Patricia Lockwood's four new poems in n+1 #51; Ben Philipps, "Evasive Species"

QUITE A FEW poets I like--Lucy Ives, Maggie Nelson, Ocean Vuong--seem to publish more prose than poetry lately. Can't blame them, really, given the relative sizes of the audience for poetry and the audience for prose, but I still feel a twinge of regret. Such being the case, it was heartening to see four new poems from Patricia Lockwood in the most recent issue of n+1.

I have been a fan of Lockwood since Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, and that is going back a ways, even back before "Rape Joke." Lockwood has not published a collection of poems since 2014, but in the meantime the brilliant autofictions/memoirs Priestdaddy, No One Is Talking about This, and (quite recently) There Will Never Be Another You have made her famous (profiled in the New Yorker, no less).

The new poems did not remind me much of her earlier poetry, but after all, it's been ten-plus years, and a lot has happened in the meantime (see the three autofictions/memoirs). These poems still have some of the anarchic, she'll-say-anything streak of her early work, but I'd say they seem under more control. There are bows to illustrious precursors, Plath (not at all surprising) and Yeats (surprising, to me, but happy to see it), a fascination with minerals, and an idiosyncratic religious inflection.

I hope more are coming.

The same issue of n+1 has an interesting essay by Ben Philipps on climate-conscious poetry--okay, I admit it, I did not expect an essay on climate-conscious poetry to be interesting because, you know, déjà lu, but Philipps began with an interesting move, talking about the two large camps of American poetry. I think of them as representational and non-representational (see post for Sept 11, 2024); Philipps goes with "confessional" and "experimental." The poetry Philipps wants us to pick up on, which he calls "eco-confessional," perhaps bridges the divide, because it tends both to say "I have to tell you about this" and to aim at a kind of dislocation and upsetting of familiar tropes, trying to jar the reader out of complacency. 

Sounds promising, no? Philipps persuaded me to look into the poetry of Rachel Allen.