James Harms's poem "February" is strange in a way that makes reading it wonderful. A lot of his images in the poem are discernable but not quite within reach of full comprehension, which is something I strive for in my own poetry, albeit with nowhere near the success to which this strategy is employed here. The list of the things in Walt's pocket: A magnifying glass, two poker chips and a plastic dinosaur, show that Walt is probably a younger boy carrying around such unrelated things in his pocket. He then "fall's asleep mid-chew," and "leaves the rest of his bologna to the charity of winter," both of these parts that conclude the initial image I actually found myself laughing with as I read them. Anybody who "falls asleep mid-chew" is hilarious; for some reason the memories of someone on TV falling asleep and falling face first into a bowl of cereal popped into my head. Harms writes of flower petals "floating in vase water," which I thought was a beautiful image, somewhat reminiscent of the big green leaves that sit atop the glassy water of a pond in the south. Harms introduces a second character, Phoebe who is going through laundry. Again, Harms goes from something normal (naming the laundry being folded-- "blue sock, pretty dress, blue sock) to something just beyond reach: "every shirt a kind of hat." What does that mean? I am not quite sure but it makes sense and simply the sound of those words together just flows. And I found the ending to be the best part of all, the strangest and the least discernable: "And the light seems to sizzle/as it settles into shadows, at the edges of which something moves. Something always moves." I have no clue what is moving or what that motion may look like, but I don't think Harms is aiming for a concrete image, he is aiming for an almost dreamlike quality that expresses the boring drollness of a February spent inside.
--Michael McCune
Monday, March 2, 2009
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