This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys & Barbarians 2

Rating:
Summary: Amid The Solid Stones, Many Soaring Seashells
Review: Considering that most poetry today is sub-poetic, this anthology has done well. Poems today (maybe always) risk remaining "prosaic-poems." Low-voltage diluted prose conversation. Could have stayed in a paragraph, but was divided into poetic lines but arbitrarily, with no skill in "enjambment." (The how and why you divide the lines for dynamic pace tone emphasis structure etc.)

But walk along the "seashore beach" of this anthology. Move aside the frequent "prosaic-poems," and you'll find "true poems." Distilled language balancing fire and ice, packing Dionysian emotions and energy within the Apollonian frame of form, style, craft. "Attainment and restraint," the artistic skill which freeze-dries significance to save it for the reader later elsewhere to savor. Seashells to listen into for an earful indeed!

Oh, not that the more-prosaic verse here is "bad." Shares much sincerely. Fractious families. Tangled relationships with straight boys. Coming out into frank pride. Militant protest about martyrs. "Aubades" or "morning-after" poems but with gritty twists to them, "the way we live now." And more.

But note the gems for which you can beachcomb here. (1) Hear the distinct voices. M. A. Tata is a hearty hoot, froth and fluff which is yet solid, perhaps an offspring of Frank O'Hara out of Truman Capote? (2) Enjoy the fixed poetic forms. Eric Norris dates traditional poetic forms, goes to the dance hall with the villanelle, ballad, sonnet-and they twinstar together, making and conveying meaning, not just prosaically mouthing it! (3) Appreciate a to-be classic. Wendell Ricketts' "Jubilat Agnes" catalog poem (about his failed dating) will become a standard "j'accuse" which skewers a whole dismal list of Gay Male Disconnectedness, preserves those butterflies on pins. (Or perhaps just Generic Male Driftiness?) (4) Enjoy at least one audacious rewriting of a straight-culture myth. In "Icarus on the Moon," the winged boy Goes Gay, soars beyond terrestrial paternity to escape to a lunar colony of boys and men...

(4) Appreciate skilled confronting of the Plague. AIDS has infected the body poetic also these days. But in art, the "antibodies" of style can help keep this enemy corralled somewhat. (Which is what art does...) On the page at least if not in life, these poets arm-wrestle the disease into clarity. Audacious leaps here too. Fog over Manhattan contains the ghosts of the lost. The end of World War Two makes one think of another war: "The only war I know is internal, is fought / in the blood and the marrow of men / and women and children who, despite their passion, / can not fire back." Even the Birth at Bethlehem is invoked and related. The poem "Don't Look In A Mirror For Two Weeks" is acrobatic, juggling several distinct tones at once: rue and regret, self-satire, and more.

Enough. Stroll this beach and enjoy the lesser poems for their effective-enough reports of experience. Savor the greater poems for their very-effective recreations of experience.