I've been reading a book of movie reviews by Pauline Kael and she's making me feel stupid. I am impressed by her ability hitch a variety of data to the ox-cart of some grand critical claim. I doubt most grand critical claims can hold up under scrutiny, but still I am envious of those writers who are fearless enough to nail their collars to the whim of the moment. My thinking is generally too gauzy for that: I nail it but the fabric rips loose every time I turn my head.



Reading Kael brought me to the question: how come the poetry in the New Yorker (which Kael wrote for) is hardly ever good? Usually I find it prettty namby-pamby, and I know a lot of other people who feel the same way. You would think that an outfit that pays pretty well would have its pick of all the poems in the universe. But I bet the flood of incoming mail can clog the gears of the editorial machine.



So here is a New Yorker poem that I thought was pretty good. The writers name is Dan Chiasson. I realize there's a style of poem I like that is not lyrical, is not song, is not suited to memory and repetition. More likely the poem is an essay that blooms from the general root of narrative. We don't have a word for it exactly. Here's one: Narrexpozyric.



My Ravine



How will you know what my poem is like

until you've gone down my ravine and seen



the box springs, mattresses, bookcases, and desks

the neighboring women's college dumps each year,



somebody's hair dryer, someone's Herodotus

a poem's dream landscape, one half Latin and



one half shit, the neighboring women's college shit?

Wheelbarrow upon wheelbarrow, a humpbacked



custodian hauls old dormitory furniture down

and launches it, watching it roll into the pile.



You won't know how my poem decides what's in,

what's out, what decorum means and doesn't mean,



until you follow him home after work, and see him

going wild all night imagining those girls' old beds.



You won't know what I'm trying for until you hear

how every fall in my back yard a swarm of deer



materializes, scavenging where the raspberries touched

the radishes, now plowed under, itching the lawn



for dandelions, stare at each other and wander

bewildered down my ravine and turn into skeletons.