Jennifer K. Sweeney, _How to Live on Bread and Music_

JAMES LAUGHLIN WINNER for 2009, which means I am now caught up.

For my own convenience, I categorize poets along a spectrum defined by the poles "non-representational" (e.g. Ashbery) and "representational" (e.g., anyone ever featured on "Writer's Almanac"). The more one can say of a poem that is "about" something, the more I think of it as representational. (I can enjoy both kinds.)

By that criterion, Sweeney's poems tend to the representational, having a fairly recognizable departure point in something she has seen or experienced, in a memory of the family in which she grew up. What kept pulling me along from poem to poem, though, was the capacity of her language to swerve and surprise, to resist reduction to the straightforwardly mimetic,as in "33 Umbrellas."

Perhaps in a Japanese rainstorm

33 umbrellas opened at precisely 
the same moment--
a ballooning

then a click--
and you were allowed further.
Go with your blue apples

falling from the night-trees.

Transcribed from a dream? A recalling of that wonderful phrase from the "Ithaca" section of Ulysses, "the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit"? I love the specificity of the number of umbrellas and that sense of initiation in "you were allowed further." Marvels await, obviously--and marvels do await on the very next page of the book, where we find the title poem.

You need not confront the storm
though it comes with its guillotine
of wind and arrows of ice.
Let it come.
Take the wheat in your sage-rubbed hands
and pull out the dull chords.

The idea that one rubs one hands with sage in order to play music with wheat does not quite jibe with any recognizable idea of cooking or of music, which is exactly what I like about it, combined with the idea we will be making our wheat-music in the face of serious adversity. The "aboutness" of this passage has virtually but not quite disappeared behind the horizon line, which I think is perfect.

Things I should not worry about, but do: 

The volume includes a long poem, "The Listeners," which seems to be about the way the poet's sometimes strained relationship with her father was lightened by their liking a lot of the same music (singer-songwriters of the late 60s and early 70s).  Does its title, I wondered, allude to Walter de la Mare's poem of the same title, which was very well known a few generations back (like Masefield's "Cargoes" or Housman's A Shropshire Lad, say)? I suspect not, but I'm kept trying to see how it might, much to my own frustration.

In the same poem we find these lines: "The music teacher told her third graders / if you played 'Strawberry Fields Forever' backwards / it would sing John is dead." I am old enough to have fallen for this rumor back in the day, but anyone my age would know that the supposedly concealed message was actually "I buried Paul" (Lennon was actually saying "cranberry sauce" on the fadeout). It was Paul--not John--whose death was intimated in dozens of clues on Beatles albums, supposedly. And you did not have to play this record backward--the one you had to play backward was "Revolution # 9," and the message thus revealed was "Turn me on, dead man." I could not decide how to read the teacher's nugget of misinformation. Did Sweeney misremember the details, or is the point that this third grade teacher was not only spreading cockeyed conspiracy theory, but getting the clues mixed up?

Similarly, the quoted lines from Joni Mitchell: "and still I'd be on my knees / I'd still be on my knees." Except it's not her knees she would still be on in "A Case of You," but her feet. Did Sweeney mishear the line? Or is she just remembering mishearing it? Or did she change it on purpose to fit the purposes of the poem?

I know I should not let these things hang me up. But I did.