Swensen’s book participates in between a poetics of the impromptu and a poetics of the consistently meaningful. It’s a position that is almost an exact perpendicularity to the relationship American poetry has to the cooked and the raw. Because while a poetics of the impromptu might map onto the raw, there is still something in its impromptu-ishness that wants to reveal the scene’s meaning. Like the raw would smudge out the occasion that started the poem. Am I writing a poem because I saw a crow? I’d rather not say. In Swensen’s book, the impromptu delights in the poetic occasion; it forms itself around the moment. She considers crows, and clouds, and other birds, and sun, along with sunlight. And what they bring to the scene.
The reader is typically led to whatever the sentiment that might have provoked the poet to think, as if for the first time, about this object. And that’s where the poem gets cooked. What makes a crow’s blackness feel meaningful? What is a new way to consider the intensity of sunlight. And while Swensen’s poems gestures to whimsy, toying with whatever occasion might have prompted her to think about this object, or this fact about the world, there’s an imaginative sentimentality that runs at the base of the poetic work. And, in fact, that sentimentality is the primary engine for the poem. Yes, the poems are shaped by imaginative logic, but their vehicle is this sentimentality. So, for instance, where a poem might whimsically posit the shapelessness of a dust mote as though no one had ever thought about it (in “Dust Mote”), the poem’s proposition that dust motes would be the shape of birds in flight or puzzle pieces—whatever the shape that most satisfies the interest of the poem’s observer/researcher—that shape rings more true because of the sentimentality involved with novel discoveries. No one would think to discover a dust mote’s shape, but the poem outweighs the obscurity any of these dust motes would have lived under. In a subtle way, the poem nods to the poetic gaze that has thickened the dust mote into meaningfulness.
For me, the dilemma is the degree this sentimentality corresponds to cooked-ness. To what extent is the poem more mindful of its performance of poem-ness. Versus its spontaneity. The impetus for each poem feels incidental to the moment. It’s the corral of imaginative gestures that are sometimes too polished, or too much what I would have expected. It’s this thing where I would prefer the poet surprise me with imaginative leaps rather than satisfy me. The opening poem, “An Orange,” compares an orange to the sun. Which is a very satisfying equation. But not that much is done with it.
This dilemma, however, has been at the foundation of my relationship with Swensen’s poetry. Any cookedness varies from book to book. A book like ‣ is consistently walking away from sentimental closure, while also revealing the surprise implicit to the poet’s mundane observations. A book like ‣ holds sentimentality just out of the readers’s reach, even as the spiritual nature of the book’s subject injects the poetic occasion with consequence. A book like ‣, however, insistently directs the reader’s attention to its subject matter. It’s a similar effect to Veer, as Swensen’s researched books often operate on elaborating the poet’s impromptu observations about the subject at hand. Like how cooked poetry seeks out a well wrought execution of purpose. In Veer it’s the ease of the poet’s imaginative reframing, to make nature mildly new. It appears that the poems are structured to be additive experiences for the reader (ie here’s a poetic view of sunlight), but the poem’s success relies on an imaginative realization that embraces the poet’s vision.
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.