Off  The Shelf by Doug Holder

I am presently in Israel as a guest of the “Voices Israel” literary organization. I judged their annual poetry contest. This is a speech I plan to make to the group.

When I look at a poem, I look at it with a deliberately untrained eye. I look at it, as I would read a newspaper, a pulp novel, or a short story. This is how I approached the poetry I judged for the “Voices Israel” organization’s poetry contest this fall. I didn’t want to deconstruct the sentences, look for Marxist theory between the lines, check for meter consistency, obsess if the bird’s feathers are red or white. Poetry to me is as natural as the next breath, an organic art, instinctual. What I want is simple, but really not so simple. I want to be surprised in mid-sentence, I want to stop and hungrily re-read, I want to say: “What an image…goddamn that was a good piece of work.”

For instance when I read the winning poem by Zvi Sesling: “Fish Eye,” that fish’s eye remained staring at me long after reading the poem. The poet starts his poem off: “Once, in the home of a Filipino, I was served soup with the head of a fish floating in the middle, the eye staring/ up, the same as in a pile of the dead at Auschwitz…” Granted this isn’t a beautiful image, but has a raw, powerful shock. The poet is not afraid to bring this image to the reader. He presents it straight with no chaser. This is a poem that will make you cut yourself while shaving, as Auden said. It reminded me of the many whitefish staring at me in judgment through the plastic wrappers at the local delicatessen. Sesling makes this disembodied fish an oracle, a sage in the soup, much like Bernard Malamud did with his “Jew Bird.”

So many poets kill their poems because they feel the need to be polite. I read that Philip Roth said you have to be willing to insult your mother if need be to be an authentic writer. Life isn’t polite, it is beautiful as well as ugly, and there are acts of kindness and acts of cruelty. The poet’s first job is to bring to the reader a moment of time that rings true, and not to put a soothing smoke screen over it.

In the poem “Rise Up My Dying Dick” (Honorable Mention) the poet brings something “up” that many of us would be comfortable with and works with it very well. He addresses his member as an old warrior, a best friend who has gone to seed where he once went to battle. The poet does this with humor and pathos, and makes the reader laugh and sadly nod in recognition. Here is an excerpt:
“Old time warriors weary of this fate
They sit and plot to the end of days
Then viciously hallucinate.
Rise up my dying dick and rally to the throne
And I will fight my way to hell and back
Loyal to the bone.”
But some poets have a way of slowly slipping up on you. They lead you along, and like a well-designed lure — hook you.

A poem like ‚ÄúParis Unsaid‚Äù  by Celia Merlin (Honorable Mention) sneaks up quietly: ‚ÄúI sent my boys to Paris/ Twenty two and Twenty, /the same as I, / when captured by/ the Seine‚Äôs rainbow twinkle, /Elysees‚Äô grandeur.‚Äù

And I am a sucker for a poem that focuses its gimlet eye on a seemingly pedestrian thing and brings out its universal truth. In “My Father’s Ankles” the poet writes of her dad’s ankles, as they are roadmaps of his life:
His legs are maps of torn-down byways
And too narrow highways
Preventing the traffic of blood and fluids
Their fluidity and refuge, instead
Bottlenecking, slow passage and nowhere to go.

In the end poetry is a very subjective experience. One poem that makes the cut for “Poetry” magazine may not for the local literary magazine. I think the job of the poet is to capture that moment with just the right words, to capture that feeling, that fleeting image, as he or she actually sees it. His currency is words, which can either be his triumph or downfall.