Poemland: Chelsey Minnis

Poetry, ego, death, inebriation, the past, cash, and gender—such are the intertwining themes of Poemland, not so much explored as remarked on in droll, four to six line stanzas surrounded by empty space. The open white of the page, in addition to the ellipses that follow most lines, provide a Zen-like quality to the poems, and an aura of wistfulness that Minnis confesses she can’t (or doesn’t want to) escape.

There’s a cohesiveness of theme throughout each stanza, but because the narrative voice seems to exist solely in Minnis’ iconoclastic mind, little effort is made to expound on or illuminate thoughts within the context of individual sections—across the volume, however, images accumulate texture and weight as the world of Poemland forms. Still, even outside the book’s discourse on life in relation to art, several of the sections are laugh out loud funny, such as this one:

I like a man in a fur-coat…especially a man with very little self-
discipline…

I like a man with self importance and sexual grandeur…

A man who has a romantic idea for himself!...

He is just a little tramp…

Minnis' tone, and the way she considers bizarre qualities she values in a man before deflating the previous three lines with her typical “on second thought” final line is startling, more down to earth than the reader is prepared for, and dryly funny.

Ron Silliman mentions in his review of Poemland that he feels as though Minnis couldn’t sustain the trajectory of the book throughout the end, but I actually found the opposite to be true. The book’s initial ruminations on poetry—while witty—are somewhat weightless, until two-thirds of the way through the book when these initial stanzas become a foundation Minnis builds on, raising the stakes for the book as her voice becomes both more conscious of itself as a work of art, and—problematically for some readers—confrontational. On page 77 Minnis declares, “With this book I have made a very expensive joke…” and on the next page she continues:

Sometimes I try to please someone I hate…

So that I can enjoy a range of satisfactions…

You should always be doing a service for others…

Even in poetry…

Is Minnis implying that the “service” she’s providing is her poetry, and the book being read? And if so, does the reader become the “someone” that she hates? Later, less consequential lines are read through the lens of these insinuations. On page 110, the god-voice of Poemland is no longer arguing with itself, but instead addresses the reader in typical post-modern fashion, removing the ellipses from the first line for more impact:

Do you like this?

It is like pulling off someone’s clip on bowtie and throwing it into
the pool…

Don’t walk out on the best revenge!

The last line especially seems to dare the reader to abandon Minnis’ book, and she tops herself again a few pages later when she emphasizes as though to an uncomprehending animal, “This is a long boring attack…” (113)

While some readers may feel belittled or offended by this point, or that they're the butt of some elaborate joke, I’ll respond to Minnis’ question—I do like it, quite a lot actually. I find Poemland to be humorous, and honest, and risky, and Minnis’ taunts begin to feel very much like a dialogue with both her own doubts and her audience. She’s voicing questions she doesn’t know the answer to, and it shows.

Interestingly, the middle lines of the poem above aren’t as random as they may first appear—like Wallace Stevens before her, Minnis architects her own connotations to images by recycling them in a variety of new contexts—earlier in the book she wrote that she wanted to be buried in a pink bowtie, and the image of the pool, which was used in the book’s opening poem in relation with the past, continues to resurface throughout Poemland. The final sections of the book take on textures not possible at the beginning, while continuing their ludic play in a field of muddy questions.