Anna's poem

Is three, or I guess four. I’m thinking of three people approaching a lake. The poems are more like movements than poems. I guess when I say movements I mean a kind of wash of meaning. But not solid like prose – as I like to say going from the west coast to the east coast of the page. Not broken up like poetry or like the prose part of poetry:  the epigraph, the skinny blocks of italicized steals, the pastiche. Also the lists which are kind of the poems of prose in a standard book. So this is a wall of poetry made out of, I think, the poetic parts of prose. There’s tons of information in this book, which I like. I like a good quote which - was it Auden who said you judge a review by the quality of its quotations. Is a poem a success by this same standard. I’m thinking we are living in a poetic age Auden couldn’t or wouldn’t have wanted to imagine. I am actually a huge Auden fan but he was entirely a prig. I’ve never used that word before and I’m glad to do here. So a great quote from Benjamin, a list of jobs someone might have had and the hourly or daily rate they received for their labor – all these things shift together on Anna Moschavakis’s page. I think of prose poems for a moment too here. I’m appreciative that Baudelaire invented them AND did them so well but mostly a prose poem is a blah thing. I’ve heard a poet critic refer to a poem that probably didn’t please him in terms of its metrical performance – the actual poem was gentler and looser than that, but still a poem. And a good one at that. But the poet critic called it a prose poem and I thought is that a veiled way of him saying that simply isn’t a poem. A prose poem being a dumping ground instead. I am on unstable ground to be bringing all this up in reference to Anna’s work and yet I am here and mean to praise. In her hands the prose poem is pulled apart, left full of holes. I spoke with her at a reading one night and I told her how much I liked these poems. Why, she gleamed. I thought is that about me. A certain poet that I am surprises her in liking these? Why did I feel so complicit in her question to me. Her poem is of an unclear genre, though it is clearly a poem. It feels poem though it scrambles around the page, proclaiming and organizing itself quietly in an emphatic and softly authoritative and questioning voice. I liked that. I liked her subjects – labor, social questions, technology and the possibility of constructing humans, and of course gender. Questions of gender are all over the place. And I’ll end there. I was talking with my friends Sam and Amrit last night in Tucson. We said that a woman’s self was full of holes. In the case of a man the whole culture is busily at the task of completing him, making him whole. Propping up his masculinity. Its everyone’s job, apparently. I love Anna’s poems because she deploys the holes of womanness to talk of a wide panorama of things, the work it took to make these poems, mainly.