What Poetry Is - Part 3

 This 1976 pinball game was called Surfer. It looks so charming compared to today's designs. The game cost a quarter, and the player got five balls per game.  I found this photo at www.lyonspinball.com.

Continuing my discussion of two poetry books at polar opposite sides of the spectrum...


The other book, Laura Mullen's Dark Archive, has the feeling of an undertow. Where Dobyns floated us through one incredibly long stanza, Mullen's poems pulls us into words and phrases that jump around the page, dislocated words that are tabbed into phrases that create strange steps, and phrases that lead into ... nothing at times, or as Mullen says in a poem entitled "OWN:" "and apparently abandons that subject."

The poems feel, perhaps, like sinking. In one of the book's early poems, she says: "I fear I can no longer think / I fear I am no longer that which things / Or that a certain kind of thinking's lost"...

Mullen's poems, like Dobyns', are about contemporary society. She, too, looks around and comments on the disasters and inadequacies. In her poems, I feel like the little metal ball pinging back and forth in a game of pinball.


Next post - Putting the books together
Previous post - Stephen Dobyns' Winter's Journey