Stategy Response, Week 12

Brigitte Byrd's collection, "Song of a Living Room," exhibits poems that seem more often than not obscure. Upon several reads through the collection I was having a frustrating time with finding the work accessible as a reader. What I also found frustrating was why was I less engaged in this work that tends to be more surreal, cryptic, rangy, and invested in word play when those tactics are usually my points of interest in female poets. Clearly Byrd is interested in the politics of poetic narrative not only evident with her prose poem structure, but with the content itself: "There was futility in the narrative and her voice broke" (Perhaps The Season Was Really That), "Same book to open. Same page to find. Last / line to break" (Something Like nobody coming Something Like went instead), "After days of rampaging through dreams she noticed a shift in the / narrative" (The Way He Stumbled On Air), etc. What occurs continuously is the comment on "breakage." Again, we return to the feminine politics of a patrilinear narrative in poems that female poets find the need to drift away from. By writing cryptically, and perhaps even cyclically, Byrd can defy the mundane traditions of the "same book" and the "same page." Why then do I in particular have a difficult time becoming involved in this collection? One element that I have noted that lends to my confusion is the heavy use of Byrd's abstractions or what I would also consider "half-abstractions." One example of this usage comes from a line in "Variation For Mushrooms And Pomeranians":"Although she had already cut through the genre with alarming ferocity this exhausted subject was splendid." Words and phrases like "alarming ferocity," "exhausted subject," and even "splendid" all strike me as half-abstractions or full abstractions. In that one sentence we do not get one Williams-like "THING" and possess no grounding in what the poet is attempting to convey. Perhaps this highlights something in me as a poet that I was not fully aware of--that being that as much as I experiment with and pleasure in the reading of word play I do need some grounding in "THINGS" to move the poem along. Is may represent a conflict boiling in my poetic feminist and patriarchal interests--that I do desire some thread of coherent narrative. Perhaps I can leave Byrd's collection with appreciation to this enlightenment to my own poetic investments and reconsider how much I let word play and narrative balance in my own writing.