Alone Together
A poet takes on the fragmented, solitary nature of American life.
PARALLEL PLAY
Poems
Book World: Poetry Poet's Choice: Excerpts to honor past Poet's Choice hosts.
Objects Are Closer Than They Appear: Michael Collier's intimate examinations
American Idyll: Elegiac poet Donald Hall knows baseball, death.
My Bondage, My Freedom: Natasha Trethewey plumbs public, personal histories.
He Saw the Best Minds of His Generation: Jason Shinder on poet Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"
Notes From Underground: Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney returns to memory and work.
When Doves Cry: Political and personal poetry for the wider world
Confessional: "Black-belt sinner" Mary Karr tells of her conversion to Catholicism in verse.
Alone Together: Stephen Burt takes on the fragmented, soitary nature of American life.
Michael Dirda: "The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy" offers a fresh take on the celebrated Greek poet.
Poetry on Audio: "Voices of the Past" opens an ear to history's greatest poets. Audio samples are included.
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By Stephen Burt
Graywolf. 88 pp. Paperback, $14
In developmental psychology, the term "parallel play" describes how very young children will play next to each other yet not together. It's an apt title for Stephen Burt's second collection of poems: Many of his subjects seem to know that they belong to a community but feel utterly separate within it.
Burt's poems display an interest in the individual psyche, particularly in young adulthood (in "July Night," the speaker laments: "Is to be adult to be always/disappointed, or to feign/satisfaction with what is?") as well as an urge to inhabit the minds of others. In "Self-Portrait as Kitty Pryde," he writes:
I have been identified
as gifted & dangerous. People fight over me
but not in the ways I want. Who would expect
it in a girl from Deerfield, Illinois,
town of strict zoning, no neon & quality schools?
One of the recurring surprises in Parallel Play is the breadth of Burt's fascination with contemporary culture (Kitty Pryde is a heroine from the X-Men comic books). A poem written from the perspective of Pierre Bonnard's "Standing Nude" sits next to a villanelle for WNBA player Lindsay Whalen; another explores "Scenes from Next Week's Buffy the Vampire Slayer ." One gleans an earnest desire to make poems out of the flotsam and jetsam of American life.The intent is to sensitize readers to the overlooked aspects of contemporary life. These intentions are felt as well in the collection's suite of political poems, which includes a moving elegy to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone as well as a sestina that laments: "It's an old problem: how do we go on being/so comfortable, and so troubled? Are we poor/losers? Am I one of the evildoers?"
The true delight of the book, though, is "Six Kinds of Noodles," an irresistible sestina that meditates on the work of John Ashbery and the function of contemporary poetry in the backdrop of an Asian noodle shop. After considering the dizzying array of menu options, the poet-speaker longs for a simple satisfying meal:
And yet the life
we long for in all its disorder is not a life
of so many tastes, nor of fame; more like one good book,
and ginger with which to enjoy it.
Jennifer Grotz is the author of "Cusp."
