Rome is doggerel. Reading the book is torturous, so complete is its lack of wisdom, imagination, and valor of insight; not even the vapid James Franco has gotten as close as Lasky to penning a would-be script for TMZ. It is near the nadir of poetry’s possibilities. The (hereby established) micro-micro standard of 500 words feels like 470 too many.
Yet not to spend a few moments on Rome is tantamount to an acquiescence, considering its placement on many ‘best of’ lists for 2014. (Here’s a final lesson to ignore ‘best of’ lists.) Let’s thus dip toes, just for an instant, into the feckless pink puddle made by these poems’ half-life.
One might learn to leave off Rome for the blurb-dribble marking its endpapers. O yes, ‘wildly human,’ why yes, ‘blood red realness.’ Are we being hastened to pick up a book of poems or replay a snippet of the runway from RuPaul’s Drag Race? Please. The Yeats epigraph is likewise a bait-and-switch, whether chosen by Lasky with felt intent or not. From the first poem, “Hunters”:
Now when I try to eat an animal, I hear crying
Not laughter
—from a grammar school diary this is poignant; from a book of poems it is embarrassingly basic. And it is this allowance Lasky gifts her speakers, again and again—the allowance to stand pat, wagging, in sunglasses, cosmetic, without a whit of probing depth—that undoes what spirit drove her to write. From “Why poetry can be hard for most people”:
It has its own intentions
And is searching for that perfect bag of potato chips like you once were
Because life is no more important than eating
Or fucking
Or talking someone into fucking
‘[T]hat perfect bag of potato chips’—now there‘s achievement. This vulgarity and constant reference to foodstuffs and popular constructs pretends to be an assiduous in-your-face refusal to remove poetry from the everyday. Do not be fooled: it is simply a lack of vision. Lasky’s speaker retreats to ‘the sour flower of my vagina / Ruins everything’ because she cannot manage more than rote metaphor, sing-song rhyme, and cliché; the poem “I am Eddie Murphy” overflows with gratuitous, explicit sex-reference (‘ten young men / Suck my gigantic dick / For two hundred hours’) because it prefers the easy mastery of veneers and list-form verse; as “Diet Mountain Dew,” as “I Feel Pity,” as the title poem in ten parts, each more grasping and trite than the previous. The entire bit has the smell of a thrice-used undergarment.
Be warned: this book is li’l’ po-biz ladder-climbing, that ten-rung gig that offers an unobstructed view of what every po-bizzer wants most: an oversized mirror. These are its fruits.
Rome is so deep a betrayal of the ambitions of literature that it ceases to be poetry. Instead, it is a meme without pictorial referent to land its punchline. There is no greater tragedy than losing a tree to print such searchless inconsequence.
Dude. “A meme without pictorial referent to land its punchline”???!!!! Who’s more full of daggerz than you??
Rarely have I come across a collection of poems that so richly deserves the dagger, N.
Who is more full of daggers. Who named the ship a shark. Who continues to rend and tear when all around is dark?
What placidity does the feltless sea feel as those pieces drift below?
What tragedy does Dorothea Lasky
aim to seed among the sows?
I’ll not read it, point there. But ‘searchless inconsequence’!? I’ll read that sentence over, gracias.
Admittedly, my undergarments are at times thrice-unwashed, so I don’t worry about the wafting as ye—this is soil of our loins, no? This tragedy’s smiling side is the white one of a doctor’s sterile scrub. Or perhaps that’s the tragedy. I might be thinking about vaccines.
A woman in a local cafe, Colorado, told me that its not the washing that needs to be done of the body but the scrubbing. Save a tree or save some water—a cold rinse and a vivacious rashing with a hard brush will do both your trick and those of the seeds, who will drink happily courtesy of your feltful deed.
Just a plug for dirt.
Nice digs hereabouts, inscriptor.