Rafael Campo read a wonderful lecture on Emily Dickinson and her relationship to science and medicine, interspersed with readings from Dickinson and his own poetry. Of course, I would have preferred less reading from a prepared lecture and more speaking. Among other things, the inevitably monotony of the reading voice sometimes made it hard to distinguish when he had left the realm of ‘discourse about Dickinson’ and started reading a poem by himself or Dickinson.

I bought a collection by Campo called The Enemy that was far better to read than I would have guessed by his earnest, but uncharismatic style behind the podium.

I wasn’t sure about Campo as the designated reader on a day honoring Emily Dickinson. I didn’t know much about him, but what I did know seemed far from Dickinson’s aesthetic. But he explained that he studied in Amherst and the Dickinson house was a source of poetry inspiration and solace to him, so all is forgiven! The collection even has a poem about reading Dickinson on the quad in college and the solace that she (along with Coleridge) provided.

As for Campo’s poetry, it is mixed.

There is a section about a trip to Paris which is beautiful and often haunting, with subtle politics, usually touching on issues around AIDS and its effect on America’s gay community. But there are also less subtle political poems in other section which comes across as heavy handed and too pat in their sentiments.

In general, he is very good when his poems are driven by place – or rather by memory of place. Provincetown, for example, appears often and is used to think about current loves, past loves, and how relationships have changed – for good and for ill – over time.

This was a sadly sparse reading. Not empty, but perhaps just 80% full and with upper balcony totally empty. Which is too bad, but Brock gave a great reading.

McHugh was the judge of the latest Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and she chose a manuscript by Brock as the winner (thereby getting it published by Waywiser Press).

Some years back, I spent too much money on an oversize paperback by Richard Howard entitled, Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003. For the life of me, I don’t know why I bought it. I hated it. A lot of the poems are written in the voices of historical figures. I mention this, because that is much of what Brock does, only I like his poetry.

McHugh was a little confusing. She spoke a lot about personal challenges and about her support for a particular cause: people who are long term caregivers for severely disabled relatives (usually their children). At one point, I thought she was reading a poem and then she looked up and started speaking about the cause and I could never tell whether these were asides during the reading of a poem or if none of it had been a poem.

I bought and Brock read from Voices Bright Flags. Very enjoyable. He’s got a nice, light touch and recognizable style, without being repetitive. A lot of serious poems, with passages about John Brown and the Civil War and slavery, but also some light humor about being a father with an insistent toddler. I actually remembered reading the first poem in the collection, Bryant Park at Dusk, in Poetry (the magazine).

I’ll excerpt from a poem about Ulysses S. Grant. Mostly because it’s a good poem, but also because Brock drolly noted that no one writes poems about President Grant.

My heart then like a puffed-up private boasting
he’s cut the enemy’s leg off
– Not his head?
– Sir, someone else had cut that off already.

A surprisingly engaging and enjoyable poet to listen to and the usual moderate of these conversations – the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles – stayed out of the way more often the usual, perhaps because the sanguine Kleinzahler was more willing than the melancholy Hirsch and the phlegmatic Szymbist to take control of the conversation (did you see what I did there with the four humours of medieval medicine?).

In his introduction, Charles noted that the poet, despite being famous for chronicling bars and diners and working class communities, was not a Bukowski. But the impression he gave was of a Robert Pinsky writing a Charles Bukowski. Does that make sense? Probably not. Well, I’m not going to explain.

The poet signed for me The Strange Hours Travelers Keep – which both delightfully named and has a wonderful cover. He aspires to Whitman’s continent spanning enthusiasm, but there is something narrower about him. The title comes from a line of William Carlos Williams and there is something of Spring & All in Kleinzahler (who is also a New Jersey poet). He wears his learning more broadly than Bukowski (again, like Williams), but has something of Bukowski’s resentment. Williams felt resentment, too, mainly for feeling left out of the conversation in favor of folks like Eliot and Pound, but this is a different kind of resentment. Something closer, indeed, the Bukowski. But more sober and plastered over with a fine appreciation of Milton.

There is a touch of misogyny to some of these poems – a ‘character’ in a poem calling Alma Mahler a ‘slut’ or a poem about a female poet who turned cruel eviscerations of her parents and the symbolic emasculation of a husband or lover into poetical success (defined, in this case, as grants, prizes, and choice campus appointments). I couldn’t call this trend pervasive or a trend, but just frequent enough to make me uncomfortable.

Kleinzahler has these wonderful exceptions to his high culture Whitman-ism. A lot of them have this delicious French influence, particularly the Surrealists (mainly Breton), though with too much conscious logic to is zig sagging motions to be truly Surrealist (and we are talking the actual movement; not ‘surrealist’ as short hand for ‘weird’), and also bits of Antonin Artaud’s structured madness. A lengthy prose poem, not suited to excerptation, I’m afraid, but that I highly recommend and which is well worth the price of the book: The History of Western Music: Chapter 4

The best poem that is also great distillation of his more usual style is the sad and melancholy portrait of faux-genteel poverty and terrifying loneliness, The Single Gentleman’s Chow Mein.

That his poems don’t take well to being shown in excerpts is a testament to how well they cohere, even when they appear random (that touch of Surrealism) or stream of consciousness.