It has been three years since Jefferson Carter published his most-recent and deeply satisfying verse collection, My Kind of Animal. The themed poems gathered in Animal speak to the idea that man, another dumb beast, redeems himself with humor.
Even accepting that a divine spark animates us, Carter consistently keeps his tongue in jowl. His verse in that book remains playful and poignant. You should own a copy.
The Tucson poet’s latest collection, Get Serious: New and Selected Poems, is a different beast. The 33 brand-new poems, which precede a larger group from previously published and long-out-of-print collections, are cruel by comparison. It’s as if, minus a menagerie of creatures to lighten his tone, Carter lets a bit of nihilism creep into his recent stanzas. Serious sounds at times like an aging, embittered poet’s final testament or last verses. Previously, Carter could stare into a cat’s butthole (“Please,” included in Serious) and sniff a geriatric yogi’s fart (“Helen,” also included), and weave emotional poetry out of such indignities. With the new poems, he doesn’t bother to sugar life’s lemons into something tasty and refreshing. He squeezes in the rinds and seeds—and expects us to drink.
Take the book’s opening poem. It’s an ugly self-portrait called “Stone Loop,” in which the instinct of writing a poem is undermined, ridiculed. Halfway through an aborted liftoff, the single stanza drifts into comic self-abnegation.
Where was I? Not
in the middle of my life,
not like Dante entering
the profound wood. More like
a sit-down comedian, a communist
allergic to theory, a retired
bobsledder playing
ping-pong with his wife.
The funny yet pity-inducing metaphors pile up to hopeless effect. It may cause readers to ask: If writing poetry in one’s later years contradicts, and is so inherently at odds with, the joy and light of existence, why should I bother reading this book? Before, Carter could smile, even bow, to absurdity’s divine traces. He now allows concrete absurdities the final say. Sure, they resonate with a measure of truth. But these farcical moments suppurate like infected wounds in a reader’s mind.
An example: the entirety of “Victim Poetry,” which begins with a zinger.
Cliterature just rejected
my latest poems.
It’s three P.M.
& I go back to bed.
I wake to the sound
of gospel-sized hail.
I go back to sleep,
my new Posturepedic
mattress, custom-made
for a bad back & thin skin,
so comfy you’ll never
get up again.
The idea of a verse magazine named after a word play on women’s anatomy is humorous. A rejected poet soothing his wounds with a midafternoon nap is silly. But the coup de grace—sinking into the coffin of a designed-for-old-folks bed as a storm batters the windows—is an expression of a poet’s bad faith.
Get up and gaze into some kitty bung, I want to tell the poet. Also, that two of Carter’s new poems end with an image of formaldehyde tempts me to urge: Do not go quietly into that embalming preserve! The bard dwells inordinately on death’s decisiveness.
When he remembers to pop his literary Viagra, Carter is compelling. The delightful “Sunlight” illuminates a scene, years ago, when a poet recites his verse while sandwiched in bed between a girlfriend and her older sister. This, and other poems, like the randy “Mall,” brighten the book’s overall tone.
They’re not enough to balance what should have been a triumphant collection. It’s great to encounter rich poems I hadn’t read before, like those from 1987’s impossible-to-find None of This Will Kill Me. Ovid-referencing “A Centaur,” yoga-riffing “Johnny-Jump-Up” and the flu-borne “Strep Throat” are some of the finest verse devoted to family and how the institution is a force that changes people. Often for the better, but sometimes for the worse.
Still, the desolate humor and poetry-insider-on-the-outside approach of the first 45 pages are tough to overcome. Carter is a powerful, underestimated poet who deserves a Billy Collins-size audience. Too bad Carter doesn’t care to please an NPR-listening audience.
He should consider sneaking Splenda into his moody lemonade.
This article appears in Dec 27, 2012 – Jan 2, 2013.
Good poetry is capable of awakening, not soothing, whether the audience be NPR listeners or undergraduates. Good poetry grabs the readers’ lapels, shakes them awake and leaves them with a reinvigorated view of the world they thought they knew. Jefferson Carter’s New and Selected Poems is a terrific collection that both strikes out into new territory and reminds us of older poems that have already staked a claim on our imaginations.
Burgess Needle
Perhaps Carter’s metaphors are “Moody” but maybe they should be when they are in response to an imperfect world. Perhaps some poems need to be cruel, to scare the indifferent awake, to remind us that not everything is funny. The collection is entitled “Get Serious” after all. I respect the poet for venturing into new territory. It may be unpopular, difficult territory, but the speakers in these poems are telling the truth. Isn’t the truth more important than whether something makes us feel good?
This is another point: Take any Poetry 101 course, and the instructor will tell you that not every poem is from the perspective of the poet himself. Poetry is all about stepping into another person’s shoes and seeing the world from a new perspective. Bravo, Mr. Carter for doing this well in Get Serious.
–Lisa M. Cole
Perhaps Carter’s metaphors are “Moody” but maybe they should be when they are in response to an imperfect world. Perhaps some poems need to be cruel, to scare the indifferent awake, to remind us that not everything is funny. The collection is entitled “Get Serious” after all. I respect the poet for venturing into new territory. It may be unpopular, difficult territory, but the speakers in these poems are telling the truth
This is another point: Writers don’t write solely from their perspective. Poetry collections often utilize multiple points of view. This is what good poetry does, after all. It invites us to see the world through new eyes, to venture into new territory we wouldn’t have initially thought about. Kudos to Mr. Carter for doing this well in Get Serious.
–Lisa M. Cole
I’m the director of Chax Press, the publisher of the book, just to clear the air. I think this review of Carter’s book is really stupid. First of all, it fails to recognize that many poems are persona poems, a voice speaking that is not the author’s. But what bothers me more is that the reviewer wants poetry to perk people up from the darkness, not to figure out what’s really going on. He wants Carter to be more like Billy Collins. If he were, Chax wouldn’t publish the work at all.
If this guy thinks Carter’s work is too dark, he must think Samuel Beckett is abysmal, and he must wish Linh Dinh would go crawl back into a hole somewhere. That’s just to name two of my favorite writers.
Everything he says which posited as a kind of negative, I would take as a positive. And the things he would like Carter to do, i.e. “care to please an NPR-listening audience,” are things I am so glad he does not try to do.
The reviewer’s vision of poetry seems to be a little coffee circle sharing its pleasantries, keeping the darkness at bay by laughing gaily or ignoring it altogether. I’d rather enter, as the masterful poet Gwendolyn Brooks names it, “the noise and the whip of the whirlwind.”
Charles: To be fair, Jarret doesn’t say that Carter should be like Billy Collins, but that he deserves a similarly-sized audience. A significant difference, I believe.
The following was originally sent as a letter to the editor on Dec. 27, 2012.
Get Serious is not only the title of a poetry collection by Jefferson Carter, recently reviewed in Tucson Weekly, but should serve as an admonition to the reviewer, Jarret Keene, as well.
As one who has reviewed poetry collections—and in this case, Carter’s latest book—it is difficult to understand, certainly impossible to accept, Jarret Keene’s dependence on ageism as a primary standard for analyses.
Keene writes (“Moody Metaphors,” Tucson Weekly, Dec. 27, 2012), “[Get] Serious sounds at times like an aging, embittered poet’s final testament or last verses.” These remarks are followed by ageist euphemisms: “When he remembers to pop his literary Viagra,” or suggesting the poet “should consider sneaking Splenda into his moody lemonade,” are condemnations of age-as-disease, and not poetry. They are not cute or coy; they are attempts to denounce a poet’s poems based on stereotypical assumptions about age, assumptions that should trouble us all. (It makes readers wonder if Keene has ever read those notable works produced by older poets.)
To do this, however, Keene must first dismiss the idea that poems may have personae and assume every poem has one speaker who has no other identity as a narrator or poetic character, but is simply the poet himself, which violates one of the basics of Poetry 101. Many voices emerge in Carter’s poetry and assume the first person narrator of ‘I’ just as in Robert Browning’s verse, or those of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, or W. H. Auden. Of course, Keene’s approach creates sensationalism, that old cheap ploy to gain the attention of readers.
Keene’s review is an ad hominem attack using ageist rhetoric and caricature. “Tucson Weekly” is not well represented by such ignorance, or viciousness which perpetuates ageist stereotyping to the exclusion of a poetry that is at once otherwise durable and valuable.
Michael Gessner
In reviewing Jefferson Carter’s “Get Serious: New and Selected Poems,” Jarrett Keene commits the critical fallacy of confusing the speaker of a poem with its author–a fallacy which, if we follow its arc to its logical conclusion, compels us to diagnose poets who employ various personae in their work–Norman Dubie springs to mind–as clinically schizophrenic. Such a narrow minded critical aesthetic confines poetry to the realm of autobiography and reduces the role of poet to
documentarian. More absurd is Mr. Keene’s implied notion that the mission of poetry should be to turn lemons into lemonade. If Mr. Keene prefers whipped-cream platitudes of reassurance in response to life’s frequent disappointments, he would be better served browsing the racks of his local Hallmark shop rather than risking his sense of well-being turning the pages of a book of poetry. I’m not suggesting we limit our endorsement of verse to the dark shadows of existential angst–or any other single creed for that matter–but I have a feeling if you enjoyed the spry wit and lyrical honesty of Carter’s previous work you’ll find much to like in his new poems as well.
I am a reader, not a critic. And that’s what I thought about Jefferson Carter’s latest:
Get Serious, the title of Jefferson Carter’s new poetry collection may as well be Carter’s way of talking to himself under his breath. From Carter’s poetry I get the feeling that he’s hiding his seriousness in what often seem ‘light’ poems, funny to the average reader. Some may be written tongue-in-cheek – because that’s the only way he is often able to express his most serious concerns; sometimes he’s hiding engagement, tremendous love and tenderness in metaphors that make one smile; often there is pure sarcasm expressing despair about the state of the world and all who sail in her.
His poems are sometimes caustic, entertaining and thought provoking, enjoyable and sad, exceedingly well-crafted and often brilliant.
You want another ‘book full of Jefferson’, the one who will not get serious, read Get Serious. It contains some old friends from former editions of his work which I was happy to meet again.
Mr. Keene- I “Goggled” you and was met with an impressive resume… but this review for Mr. Carter was disappointing to say the least. Not because I disagreed with your overall opinion… but because you used a horribly, cheesy image “sugar life’s lemons.” Any reviewer or editor for that matter who would even use this as a crutch instead of a solid opinion loses any weight at all with me.
A bizarre, ageist review. It started with the mistake of presuming a certain poem is automatically from the perspective of the poet himself and then devolved into shots about “literary Viagra” and “Splenda.” A disservice not only to Jefferson Carter’s work but to the past work done by the reviewer, who is normally pretty good.
I do not like Jefferson Carter and I do not like his poetry. He has the edge of a butter knife. I didn’t like My Kind of Animal or any of his previous books. I thought this review was funny, and probably too nice, though I will not read Get Serious. The title alone is enough to turn me away, a terrible title. Although I don’t understand how the reviewer could say at the end that Carter deserves an audience the size of Billy Collins’. Why would he say that, after such a negative review?