Reading this book, I’m reminded that Mary Jo Bang was a photographer before publishing this book. It’s something in my Bang readings that I wish I would have realized earlier. Because it speaks most directly to this speaker I’m always hearing in her work. The arch observer, the knows-better-than-you-but-you-probably-don’t-appreciate-it companion who’s taken the opportunity of the poem to explain that to you. I wrote about this some when I was companioning Bang’s speaker in the “The Harbor” to Jennifer S. Cheng’s essay “A Catalog of Falling.” (A View on Disjunction) I’ve long been enamored with this speaker. And appreciated her sharply she contrasts her perspective from anyone else in the room. Poet knows best might be one way to think of it.
I would argue the speaker in Apology for Want is like a version of Elizabeth Bishop preparing the way for Mary Jo Bang’s Louise, who appears in her second book, Louise in Love. To stretch my analogies so they fit with one another, imagine this speaker styled like Elizabeth Bishop, whose knowing observations shed light on some domestic subjects, some medical subjects (especially the body in its biological existence), and this “Elizabeth Bishop”-ish speaker has taken her gift for observation and framing to photography. This, for me, is this first book from Mary Jo Bang. Poems like “If Wishes Were Horses” or “Metaphor as Symptom of Reason’s Despair” offer what feels like a gilded frame to the Louise that will soon be arriving in her next book.
I remember the first time I’d heard her read from it, when she was emphasizing the the letter sounds that were being closely echoed. And I remember finding it curious that this would be what was emphasized for the poems. Because I still don’t hear those letter sounds when I’m reading the poems to myself. Yes, in “Twilight Amnesia,” there are letter pairings carved like inlaid ivory into a wooden box. But those pairings have a specific purpose, speaking to the poet’s relationship with her stepson. The majority of the book reads as a speaker removed from whatever immediate circumstance prompted the poem, providing sufficient space for her to carefully articulate what she sees happening. Perhaps what she sees carefully tracks with the actual scene. Comments she would pass to the actual people the poet imagines speaking to. Where the poems are like velvet rhetorical cudgels.
It’s not yet, however, the poetic speaker who’s deeply invested in affect and giving the reader that knowing look in her eye. A poetic speaker I find dominating Bang’s work since.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.