E-Mail This Article to a Friend Poetic license No need to dumb down for summer — plenty of new poetry has all the humor, vibrancy, sexiness, and suspense of a good beach read BY RUTH TOBIAS
	Vintage verses Poetry collections worth a second — or third or fourth — look Lunch Poems, by Frank O’Hara (City Lights Books, 1964; $7.95). It’s 40 years old, yet it hasn’t aged a bit. O’Hara’s slight volume of seemingly throwaway poems, with their colloquial, breathless, and oh-so-droll observations of New York at noontime, is in fact a moving American classic, containing "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed)" — "I have been to lots of parties/and acted perfectly disgraceful/but I never actually collapsed/oh Lana Turner we love you get up" — and "A Step Away From Them": "A glass of papaya juice/and back to work. My heart is in my/pocket ..." Selected Poems, by James Tate (Wesleyan University Press, 1991; $17.95). Pure silliness — the purest, in fact — both relieves and highlights the sheer heartbreak in Tate’s work. Take "The List of Famous Hats," which considers poor "pinhead" Napoleon and his "tricorn bathing cap": "Beneath his public head there was another head and it was a pyramid or something." Or the charmingly horrific "Five Years Old": "And then my sister came home/and I threw a dart through her cheek/and cried all night,/so much did I worship her." Read him and weep through your laughter. Head Citations, by Kenneth Goldsmith (The Figures, 2002; $10). This singularly odd work is composed entirely of mis-transcribed rock lyrics — which are funny enough when you can name the song, exquisitely so when you can’t, from "when you get to the bottom you go back to the frog on the slide" to "goodbye, yellow brick road, with the darkened sorority house" to "I know that pizza goes with broccoli, but I’m eating lots of snails off a windowpane" (?!?!). For all its comedy, it’s ultimately a testament to the wondrous workings of the human brain. That They Were at the Beach, by Leslie Scalapino (North Point Press, 1985; $9.50). Don’t let the bright-pink cover with its old black-and-white photo of bathing beauties fool you — this is not a frivolous read. It is, however, a worthwhile, powerful one, given Scalapino’s gift for mimicking, through language, thought and the passage of time until the two converge to create memory: "Playing ball — so it’s like paradise, not because it’s in the past, we’re on a field ... our being creamed in the foreground — as part of it’s being that — the net is behind us." You can almost see the sun motes, hear far-off traffic murmur, in Scalapino’s ode to evocation itself. By Ruth Tobias

Every summer we get dumber. Or so the book world seems to think. Not only do publishers dump their load of bodice-rippers and spine-tinglers, but reviewers turn "fluff" and even "trash" into compliments under the apologetic rubric of "beach reads," implying that a) you can’t don a bikini and think at the same time, and b) substance is eternally dull.

Unfortunately, when it comes to poetry, many if not most people, in or out of bathing suits, agree. The received image of poets as pale, black-clad, near-suicides — and of their work as dark and difficult — is tenacious. And sometimes, to be sure, it’s justified.

But not always. In fact, there’s plenty of poetry out there boasting all the humor, vibrancy, sexiness, and even suspense that make some pulp fiction such a guilty pleasure — minus the guilt, since, at the end of the sunny, breezy day, it’s still poetry you’ve been reading. Here are a few choice examples.

Ghost Girl, by Amy Gerstler (Penguin Books, 2004; $16). Chick lit’s got nothing on Gerstler’s oeuvre. Its phalanx of post-feminist personae — ogres’ mothers and pastry chefs’ daughters, grieving wives and even fetuses — are by turns as naughty and neurotic, girlie and vicious, theatrical and wry as the sassy city gals currently passing for heroines on the bestseller lists. When they’re in love, they compose odes to semen: "O gluey sequel/to kisses and licks,/the loins’ shy outcry,/blurt of melted pearl ..." When they’re in loss, they have the mouths of sailors — which nonetheless leave lipsticked imprints via prettified curses like "fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.... Fuck you puce and chartreuse." When they’re motherly, they coin pet names like "my darling little bone meal casserole"; when they’re not, as in "Touring the Doll Hospital," they ensure "every/bed in the head replacement ward is occupied."

But what distinguishes these capital-F Females from the two-dimensional, pseudo-mimetic characters that populate much of women’s fiction is Gerstler’s decision to infuse their voices with the sound of language itself: "Carefully pronounce the words soft cloth. Each vowel has its own savor and tang. Say Icy diamonds suffice ... Say Prove he is in the tomb." While the unquestioning Carrie and Bridget types offer us fun-yet-fleeting escape from our profoundly messy lives, Gerstler’s speakers confront our potential to find our own voices.

A Green Light, by Matthew Rohrer (Verse Press, 2004; $12). Rohrer’s poems are the literary equivalent of hash brownies. They go down easy, even sweetly, but then something’s funny. Suddenly the world is vivid and yet hard to make out. You’re isolated even as you’re surrounded — by sentient candelabra, emus and winged snakes, creepy ferns. It’s not simply a call to magical realism (or absurdism or what have you); rather, Rohrer invokes the mundane for our enchantment. He celebrates the imagination, implying there is no magic, no humdrum, beyond the mind’s belief in them. Hence humorously oratorical titles like "My Soup," "Mongolian Death Worm," and "Ski Lift to Death!" that play with notions of the trivial and the profound. Just as you begin to accept the possibility that you’ve misspent your life overlooking the minute in favor of the great, Rohrer claims the contrary: "every day we’re walking through the sky,/walking right in the middle of it." Eventually, it becomes clear that in his "book about how to have a big piece missing from your head and live," Rohrer is teaching you to do without tyrannical logic, by which we grow up to become good little reasoners rather than big bad thinkers.

Cocktails, by D.A. Powell (Graywolf Press, 2004; $14). Obviously, the title alone — floating in cheeky retro script above a paper umbrella on the sky-blue cover — is an invitation to the lush life depicted in the famous lyrics of the book’s epigraph, promising a glimpse into "all the very gay places/... where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life/to get the feel of life." Actually, the places Powell’s speaker prefers, cinemas and discos predating the AIDS epidemic, remain alive in his mind, embodied by him and by his loves, as when "the cocktail hour finally arrives" and "longing.../...OPENs my mouth: its tiny neon lounge." Thus, speech merges with the jukebox lyrics of a wishful soundtrack — "The Glamorous Life," "I Melt With You" (by Modern English, no less), "I Will Survive" — and the self becomes characters from films located within some fabulously prelapsarian state, like My Own Private Idaho and My Beautiful Laundrette.

Ultimately, the speaker dwells most urgently in the space between feeling life through evocation and living it through experience. The realization that this gap closes only in death —"here is the door marked heaven: someone on the dancefloor, waiting just for you" — is what Cocktails so wittily and wittingly, if never quite willingly, approaches.

Macular Hole, by Catherine Wagner (Fence Books, 2004; $12). "Who’s my fucker? Who will be my special fucker?" asks Wagner, the ultimate alter ego — perhaps cocking her brow at anyone feigning ennui — in poetry that startles, mortifies, and thrills us to the secret savage core. After all, the title points to an absence in the part of the retina that most accurately distinguishes hue and line; that the book would thus be filled with the off-color and the out-of-line — with a sort of anti-worldview — is strangely fitting. Indeed, though her book is not really confessional, Wagner, a new mother, seems to be eyeballing the world through her crotch, and the resulting observations are refreshing, even cathartic — especially as they involve her own needs versus those of others, not least an infant’s. "A great suction fattens/on my très rich hours," she seethes, "make me an animal better than that." Her desires are themselves consuming: "My greed was outrageous/power-outrageous," she boasts at one point, illustrating her belief in its omnipotence at another: "God would become personal to me when I/thought I was so sexy…,"

I drew a picture for the questionnaire

of a man in flared

trousers, & there was

me, wearing a fuckable nighty. That was my answer.

Her now-painfully, now-hilariously honest admissions grant us permission to wallow in taboo — until we are ready to clamber out with her, to "introduce the boat to the water" and push off.

Ruth Tobias can be reached at ruthtobias@earthlink.net.