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One professor passes, another gets an F
Two professors, two poetry debuts and two very different results. Professor Larissa Szporluk of Bowling Green has given us "Dark Sky Question," a fun, bouncing collection of little word plays that, while uneven, succeeds more often than not. "At the Site of Inside Out," by Professor Anna Rabinowitz of The New School, on the other hand, is a heavy, morose and dark set of works that bogs down in its lack of imagination and wearisome literalness. It's actually debatable whether Rabinowitz is even writing verse here. Poetry no matter how avant-garde, modern or post-modern is still supposedly based on the twin premises of structure and rhythm, neither of which is present in any recognizable form in Rabinowitz's book. Inspired by her laudable efforts to learn about her Jewish family's fate during the Holocaust, "At the Site of Inside Out" reads as if Rabinowitz kept a journal during her travels in Europe and then simply inserted random line breaks and handed it off to her publisher. All of which might be excusable if the results were noteworthy in other words, if Rabinowitz were a particularly gifted writer. While she is technically proficient there aren't any glaring grammatical errors Rabinowitz has little knack for description and less yet for impressionism. But really, one's own powers of descriptive prose quickly seem incapable of describing Rabinowitz's writing. To illustrate, consider the opening four lines and closing two lines from a poem picked at random but perfectly representative, "Anthem": Let us praise appropriate images tadpoles that father assemblage in the flea markets of the city's debris. ... Because they are connected to origins, because they codify our movement, And on and on the book goes like this for, what, 70 pages? Perhaps the blurbs on the back cover should have been enough to warn of the horror inside. A Molly Peacock gushes over Rabinowitz's "debut of intense invention, with language at a height and experience at a depth that the whole art suddenly appears as a plinth on the plain of American letters." When one is reduced to touting a book with the kind of mindless gibberish that beats the very meaning out of words, that's a certain kind of endorsement all its own and probably not the one the publishers intended. Szporluk is more modest in her aims no grand visions here, no odes or opuses, but small little vignettes, little impressions of life. As poetry should, Szporluk's has a nice rhythm to it, an innate if informal meter that lends her writing a certain cadence: It's a lot like emptiness, the season Or this passage from "Agnosia": A far star is making leaves Not all of it works; it would be surprising if it did. But it's fun, it's playful; her writing flirts with you, makes you want to read more. What else could you ask? |
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