Chelsey Minnis, _Zirconia/Bad Bad_ (poetry week # 4)

WITH ALL OF the attention Chelsey Minnis's Baby I Don't Care got last year, Fence Books must have decided it was a good moment to republish her first two collections, making them available in one handy volume with an introduction by Ariana Reines (this is one of those introductions it would be a mistake to skip, by the way).

Zirconia (2001) includes several prose poems, but for the most part the poems are...hmm. Not that easy to describe. Imagine an erasure poem, the kind where the selected words remain in the place on the page where they originally occurred. Now, imagine, that the removed words have been replaced not by white space, but by rows of periods. Good? Okay, these poems, usually a few pages long, look like that. The effect is a little bit Charles Olson, a little bit like those translations of Sappho that have gaps where the papyrus is damaged, a little bit like erasure poetry, but not exactly like any of those things, so while the individual poems may not be authentic gems (which may be the point to the book's title), they do deliver un frisson nouveau, we could say.

The form recurs in Bad Bad (2007), but now the solid rows of periods are partial rows and dispersed irregularly around the page. Why that should make a difference, I do not fathom, but somehow it does. I found myself being more impressed by Bad Bad than by either Poemland or Baby I Don't Care, actually, and it had something to do with these poems. But what? Maybe the way they dance a little bit with language poetry? Maybe the way that irregularly spaced rows of periods suggested there was an erased poem underneath, not an erased page of prose? Maybe something in the urgency of "Man-Thing," "Bad Bad" (the poem of that name), or "Foxina"?

I found myself also profoundly enjoying the 68 prefaces with which Bad Bad opens, which anticipate the poems of Poemland. Here, too, Minnis's sardonic take on poetry-as-a-career combines effectively with a certain Instagram-poetry flatness that takes some abrupt plunges into the surreal.

And speaking of sardonic takes on poetry-as-a-career, Minnis's "Anti-Vitae" should be on every bulletin board in every MFA program.  A sample:

1997-2000
   
          Continue to not publish book.
          Bite cuticles.
          Manuscript rejected by Verse Press.
          Mental health questioned.