Compulsions combines shock, humor, subtlety and swagger
By Mary Jane Ryals
A wonderful writers' work, like that of Julianna Baggott's new poetry collection Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees, can't be contained, measured, talked about in one small review. But I'll try.
The voice of this wit-filled, insightful collection is wind blowing through bare trees. Strong, clear, sometimes shocking, always reverberating. You pay attention.
In this collection, Baggott, a creative writing teacher at Florida State, attends, as a writer, to her court--the reader, the critic, the student of writing. A tough audience. This book acts as a cirque de treatise, a fun exposition, perhaps a textbook for writing poetry presented as poetry.
The titles often ask imaginary questions that readers and critics often ask about literature: Why do you write? Where do you get your ideas? Do you have any tips? Cleverly, the narrator answers and doesn't answer questions that non and nouveau writers ask.
In poem Q and A: How is it that poems can just fail? She answers, The poem can become so fearful and tidy/ t hat it wraps itself in plastic slip covers.
In Q and A: Do you think it helps your poetry if you've had a lot of experiences and have seen the world? The poet responds, It helps to have a room, a window with many panes.
Baggott'll offer answers, but she always returns to the mystery of the imagination as the essence of writing while embracing the real world.
Ironically, Baggott uses formal devices of poetry so subtly, you hardly notice. It's like watching a soccer match or a gymnastics event where the torso performs so gracefully, the arms and legs held with such intense purpose, the viewer sees it as simple, knowing full well it takes years of practice combined with that natural gift to make things look so do-able.
In Q and A: Why don't you write formal poetry? Baggott's narrator seems to joke around, but the internal rhymes, the assonance and consonance in one sentence are exquisite: I cannot help it. I mistake quatrain for Coltraine, / terza rima for tiramisu.
As her epigram by French critic and historian Hyppolyte Taine says, Man...produces philosophies and poems in about the same way silkworms produce cocoons and bees their hives .
It's rare to laugh out loud at poems, but I did reading this collection.
In Q and A: Do you simultaneously submit? , a question about sending your work to more than one magazine at a time, (a deed once considered scandalous, and still is to some), Baggott goes real, working class, to the gut. The poet as mother, breadwinner, teacher, talks about her grandfather's line to her, Cover your beat, Baggott. Keep at it.
It's easy to miss the rhyme in the words Baggott and keep at it , and that's what makes this collection seamless, clever and sincere.
Baggott will tell you she's second generation literate, and comes from a working family. She assumes that a writer works hard and that the clock is always ticking. You can hear the monosyllabic beats of her simple words, the hard b's and d's, t's and s's of the working class Anglo-Saxon English. They mix into the song of the Gaelic her ancestors brought from the old countries.
I love the two back-to-back poems where poetry addresses her long-winded sister, the novel, and the novel responds to her petulant sister the poem. Baggott has novels and poetry published, so hears these intellectual battles between "the sisters." The narrator embraces 'sister poem' and 'sister novel,' and teases them both--hard.
Besides accusing 'sister novel' of being long winded, wanting so much, being swaggery, busty with hips , Poetry insists: We're twins, but in fact, I think my father wasn't yours...Do you recall the piano tuner, / how gently he slipped/the upright's lid back into its joints?
'Sister novel' replies that she has Manners. I pass around tea and cakes. / Have you ever allowed these comforts? / You let them wander rooms, disoriented.
'Sister Novel' also explains that Our father, yes, ours admired and needed the skilled tools of the piano tuner. Novel claims that she recalls more, truer. The piano tuner, for examples, was a sweet fag.
This collection provides sweet relief from academic answers. Fresh breezes of the mother tongue. There's passion, love of craft, music in this book. Easy to hear, easy to sing to if you slow down and listen.
Book Info
Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees
by Julianna Baggott
Pleiades Press, 2006
65 pages
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