Looking over a mountain of poetry books published in 1999, I'm struck by the relevance of one that came out in 1798: "The Lyrical Ballads," by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordworth's introduction -- in its time truly revolutionary -- boils down to this: poems should surprise readers out of their complacency, speak "ordinary language" and stay away from cliches. Wordsworth provides a handy three-prong tool for digging through the mountain.
* Surprising the reader: Let's start with non-complacency. Which books climb Emily Dickinson's "stairway of surprise"?
It's a surprise when people we don't think of as poets come out with an excellent poetry. One such is Michael Ondaatje, probably best known nowadays for the novel on which the successful movie "The English Patient" was based. His new collection, "Handwriting" (Knopf, 80 pages, $22), may startle movie fans into becoming poetry readers.
The poetry of playwright/film writer David Mamet ratchets surprise up to shock. For my money, and I only put my money on poetry that pays off in knowledge of the craft, Mamet's "The Chinaman" (Overlook Press, 73 pages, $19.95) ranks among the best of the batch. When this book's good it's very, very good -- and often horrid too. Here's the title poem in its disquieting entirety:
I am a Mandarin Chinee.
My fingernail is long,
I drink gunpowder tea;
And the wild monkey's song
Delights me in its pain
As his skull is made hot
That I may eat his brain.
See my retainers' lot,
Who expiate the sin
Of their vile birth
Serving the Mandarin.
But what is our pride worth
Who serve as commanded,
Where doth the logic fail?
Some are conceived to heat the monkey's head,
Some to drink tea and to display the fingernail.
Louise Gluck's bone-chilling intelligence surprises like a paper cut. In her latest collection, " Vita Nova" (Ecco, 51 pages, $22), she plays myth against the everyday and renews both. "The Winged Horse," for example, presents a psychological Pegasus in the language of horse breeding.
Another happy surprise: Nikki Giovanni, in the three decades since she marched in the black power vanguard, hasn't lost her groove. "The Wrong Kitchen" leads off "Blues for All the Changes: New Poems" (William Morrow, 96 pages, $15) with a surprising, subversive tenderness and some in-group wordplay (did you know "kitchen" means the fuzz at the nape of the neck that eludes artificial hair-straighteners?).
Rita Dove, in "On the Bus With Rosa Parks" (W. W. Norton, 80 pages, $21), "sees" in surprising ways. "Lady Freedom Among Us" gives us a Dove's-eye vision of a street person observed during Dove's D.C. stint as Poet Laureate of the U.S.: "with her oldfashioned sandals/ with her leaden skirts/ with her stained cheeks and whiskers and heaped up trinkets," she's the Statue of Liberty's alter ego.
* Ordinary language: In America's diverse society, Words-worth's demand that poetry speak "ordinary language" begs the question "whose?" Several new translations respond "Both," offering the original language and English on facing pages.
The "Selected poems" of Argentine literary giant Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin-Putnam, 480 pages, $40), Alexander Coleman, editor, are well-translated from the Spanish to English by a galaxy of poets including Robert Fitzgerald, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand and John Updike. Translators are indentified by tiny initials at the foot of the poem; a translators' index would have helped.
Norman Shapiro's translations of "One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine," a bilingual edition from the University of Chicago Press (312 pages, illustrated, $25) sound more 19th-century than the originals; it's refreshing to run the tongue over the fluid French. For yumminess, savor both the Italian and the facing translations by Sonia Raiziss and others of "Addictive Aversions," Alfredo de Palchi's sexy and only occasionally sophomoric collection.
And consider Mexican-American writer Leroy Quintana's "The Great Whirl of Exile" (Curbstone Press, 59 pages, $12.95). Not a translation, it melts English and Spanish into one another within poems.
I'd like to think Wordsworth meant "of people" when he wrote "the ordinary language of men," but I'm pretty sure he was talking about guys. At least one 1999 collection booms with guy-talk. It's "Poems for the People: 73 Newfound Poems from His Early Years in Chicago," edited by George and Willene Hendrick (Ivan R. Dee, 192 pages, $22.50). "Most never before seen in print," goes the publishers' ballyhoo. No wonder. "Why [demands the poet of the evangelist in "Billy Sunday"] don't you go ... sit by yourself a whole day in a toilet ...think it all over, empty your bowels to a finish, and ask yourself if you ain't about as coarse and crooked a grafter as any of 'em. ..."
"Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation," edited by Pamela Gemin and Paul Sergi (University of Iowa Press, 234 pages, $15.95) supplies an antidote to "Poems for the People" with poems by nearly 100 women of that certain age, ranging from the seldom-heard to notables like Sandy Cisneros, Lynn Emanuel, Joy Harjo and Maryland's own Kathy Mangan.
* Avoiding Cliches: Avoiding cliches has little to do with fame. Marge Piercy's, John Hollander's, Adrienne Rich's, Charles Simic's, and W. S.Merwin's 1999 collections do it. But so does "The Alphabet of Desire" by Barbara Hamby, whose career began in 1994; it's $25 and $12.95, "self-distributed." I wish I'd written "Beri beri" or "The Chicken Wire Girls."
If John Ashbery's "Girls on the Run" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 55 pages, $20) seems to collapse into what Louise Gluck once termed "the curse of cute," try again. Based on a bizarre series of watercolors by outsider artist Henry Darger depicting weapon-toting, countryside-pillaging, androgynous Christopher-Robin lookalikes, this book-length poem is no cutesy romp. It chronicles the loss of "gay innocence" as AIDS came to Ashbery's New York subculture.
Things poetry and prose have in common: Deana Johnson, TU English Department administrative assistant and tireless sorter of review copies, came up with this commonality: books of poems, like novels and how-to's, make good gifts -- even if the recipients don't usually read poetry. Deana and I agree that ALL of the 4-by-6-inch Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series' hardbacks, with their gold cover-lettering and ribbon booksmarks, are adorable -- $12 for 250+ creamy little pages. Deana loved Herbert Kohl's "A Grain of Poetry: How to Read Contemporary Poems and Make Them a Part of Your Life" (HarperCollins, 175 pages, $23).
Sounds like chicken soup, no? No. The complex, peppery inclusions prove good poetry is alive, well, and timeless. I bought a second copy for myself.
Clarinda Harriss, chair of the Towson University English Department, has published three collections of poetry and contributed two scholarly works on poetry. Her work appears in many U.S. magazines including Touching Fire: Erotic Writing by Women. She edits and directs BrickHouse Books Inc., Maryland's oldest continuously publishing small press.