Mark Jenkins
Review of Kevin Griffith’s Denmark, Kangaroo, OrangeLong Beach, California: Pearl Editions, 2007. 80 pages, $14.95, paper.
The biggest challenge for any prose poet is to escape the influence of Russell Edson, the best-known contemporary prose poet whose work is frequently absurd and surreal. His poems often read like grotesque fairy tales. For instance, his poem “The Way Things Are” tells the tale of “a man who had too many mustaches.” Throughout the poem, the man adds layers of mustaches, dubbing the uneven mustaches normal and the even abnormal. “It’s not that I want to, it’s simply the way things are” the man says to a bewildered onlooker. It is particularity difficult for an entire collection of prose poems to become their own poems. Many contemporary prose poets might have to echo the exasperated mustache man if they were asked to explain Edson’s influence in their writing. All too often recent prose poem collections sound like Edson tributes. I have no problem with Edson and his devotees. It’s just important to note that as a form the prose poem goes back to at least Baudelaire. There are plenty of other contemporary prose poets that expand this increasingly popular form.
It’s not to say that that Griffith’s prose poems never bring to mind Edson. Some do especially his poems that center around people in inexplicable situations, such as the Trapped Furnace Repairman in “Furnace” who is doomed to be fed sliced apples by the narrator’s children through the cold air return. “I suppose that something will have to be done someday,” says the narrator. Yet the family and the repairman are content to coexist. “We just have to get used to it— the smell, the snoring.” Or take “Killer” where the narrator learns his own killer is himself. “I remembered my last words to myself: ‘It’s nothing personal.’ ” Edson’s influence can be felt through this collection, but does not overwhelm Griffith’s own voice.
In this third collection, Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange, Kevin Griffith brings to prose poetry what he began in Paradise Refunded, making poetry funny. He is not alone in this endeavor, thanks to poets like Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, and Thomas Lux, among others. Yet Griffith brings his own fixations along, too, namely Zombies in poems like “Zombie Noir,” and “When You Return From the Dead.” His work also touches on poetry, writing, and Academia with poems like “Department of Nothing” and ”On the Visiting Poet.” Many poems in this collection like “Coffee” have a self-awareness that keeps them buoyant and interesting.
In “Writer’s Retreat,” a writer works on a surreal assembly line where he “must write this poem on the baby’s belly… in fifty one seconds a small air-raid siren will sound and the nurse will hand me another baby.” This poem seems less a commentary on Writer’s Retreats than on the difficulty of finding writing time. Other obligations to family, teaching fulltime, and other obligations mean it takes being “strapped to a sweaty chair” to even manage a few seconds of writing.
Griffith’s “Workshop Poem” imagines a poetry manufacturing plant where poems initially resemble poorly cloned sheep: “Down they came off the assembly line of imperfection; some adorned with shriveled limps, some eyeless, some with goiters so disturbingly large, one felt a pain in the frontal lobes just looking at them.” This poem makes poetry workshops into metaphorical refineries. Each poem gets “hosed…down, then scraped clean [of] any usable flesh.” Who hasn’t heard one critic or another accuse the overproduction of vaguely defined workshop poems as culprits for poetry’s decline? This poem satirizes such criticism. Further, this poem imagines a universe where the demand for poetry exceeds the supply of poems and poets to write them, hence this poetry factory. The demand is not satisfied until one day a perfect poem is created, rendering the factory obsolete.
Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange, marks an exciting point for Kevin Griffith. It is not so much that the poems in this collection are different from his previous books, but they are more earnest and distilled successors to his earlier work, something all poets strive towards, but rarely achieve.
