I DO NOT remember why I bought this. I don’t think I saw any reviews…I don’t think anyone recommended it…I don’t think I saw some reference to her work somewhere…it may have just been that this collection was published by NYRB Books. Whatever it was, it worked out. This is a great collection.
Quite a few of the poems, perhaps as many as half of them, are prose poems and brilliant examples of the genre. (I checked David Lehmann’s anthology of prose poems to see whether I had come across her work there, but no.) They have a way of matter-of-factly dropping a non sequitur in a deadpan, nothing-to-see-here way that reminds me of James Tate.
What struck me most, though, is a quality that I associate with some Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker poems, having to do with the poem not needing to be seen/read/noticed as a poem to be a poem. Most poems, nearly all I think, want you to see them, want to register on readers’ consciousnesses as poems. A lot of Willis’s poems seem more self-sufficient than that, almost as if they do not need to be read and recognized as poems to be poems. We could call this a kind of modesty or self-effacement, but it could be a kind of supreme indifference too, the absence of any need of readerly approval. I find it very attractive, somehow.
The final poem, “About the Author,” seems to be a witty twist on just this point, playing as it does on the idea that if we readers see the poems as poems we will want to know about the source of the poems, the poet, assuming her to be remarkable and interesting and wise. And even though I repeatedly found myself thinking, as I read Alive, that Willis is interesting and remarkable and wise, “About the Author” seemed a well-dropped reminder that whether I came to such conclusions or not, her poems were poems.
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