EVERYDAY PEOPLE
Everybody talks about finding poetry in the everyday. Three writers make it look it easy.
Ellen Lytle knows the hazards of the job: “That’s just what poets do/romanticize everything.” In Marvel, she sees common life through fresh eyes, or more to the point fresh language. The touches are just fresh enough, applied with a fine brush. To the sparking scene setting add an unblinkered rewiring of approved English syntax, and the result is a terrain that rustles with lightly suited revelation:
a leaf floats between
two birches
the field is shocked:
its lofty manner
its deliberate
slowness
maybe it’s jealous
of the dance
At the same time, Marvel, composed in part during the long months on Covid, is more than an album of deft verbal snapshots. Annotated with dates of composition to evoke the casual habit of the journal keeper, the poems frame their swift, incandescent points of observation with bursts of unclouded passion and frequent pain:
when again, the space between
tree canopies in much too wide
like blank skies that could
bring her to her knees
whether cleaning out the fridge
or taking a bath, these blanks,
such as they are, fling snippets
of sadness right at her, and
it’s usually in spring
on damp days
Ready words root the poet standing and serene, in stillness or in flames.
In Life of a Kalamata, colorfully illustrated with the poet’s original artwork, Didi Champagne also steeps in the minutiae of daily life, but in a spirit more exotic and less emotionally fraught. Champagne can’t leave a line without giving it a fresh turn of phrase. Like Aug, she has a flexible regard for common rules of language, shifting at random between first, second and third persons that keep the reader alert and awake. Baubles of shimmering imagery skip through this account book of dependably arriving wonders.
There was an
antique sewing machine
sitting upon a lily pond table
and a few pillows
close to each other
so they can play
together. Like a
bullet in slow flight,
all I can think of
is how I will get there.
Should I hold a seance,
and, if so, would the
other voices in one’s
head interfere?
The four prose entries in Angela Sloan’s sliver of a chapbook Stories about Love present familiar scenes, each with some troubled undertone: a family Halloween night, the mood swings of a distraught actress, a daughter’s discovery of her mother’s old letters to her father, an unrequited lesbian crush. The key to the pieces’ power are the backstories that the author, a master of the white spaces, leaves just offstage of her nuanced but poker-faced narratives–the betrayals, the traumas, the self-deceptions hinted at but never elaborated. Sloan sports what may be any writer’s greatest gift: the exquisite knowledge of exactly when to shut up.
To mix it up, Sloan brackets her stories between lyric poems that are more personal, mixing some of the darkness of the stories with a warmer intimacy, combining heart and a strong formal hand.
