Rae Armantrout’s Versed
deservedly won yesterday’s Pulitzer, and will likely garner more analysis and discussion in other outlets as a result. So as to not ignore the finalists, here are a few thoughts on the books:
- Inseminating the Elephant
, by Lucia Perillo. It’s a troubling sign when poetry reviewers call a book “funny” – it means one of two equally bad options: A) The poet wrote footnotes for a bilingual pun they’re quoting in the original Sanskrit. Or, B) Grandmothers and members of the clergy are likely to chuckle. So I was surprised when I caught myself laughing throughout this excellent collection. The poet’s humor is both aggressive and humble. It forced me to recognize in Perillo’s multiple sclerosis my body’s own fragility. Recommended.
- Tryst
, by Angie Estes. Estes makes a lot of references – opera librettos, letters of Petrarch, Nijinsky’s fountain pen, Cimabue, the Indy 500. I found myself skipping through just to look at the italicized quotes, which were always more engaging than the poems themselves. By the end of the book, I hadn’t been able to find Estes in her work – she was lost behind a constant display of erudition. Allusion for allusion’s sake. At one point, her footnotes actually recommended I try Google Translate. This collection might have fared better instead as quotes anthology.
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- Yesterday I mentioned having seen something odd in the Drama category. Pulitzer jurist and theater critic Charles McNulty confirmed my suspicions in an interesting article in today’s LA Times. He writes “the [Pulitzer] board ignored the advice of its drama jury in favor of its own sentiments.” In doing so, he argues that the board is on the wrong side of “the new guard of American playwriting.“
Folio Found. 