M.G. Piety

 

A Review of Miriam Kotzin’s The Body’s Bride

The Body’s Bride, Miriam Kotzin, David Robert Books (2013)

I have always loved accentual-syllabic verse. Most people do, even if they don’t realize it. Human beings like rhyme and they like meter. That’s why they sing. That’s why they make up nursery rhymes. There are people who think that they don’t like poetry. I have to believe, however, that that is because they are not sufficiently familiar with it, that their exposure to it has been limited to a few contemporary free verses, or to some of the more difficult older poems where the requirements of the form obscure the narrative, or where the rhyme and meter are so subtle they are difficult for the untutored reader to appreciate.

Long poems in particular can be difficult. I was gratified once to hear the Danish poet Søren Ulrik Thomsen say that he didn’t particularly like poems that were longer than a single page, or perhaps it was that he didn’t like writing such poems. In any case, I was gratified because I have never much cared for long poems myself. I often pick up a book of poetry and flip through it to see the length of the poems. If most run only one page, then there’s a good chance I will buy the book. If most are longer than that, then there’s a good chance I won’t.

I don’t mean to suggest that short poems are necessarily better than long ones, but only that short poems make fewer demands on readers. Short poems can be just as profound as longer poems, but the profundity is easier to grasp if the whole of the poem sits on a single page. Perhaps this phenomenon has to do with the shortened attention span of the contemporary reader. Or perhaps it is that everyone has so many obligations now that it seems too decadent to carve out enough time to appreciate a longer poem.

The Body’s Bride is a slender volume filled with precisely the kind of short poems I love and that appeal to most contemporary readers of poetry, both tutored and untutored. It is clearly the product, however, of many years’ work, because although there is some free verse, most of the poems are formal and formal poems are excruciatingly difficult to craft. Only someone with years of experience both reading and writing formal poetry could produce such a volume. There are triolets, rondeaus, sonnets and villanelles to name just a few of the many forms represented.

Kotzin is a master of forms and of the poet’s craft more generally. The imagist anthem “no ideas but in things” taken from William Carlos Williams’s epic poem “Patterson,” had always seemed kind of arbitrary to me. Yet compare Kotzin’s triolet “Nuptial” to Hardy’s triolet “How Great My Grief,”
 

How Great My Grief

How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee!
­­—Have the slow years not brought to view
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Nor memory shaped old times anew,
Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee?
 

Nuptial

Each year I wait for the old pear to bloom,
to stand adorned again in frothy white,
a brazen backyard bride without a groom.
Each year I wait for the old pear to bloom,
I stand beneath the tree, the air a tomb
of scent and petals. Spring’s a passing blight
each year. I wait for the old pear to bloom
to stand adorned again in frothy white.
 

Despite the fact that some would argue the overt subject matter of Hardy’s poem is more profound, Kotzin’s poem is the more forceful and beautiful precisely because of the strong images, including an unexpected, and hence arresting, reference to spring as a “blight.”

Images abound in the poems in this collection, as do literary allusions. “On certain summer afternoons/when shadows stretch across the lawn” begins “The Itch” in a clear allusion to Emily Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of light.” There’s another, more overt reference to Dickinson in “Pulse.”
 

Pulse
after Dickinson

Why should I stop for Death?
He would not stop for me­--
Instead he cruised right by
Pretending not to see

Me waiving here—Although
The winter light is dim--
I recognize his Escalade--
A certain formal black.

I couldn’t hear his music--
Yet I still feel
His beat—just watch him—now--
Cool jamming on the wheel.
 

“Pulse” exhibits another quality shared by many poems in the collection—humor. Sometimes the humor is dark, as in “Pulse,” but other times it’s light, as in “Villanelle Villainess,” Kotzin’s hilarious meditation on the reaction of her students to being assigned to write a villanelle.

There are also poems about paintings, including paintings by Winslow Homer, Emil Nolde, and James McNeill Whistler. And then there are the unsettling poems in the third section of the book, beginning with “Lurkers,” an unusual form of the sonnet in that each line is end-stopped.
 

Lurkers

Who’s leaning slouched against the jungle gym:
If we walk closer, we can see his face.
The lamppost near him flickers and grows dim.
He looks toward us, and he begins to pace.

He moves between the jungle-gym and slide.
He stops, looks at his wrist, must see the time.
He shakes his head as though he can’t decide.
He grabs a bar, and he begins to climb.

He perches, balanced, at the very top.
He holds his arms straight up above his head.
He teeters, sways, then grabs the bar to stop.
It seems he’ll jump; he swings his legs instead.

So who—or what—keeps him out here so late?
We stand in the shadows, too, and watch him wait.
 

“Bait,” the next poem in the third section of the book, is even darker. Like Richard Eberhart’s “The Groundhog,” it details the disappearance of a carcass. But what kind of carcass? The poem doesn’t say. There is a reference to a “heap of offal” and a blood-stained item of clothing (both of which have mysteriously disappeared by the final stanza) but the reader is left to figure out for him, or herself, exactly what happened.

This is a collection for both the casual reader and the connoisseur. The casual reader can appreciate the wonderful surface qualities of formal poetry, the rhyme, the meter, and the connoisseur, in addition to these things, can appreciate the multifarious literary and artistic allusions and the deeper emotional content of each poem. This book is a masterpiece that, again, has to have been many years in the making, if not in terms of the actual writing of it, then certainly in terms of the development of the sensibilities represented in the individual poems as well as in the supreme mastery of the poet’s craft that they display. It has long been my view that Kotzin is one of the best poets writing today. Anyone who doubts such an assessment need only read this work.

M.G. Piety lives in Philadelphia where she is an associate professor of philosophy at Drexel University. Piety came to Drexel from Copenhagen, where she lived from the fall of 1990 until the fall of 1998 and where she taught Kierkegaard and the history of European philosophy through DIS (Danish Institute for Study Abroad), then a division of the University of Copenhagen. She received her M.A. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. in philosophy from McGill University in Montreal.

Piety is a frequent contributor to the online political journal CounterPunch and has published numerous scholarly articles in professional journals and books as well as popular articles and essays both online and in the Times Literary Supplement. Her translations of Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs for Oxford University Press appeared in 2009 and her book Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology was published by Baylor University Press in 2010. She is currently working on a book for Gegensatz Press titled Fear and Dissembling: The Copenhagen Kierkegaard Controversy.