Ange Mlinko, Juliana Spahr, and Niagara Falls

When was the last time you took a trip with your parents? Okay, most people probably stop in junior high, but when mine told me they were visiting the east coast—Boston, Maine, then NYC—I couldn’t resist a road trip. My parents are pretty fun, and the timing works out well since my wife is with her mother for the week. Everyone is happy, and now my wife and I can pine for one another and look forward to our joyful reunion.

I’ve found lots of time to read this past week (since I am officially finished painting for the summer) and finally read the last two poetry books from my June trip to King Library: Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You by Juliana Spahr, and Matinees by Ange Mlinko.



My summer reading has been rather sporadic, which has made for some really interesting and unintentional juxtapositions, and this week was one of those instances. Ange Mlinko’s style reminds me of a hipster Frank O’Hara; there’s a lot of speed in her lyrics, and she has a great eye for glittery details. I wish I hadn’t returned both books to the library because I find myself wanting to look some things up and talk more about them and now I’ve gone and shot myself in the foot. But, if you’ll let me misquote, there’s a poem that begins with lines that are something like 2 pieces of chocolate for breakfast/is that enough to get me through work? and I thought that segment was just about the closest a poet can come to mimicking someone else’s style. I enjoyed Matinees; the speedy, stream-of-consciousness, city bling kept me interested, but it’s hard to do what O’Hara did as well as he did. (I once claimed otherwise. If you heard me make this claim, let me retract it. I was wrong. While his style is easily imitated, that doesn’t make it interesting, or lovely, or graceful, or emotionally touching: O’Hara’s work is all of these things.)



For one thing, O’Hara wasn’t just charming and self-reflexive; there was genuine surprise to his poems. Part of the reason they’re so pleasurable (and I'm thinking mostly of Lunch Poems) is because they end up so far from where they began. With Mlinko, that extra surprise wasn’t always there—the poems just kind of ended. I was also reading a post on HTMLGIANT a day or two ago (see links to the right) where the author tries to classify a substrain of poetry they call “lazy apartment poetry” and while I don’t think Mlinko falls in this category of mindless introspection and writing about anything she sees, however insignificant, I do think she finds her city life more interesting than I did. With O’Hara, that wasn’t a problem. There was real charm and humor to him that was evident in his poems. But, I’m going to stop because this is starting to sound nitpicky and I don’t mean to be. I liked Matinees. But the style the book was written in makes it difficult not to compare it to O’Hara.

Comparing Matinees to FY—A—ILY is much easier, because the books were so different. Matinees is like a paginated manifestation of ADHD, and FY—A—ILY is so methodical and meditative. I began the second book unsure of what to expect, and initially, I was a little disappointed. FY—A—ILY is organized into six long poems, and the first one, “localism or t/here” was not my favorite. But “things” was really wonderful, as was “gathering: palolo stream,” and everything that came after. I think part of my early disappointment was because I thought I had the book pinned down, assuming that Spahr was disguising simplicity as profundity, and it annoyed me. But in “things” it was easier for me to see how persistent and sincere the book is, and how Spahr is really digging at the foundation of big, important ideas, including how we communicate with each other. As I write, I’m struck by the similarities that could be drawn between her book and Stein’s Tender Buttons. Both are relentless in their pursuit to make something new through the medium of language. With Stein, that subject was language itself, but a certain kind of repetition was applied in both cases.

Spahr’s sections on “da kine” were particularly striking, and I love when she breaks the regimented structure of her thought process to reflect on her own confusion. She’ll pause and write about how she herself is confused, and how she wants to convey something to the reader. There’s a great spot where she’s juxtaposed two metaphors and finally she confesses that she doesn’t know why comparing those two metaphors bring her closer to the truth of what she’s trying to say, although she knows they do. I felt a strange kinship with her at that moment.

Everything I’m writing right now is incredibly sloppy, but it’s late, I’m typing by the light of my computer at a Holiday Inn Express outside Boston, and I’m worried that if I don’t get some thoughts down about these two books I’m going to lose them. I should not have taken these back to the library yet! I brought some other books along with me I’m excited to read, working on Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem right now, and I’ll probably start reading Brett Foster’s The Garbage Eater tomorrow, because it’s fun to read poetry in the city.

As for the title of this post, we stopped at Niagara Falls on the way here, and all I can say is that if David Foster Wallace had written A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again II, this destination would have been the perfect fit. Seeing the falls was cool, but the carnival that has assembled around them (think wax museums, ripley’s, and a lot of fried food) was disheartening.