I
wish Super
Blood Wolf Moon had been available several years ago
when I was substituting for the regular teacher in a high school
honors literature class. I didn’t have to teach, just sit at the
teacher’s desk and stay awake. The students sat at their desks
staring at worksheets. At first I thought their stares were fueled
with pure scholastic intent. But soon enough, when I saw no one was
doing anything besides staring, I realized they were in a trance,
unable to move or talk or look at each other. Or write. Soon enough I
learned Wallace Stevens was to blame.
Not
that Stevens’s famous poem Peter
Quince at the Clavier had
enchanted these students, or that they had all gotten stoned on some
damned good shit before class — well,
they might have, that last, but only to enable them to stare at a
worksheet
expecting
them to answer technical
questions about the sort of things that might
interest a college seminar dealing with poetry the way someone unable
to tell a joke to
save his life
could tell you precisely
what
makes it funny.
The
self-discipline of my honor students was exemplary in keeping them
awake and apparently devoted to understanding Peter
Quince at the Clavier instead
of rioting or crashing, ballpoints
clattering to the floor and
heads banging against desktops, in snoring
slumber.
None
of this would have happened had the poem they were facing on their
worksheet been On
Learning of the Death of an Old Girlfriend on Facebook before
Finishing Your First Cup of Coffee.
Perhaps
the teacher would have risked being fired or at least brought before
a committee of parents-with-lawyers for assigning this lead poem in
Gary V. Powell’s Wolf
Moon
collection. And yet if more high school classes taught appreciation
of poetry rather than how to dissect a poem, maybe poets, the most
seductive of all word wranglers, would be able to reach more readers
who fear poetry is something they have to “get” rather than
merely enjoy. I cannot think of anyone, of any age or proclivity, who
would not “get” On
Learning of the Death of an Old Girlfriend on Facebook before
Finishing Your First Cup of Coffee from
its title alone -- even
without
the first stanza:
When
your old girlfriends
begin
to die like
dogs
you’ve buried over
the
years,
There
are fourteen more stanzas in Old
Girlfriend.
I
laughed out loud, alone in my apartment, each time I read On
Learning of the Death of an Old Girlfriend on Facebook before
Finishing Your First Cup of Coffee, and
the laughter
has
continued
long
afterward, sporadically,
dieseling
like
an old gasoline engine that doesn’t want to stop, kicking
up now
and again mysteriously,
and occasionally
in delicate social proximities. Want another one? Stanza? I
don’t see why not:
When
your old girlfriends
begin
to die like
rushing
rivulets of rain
disappearing
down a sewage drain.
I
don’t mean to give the impression with this selection that Powell’s
poems are intended to be read only at stag parties, although it seems
clear such would be a welcome venue for them. True, the evidence
might point to a for-bubbas-only supposition, especially weighing in
consideration the title of one of Powell’s three celebrated
collections of short fiction: Lucky
Bastard (for those of you who have yet to celebrate them
personally the links here and directly above are to my reviews of the
three: Getting
Even and Beyond
Redemption).
While
it is true Powell’s poetic outlook is that of a man, a man with a
man’s lifelines and hard-learned sense of humor, it’s also true
he is a poet, and any poet worth his iambic pentameters can
appreciate the feminine sensibility. Take for example, How to Make
a Garden’s
opening stanza:
Clear
a space, a space in the sun,
of
trees and bushes, vines and thorn,
as
you might carve your torpid heart from
your
chest and lift it into the light, so that the
hard-earned
scars may heal, and it beats wild again
and:
Till
the space by hand, or with a power tiller,
if
you’re able to bear the noise, turning the soil,
as
you might cultivate your fallow mind to converse
with
mountains, trees, and valleys, with fish of the sea,
birds
of the sky, beasts of the land, and worms of the
earth.
Please
do not mistake my offering How to Make a Garden as
strictly a feminine poem. Neither Powell nor I are so
simple. But prospective buyers of this chapbook might suspect gender
exclusivity with titles like The Night the Condom Broke or
When Wifey’s Away, the
latter beginning with
this
couplet:
I
practice saying “I love you,”/so I won’t forget the words
Ultimately,
I would suggest, if you have a sense of humor regardless of gender –
birth or choice -- you will find a lot to like in Super
Blood Wolf Moon. Why, gasp
of gasps, it might even set
you to howling once the
day slides away making room
for creatures of the nighttime
sky.
Former
Texas Poet Laureate Carol Coffee Reposa offers this about the
collection, “I think it was Ethel Merman who said that we grow up
the first time we have a good laugh — at ourselves. Most of all,
these poems strike me as the work of a person who is absolutely
committed to writing good poetry, and I feel honored to have had the
opportunity to read his work.”
Back
in my classroom, as I said up top, Super Blood Wolf Moon, had
it been
available back then, might have enabled me to do some actual
teaching, i.e. turn these serious honor students onto what poetry is
all about, that is, something deeply felt by the poet expressed in a
way to arouse deep feelings in the reader -- and to hell with what
that means or why.
Gadzooks...I
almost forgot to mention Super Blood Wolf Moon won the 2020
Contemporary Poetry Chapbook Prize! Click the hyperlinked title at
the top to pre-order your copy so you can celebrate these poems
personally, in daylight or under a leering midnight moon…
...owooOOOOooo...
