Love and the Eye

Love and the Eye

Laura Newburn

I typically don’t like narrative poetry.  I don’t “get” it, in an emotional, visceral sense.  This really is just personal prejudice, a function of my OCD that says things need to be observed, analyzed, broken down and then consumed in order to understand them.  I look for detail, I want to know what the world smells like, tastes like, before I feel like I can enter it.  (To be fair, I know a few narrative poets who can capture that sense of place, but not many). 

I read through Love and the Eye quickly, but mostly because I didn’t linger in the world.  Newbern’s writing often felt myopic, like she was looking at an object or a scene in a dark room without context.  In Apartment Elegy, “A table, a blue / glass pitcher. Flat // black of the table, / forget. The roundest // of blues, forgive. / Then a small rain; // then silence, silence / like earthenware.”  I follow her connection between the black of the table and the verb “forget,” and also the connection between the blue curve of the pitcher and the verb “forgive,” but those connections are intellectual rather than emotional. 

Similarly, in “Motel, I have difficulty emotionally attaching to the descriptions: “Flat motel bed. / Flat brown / expanse. Car // outside and yet / another new life / doing its tanta- // lizing dance on the / ceiling.”  In this case, “flat” doesn’t seem expansive to me, in the way that the Texas landscape is flat; it seems small, insignificant, defeated.  I understand it, but I don’t know whether I care.

However, I find her line and stanza breaks delicious.  It’s hard to see the impact of the stanza break between “tanta-“ and “lizing” in the paragraph above, so here’s how it appears on the page:

“outside and yet

another new life

doing its tanta-

lizing dance on the

ceiling.”

The break in the middle of the word becomes onomatopoeic; the word sounds the way it means.  (“Pop” and “squish” are textbook examples, when you say them, you feel what they mean.  I learned that from Reading Rainbow when I was like 5.  PBS fucking rocks!)  “Tantalizing” evokes a sense of eager anticipation, an intake of breath, which is exactly what the stanza break forces you to do. 

I’ve always connected very short lines with imagistic poetry; I didn’t connect short lines with narrative work.  In the poem Death, Fifth Avenue, her use of short lines, often hanging at the end, serve the motion of the story in a very interesting way: “I saw two old women / moving through time / through the huge // lobby of the building / I work in, through / the gold doors too / heavy to ever truly / open, or close. They were moving” Leaving “through” to hang at the end of the line pauses the reader for a split second on that action, reinforcing the transitory feeling of moving from one place to the next. 

Like any other poetry reader, I am a collector of lines I love.  I’m simultaneously jealous and greedy; I want to steal the lines and live inside them.  My favorite lines in this collection appear in Little Bird: “What is a child but dark. / What is a child, if not a pocket of dark.”