Ange Mlinko writes in her blog: "A New York Times columnist [David Orr] goes delirious and proclaims a reclusive female poet [Elizabeth Bishop] the greatest American artist of the 20th century, deeply annoying everyone [Dip into the Poetics List archives], it seems, but me, who was, am, delighted. "But how about x and x1 and x2 and x3?" (All male, of course.) Oh, get off it, people. Bishop may have only written half a dozen spectacular poems [My emphasis]; it is arguable whether any poet exceeds that number. Especially (look in the mirror). If I had written some of Bishop's poems, I could die easy."
How many poets can you say have written half a dozen spectacular poems in their lifetime? How many painters have painted six spectacular paintings? [To define spectacular, for this reader: a spectacular work is one that you read and re-read and re-read and the work never exhausts what initially delights. The work never is exhausted, never exhausting, enervating.]
I've been pleased of late [lowering my standards?] if I find one spectacular poem per book (often the first poem of the book). Much to please in Pam Rehm's Small Works, its incredible spaces between lines and stanzas, ala Rae Armantrout, the kinds of spaces I love as reader to think through, to imagine, to inhabit, dammit! Her poems often have the capacity to hold more than poems five times their length, each word, each line, hefting more than its literal, conventional weight. Still, for all the quiet fireworks spreading across their mental skies, there's but one poem I'll hang onto the book for. But oh what a poem!!!!:
Acts of Interpretation
To become a kind of emissary
I have found
wonder
in pieces
moving towards me, slowly
All at once
the depths of time
abide
inside
A lantern on the internal
intensified
You can define prospect
with only so much
certainty
Rain pooled in the streets' hollows
I swallow the news
Someone is gambling
for control
If you don't mind
just sitting there
to be moved
Mlinko's spectacular keeper poem in her new book Starred Wire just might be [haven't finished] this:
Keys & Scales
Back when maps were dangerous it was seditious
To give one to a foreigner; feeling so perfectly calligraphic that,
Implying the limp like an iamb superseded what was said of one
By the words themselves, one slyly wrote across the desert,
Allaying the panic took a device to craft a presence.
To say, in search of a role, that a double bend in the river
Was a perimeter of repatriation,
We tried that of believers, like quoted back to itself
The wilderness too shape; the stars were of where
Two had met, in honeydew shadow, and made maps praise.