Brian Henry

In this special anniversary issue of the North American journal Verse, sub-titled The Second Decade, one can find a poem by Ethan Paquin called ‘New Form’. Its first line reads: ‘Ablution when stitched with pertussitine hate.’ Pertussitine? One of the most striking things about this large, impressive collection of contemporary poetry is its penchant, indeed rage, for the obscure word. After a while, I just left the Shorter Oxford next to me when I was reading, but it didn’t always help when I came across words like ‘usufruct’, ‘blisson’, ‘eldritch’, ‘rutabagas’ (North American for ‘swedes’), ‘alginate’, ‘geode’, ‘arroyos’, ‘aretes’ (those last four from one poem), ‘catafalque’, ‘cartouche’, ‘penetralia’, ‘solatium’, ‘griffonage’, ‘exogamous’, ‘matutinal’ and (twice) ‘pled’ (the past participle of ‘plead’). It’s a mildly interesting parlour game to see which words my computer recognises.

Publishers and the publics they serve seem enthralled by the idea of ‘the best’. The best of what is ultimately less important than the superlative itself, which implies a rigorous screening process to isolate the most worthy material. Never mind that magazine and book publishers have already put writing through a brutal screening process with acceptance rates from .01 to 1 per cent. For readers whose schedules or temperaments prohibit them from doing the work themselves, a collection of ‘The Best’ can be useful and appealing.

Both Dennis Haskell and Andrew Sant are primarily domestic poets. Family and friends comprise the milieu of many of their poems, which attempt to transform quotidiana into something of enduring interest. The chief danger of this type of poetry is that the prevalence of so many poems about family members and friends results in a poetic environment that can resemble a vast, monotonous suburb. If most domestic poets seem indistinguishable from each other in their subject matter alone, then the situation of contemporary poetry becomes further muddled when this homogeneity is bolstered by a general complacency with language.