Chelsey Minnis
Wave Books
April 2009
126 pp.
$14.00, paperback original
In her third full-length book of poetry, Poemland, Chelsey Minnis presents an environment that forges a strong, experiential relationship between reader and text. She does this while simultaneously working to resituate poetry--or to place it firmly in an arena it is not often placed--in the realm of the purchased and the loosely domestic. The poems insist throughout that they are not working to participate in a lofty, ethereal venture, but in an emotional and physical reality that the reader takes part in. As the opening line of Poemland states, "This is a cut-down chandelier," an object, that is, brought swiftly from a place of unreachable grandeur to a heap on the ground we can reach with our hands.
Minnis' accumulation of poems in Poemland function by recalling a heaping or amassment; they are untitled, and the exact moments of each poem's beginning and end are vague. Pages hold four to six long lines that end, almost exclusively, with ellipses. Every eight to ten pages the string of poems, whether they are considered individually or as part of a serial piece, are interrupted by a page that is blank except for a barcode topped by the book's title. Because of Minnis' consistent use of ellipses, the relationships between the lines on each page are undefined. At times they read as accumulation, "This is digging and digging through the fur coats look-ing for a pistol... / And it's like a bronze ruffle going down your front... / And it's like the torn off sheer nude covering..." (120), and at other times as a progression, "I like to be thought better than I am... / But I hate to have the sole responsibility of judging my-self rightly..." (40), but they are most interesting when the relationships between lines are ambiguous due to an absence of conjunction: "This is when you think you are earning a freedom from self-disgust through busy-work... / The poem lies on the floor until you step on it and it sticks to your shoe... / It is flimsy and soft like lemon mousse..." (34). In this last example the relationship between "busy-work" and "the poem" is unsteady. I assume some connection between the two because of their proximity on the page, but no such connection exists grammatically. The same is true of the groupings of poems throughout Poemland. Although certain themes like death, personal failure, treacherous physical set-ups, and suggestions for how one ought to live in "the pre-death time span" (35) appear more densely in certain sections, a defined poem confined to its own page, title, and subject does not exist in this collection.
These open, or perhaps unregulating, structures strongly interact with one of the book's major themes--poetry itself. Because of the undefined relationships between line and sentence, stanza and poem, many of the normative guides of free verse are unavailable to the reader, which insists on this question: Exactly what kind of poems live in Poemland? Often poetry shows up as the line's subject, "Poetry is like waking up drunk in a lemon yellow room..." (5), and Minnis also refers to the act of writing a poem, "Writing a poem is like trying to do something, isn't it? / It's like trying to have an ungroveling feeling..." (19), but the most common subject of the book is the demonstrative pronoun This. A This opens the first line of the book, and 77 of the nearly 450 following lines begin the same way. That's 17% of the lines, a percentage that does not account for the portion of the book made of up lines that follow the This subject with the conjunction And, which progresses the already flexible subject, defined only by the pronoun. The presence of so many This' is interesting and troubling because of their placement at the beginning of the line, and often times, the beginning of the poem. Because of the undetermined relationships between most lines due to her use of ellipses, and a lack of poem titles, the This that opens a line cannot refer back to a defined subject. In one instance a page is built entirely of lines beginning with This (115):
This is like crying while trying on different outfits...
This is like crying because you can't open a jar...
This is like crying in a ditch...
This is when you look at the dinner table and start cry-ing...
This is crying while wearing a hat...
This is "ow, ow, ow, ow"
Most often I read the This as referring to the poem or poetry itself, and more precisely, to the experience of poetry. Which recalls, again, the book's strange title. Perhaps, because these poems are in Poemland, the pronoun This can be generally read as pointing to the experience of Poemland, which is the experience of reading the book. While reading I feel consistently surprised with the ease with which I tie this vague word to my experience as reader, and feel it provides an entrance into the poem. With the accumulation of these unregulating constructions, Poemland works to bring to the ground the chandelier Minnis mentions in her opening line, and build a more easily accessed, physical enviornment.
Although I've focused almost exclusively on the elements of Poemland that are vague or undefined, the poems rarely feel lofty or untethered because Minnis consistently ties her subject, often through simile, to the realm of the tangible, experiential, and purchasable. This is the way in which the reader gains access to the poems in Poemland. In the following lines Minnis moves from the vague subject This through several similes to a number of experiences and objects (101):
This is like looking too sexy in an uncomfortable chair...
This is when you lean over the railing and your hair rib-bon falls out...
It is like being slapped in the face with a stack of dollar bills...
I like it like glitter drums!
And, as in the third line, the idea of money is prevalent throughout the book. Because of the peppering of barcodes, the experience of reading Poemland is similar to checking out in a department store. The reader consumes a batch of pages between each barcode, and the same barcode adorns the cover. This insists, with little subtlety, on the subject of money and consumption, but Minnis rarely directly compares the subjects of money and poetry in the poems themselves. She does write "This is required to look like a poem...and to read like a poem... / But it's really just some incomprehensible money..." (63), which suggests that "a poem" and "money" are not intrinsically linked, but refrains from directly specifying their difference.
Wallace Stevens wrote that "Money is a kind of poetry," and although I'm not sure Minnis is presenting this exact idea in Poemland, she does encourage speculation on similarities between the two. Although I often think of money as existing in the realm of concrete, tangible objects far from the abstractions of poetry, the function of money in society is actually quite abstract. We generally work to acquire money, which we then trade for goods. It is a hovering abstraction used to equate actions and tangible objects. This is something we can all understand in our wage-based lives. But I wonder if the hour's worth of work that I put in for $8 and the slice of pizza I buy with that money relate to each other in a way similar to the experience of the "lemon yellow room" and poetry itself in Minnis' line "Poetry is like waking up drunk in a lemon yellow room..." (5). They are like each other only because the poem says so, and in the same way my labor and the food I buy are like each other only because they are equated with money. And perhaps this is another method Minnis uses to create a collection that examines poetry's function and its potential by bringing it to the tangible land that the reader participates in.
