not merely dirty on the level of what they contain—they are also frequently dirty in their muddled relationships, especially between the speaker and what appears to be his father (or a father-like figure.) This complicated relationship, which is also tinged with lust, is the primary source of tension in the collection. The first poem of the book, titled “Sacrifice,” begins with the telling line: “When my father bound me, I submitted […].”

In “Dream Fathers,” the line between father and lover intensifies as it blurs:

A snakebite scars his hand, exactly where

a cottonmouth bit my father as a child.
He almost died. The man slices open

his left breast, the hinge of skin peeled
back to expose the heart. He lifts it out,

he kisses it as if he were the one who broke it—
blood on his lips, blood and cum on mine.

This poem reminded me a lot of Frank Bidart’s poem, “Love Incarnate,” when I first read it. The body this speaker encounters in the dream shares the same snakebite—the same wound, a mark of certainty—as his father. The body of the lover, the father-zombie, functions as a symbol of the connection between sex, life, and death, a connection that seems born out of the speaker’s guilt that his homosexuality causes harm—spiritual, psychological, physical—to his lover and his father. The blood and cum, both vital fluids, mark the speaker and the father/lover’s bodies, emphasizing the way in which the connection between them (all of them!) manifests as pain and pleasure, a continuum not uncommon to the way same-sex desire often functions in the work of other gay poets.

Idle States and Idle Loves

Christopher Hennessy’s book came into my hands by way of an old teacher who thought the book would have something to say to me. The title, Love-In-Idleness, seemed to so perfectly fit my emotional state at the time and the still-static nature of my love life that I took the book with trepidation, as if I were being held a set of schematics for my psyche.

Turns out I wasn’t far off. Love-In-Idleness, Hennessy’s debut collection, is certainly about more than just the gay experience. It would be a failure of sympathy to read his book, which tracks the relationship between self and the family, self and nature, and self and society, from childhood to adulthood, as only a statement about contemporary gay life. But the title, and my default way of being, drew me to the poems that seemed especially interested in examining the nature of gay bodies, both the speakers’ and the various love objects that flit in and out of view throughout the collection.

Hennessy’s poems tend to be ornamental, perhaps overly so, but his tendency toward embellishment is less a flaw of composition and more an accurate representation of the poet’s early psycho-sexual repression, and his grown up escape from such an “idle” state into another, preferable form of idleness. Hennessey’s poem, “Sick Room,” deftly illustrates how damaging idleness can be to the self:

Fever is hostage for you,
       my dear wound, my truce.

My spit is a tasteless poultice
       and my breath is
       leaves of mint on your chest.

I am ridden, I
       am prone, here.
       I am the ever-present room,
       curtaining contagion.

In his poem “Autopsy,” Hennessy’s speaker announces that his “slippery virgin heart is ripe,” a declaration that he is moving, however awkward or uncertainly, into a position of sexual confidence. The heart is fruit, fleshy and soft, ready to be consumed. Somewhat surprisingly, the poem reverses its logic in the final tercet, where the speaker says “there is no heart in a pumpkin- / shaped boy who eats out his in- / sides to suck on his sin.” The delicate fruit, the object of Edenic sin (as I read it), is no longer hanging on the branch. It’s been grounded, gourded, and the poem turns toward from self-examination to self-recrimination.

Hennessy’s speaker connects his sexual maturation with a grave awareness that his “pumpkin- / shaped” body cannot house a heart because the shape is ill suited. Maybe having been burned in the past for my own squash-like physique colored my perspective when I first read these lines and saw in them an implicit critique of how superficial gay culture can cause those of us not blessed with conventionally beautiful (read: thin) bodies to practice self-loathing.

A bit removed, though never truly removed, from that first reading, I think it is hard to read comparing oneself to a pumpkin as anything but an exercise in self-deprecation because the shape of the speaker’s body seems linked explicitly to his emotional state. Contrary to what the speaker says, I don’t think he’s heartless. Rather, his heart has become the sin he sucks on, just a pit to go along with the flesh he eats away, sulking darkly, waiting for love to break him open. The cynical among us might question whether love has such restorative powers. Some days, I think it might.

Christopher Hennessy:: Love-In-Idleness:: Brooklyn Arts Press