Saturday, August 29, 2015

I really like Sandra Simonds' poem "I Am In Room One Eleven," which appears in thefanzine.  This piece is longish, and I like its irrepressible quality.  Too, it seems much closer in timbre/lineaments to her wonderful first book, Warsaw Bikini, than many other poems of hers I've read recently, which cheers me--as the poems in that volume still strike me as her best.  At any rate, I recommend checking out the aforesaid poem, as well as her poetry in general--which tends towards the terrifically lively, and engagingly works talky/talk-like/talkative tones...a mode I think tends towards being rather blah; so I love that Simonds is able to create energetic stagings via an aesthetic I am, oftener than not, not a fan of.  I think I like this talkative quality, in the case of Simonds, because she is not actually trying to transcribe speech--to merely imprint a page with what's already there/made: she--rather the poems--likes grand shapely stanzas, likes dynamic line-breaks, likes sound and play--in other words the poems take advantage of many of the elements that traditionally constitute poetry.