Reader’s Diary: Lorraine Lupo's 'By Way Of'
Cards on the table: I prefer short poems to long ones, slender bodies of work to massive ones. So naturally, I consider the best way to read poetry is not in a book, but in a chapbook.
Cards on the table: I prefer short poems to long ones, slender bodies of work to massive ones. So naturally, I consider the best way to read poetry is not in a book, but in a chapbook. And of course, when you’re committed to notating your reading experience in a paragraph per week, a chapbook ought to be easier to handle than a full-length book. All the more so when the contents of the chapbook are a series of paragraphs — prose poems, you know. But somehow that’s not really the case. The poetry in poetry, as everyone knows, consists in precisely what escapes paraphrase or summary — but, at least when you’ve got a lot of poetry to sum up, that might make it easier to eke out a paragraph. Lupo’s paragraphs have something irreducible about them, the kind of thing that gets me thinking, “How did this person do that?” As usual, I look for the “meta” moments, the places where the writing seems to be reflecting on itself. And I find those places, because every word here has weight, and every word weighs itself. Like this: “Try to describe it. Your mind goes tearing through itself, trampling nesting birds. Flowers are ‘in hiding.’ You gooped them up with yellow.” That’s the first half of a poem called “Goop,” and it really does seem to sum up what happens when I try to describe something (a daily hazard for art critics and poets too). But life is always full of surprises. “Shark at the door? Open it.” I feel like I did open a door to something when I unsealed the jiffy bag containing these twenty poems by someone of whom I have no idea, a publication by an unfamiliar press, with a Google search revealing not much about the former nor anything about the latter. Physically, the chapbook is simple and elegant — well, “designed by The Grenfell Press,” as the copyright page informs me, which is to say, by the best. I hope this much is true: “There’ll be a lot of that ahead, but for now forget it. Goldfish crackers. They’re like poems. You’re like a poem. Wherein time is suspended for one second.”
Lorraine Lupo’s By Way Of (2016) is published by Green Zone Editions (437 E. 12th Street, #18, NYC 10009).
