June 2008 issue of Poetry, the longest running United States poetry magazine

“The sky was laced with Irish cream mist, that mellow tan overhanging the hills, which were studded with deathmasks and baskets spilling flowers from both ends…” So begins Ange Mlinko’s fractured poem of matrimony, lightning, and horror films, “A Not Unruffled Surface,” from the June 2008 issue of Poetry. The issue is an all poetry issue, filled with work by—among others—Charles Bernstein, A. R. Ammons, Donald Revell, Charles Simic, Michael Hoffman, and Meghan O’Rourke. Overall, the pieces inside are ones of quiet expression, most often choosing resignation over revolt. Nonetheless, like nearly every issue of Poetry, every poem is filled with language to break your teeth on.

Aside from Mlinko’s poems (here’s another taste of the controlled frenzy of her writing: “’In a flash,’” as they say, we could acquire a self-renewing subscription to classical music (it’s always classical in the scientific literature) accessible at all hours and piped into the forebrain from the hypothalamus”), Rae Armantrout’s poems are the strongest in the issue. Her four poems are filled with Armantrout’s usual anxiety tinted imagination, and which makes for the type of poetry reading experience Emily Dickinson was looking for. In her presentation at least, Armantrout is very similar to Akhmatova and Grace Paley, poets who seem in their poetry to have nothing to prove, but only fantastic (and often disturbing) observations to share. Here’s an excerpt from her poem “Apartment“:

2

The present
is a sentimental favorite,
with its heady mix
of grandiosity
and abjection,
truncated,
framed.

3

It’s as if I’m subletting
a friend’s apartment.
Even in the dream,
I’m trying to imagine
which friend.

And I’m trying to get
all my robes together,
robes I really own and
robes I don’t