Taking some time with Thesen:

Katherine: I was instantly drawn to Sharon Thesen's volume The Good Bacteria, attracted by the swellegant cover and the title. A meditation on bacteria suggested something unsettling and fecund, itchy growth that gets under your skin. I like being infected by such things (poetically).

Reading this volume, I had an unprecedented experience of understanding less and less the more I read. I spent the most time on the title section of the poem, mostly because it's the one that resisted my attempts to get inside it so persistently and with such a cool grace, that I felt myself a questing knight in pursuit of the remote lady, with nary a dropped handkerchief to be seen. And I recalled Alex's comments about poets not making statements through their use of imagery, and while I maintain that this is not the case in Babstock, I began to wonder if a kind of non-expressivist gesture was at work here. The Frank O'Hara in the exclusively male line-up of "predecessors" blurbed on the back was a helpful directive, but with most poets in the New York School, if I don't understand the connections between the images, I'm enjoying myself so much that I often fail to notice.

Thesen's style is clean and crisp, but not engaging enough to distract me from a deep-seated compulsion to try to make coherent sense of a poem. I am used to work which nudges me out of this compulsion, but usually it accomplishes this by drawing my attention elsewhere - to formal or linguistic play, to the power of the images itself. Thesen's work isn't doing anything particularly interesting with language or form, and the images just aren’t that arresting . . . Well, maybe the poem about the duck who married her sister . . .

And it's a bit of a tease, because in this opening sequence, there are some repeated images and gestures - birds all over the place, the play of surface and depth, a lot of stuff falling, and consumption, journey by foot, by car, and a delicate cluster of synchronized swimmers whose floral-wrapped heads occasionally break the surface of the water, and are gone - but none of it seems to go anywhere beyond suggesting this vague unsettling feeling. So much weeping - over what? Maybe the problem is that this is the "good" bacteria. Yoghurt. Plain. Maybe vanilla. No fruit at the bottom.

The poems that were the most interesting to me in this volume are in the second section, "Relative to History," where the poems most fully embrace strangeness, like "Scenes from the Missing Picture," whose plot could easily be a rip-off from the Twilight Zone. Or the ode to a deli sandwich that is "Lunch":

The tomato like a crying child bride was brutally
wed to a tuna.

. . . except I got distracted by the fact that the meat in this sandwich was "from the deli." Who buys tuna from the deli? Is this a Vancouver thing? I’m not usually given to being so pedantic, with poetry or anything. But there was nothing else to distract me. Not even the great line that followed:

'Meat.' What a word.

Thesen herself frames these works with an apology in "Prologue," mischievously placed nearly half-way through the collection:

I noticed everything –
its transients finding a dime,
its gorgeous detail.

Yet feel remiss
in the quality of my general
attention. The trifling,
the nonsensical
had a short day, relatively
speaking, relative to history.

Someone should write an important poem.

Such a calculated gamble, setting herself up that way, because it’s hard to shake your initial response:

"Yes, indeed. and you haven't done it."

Except that I’m not particularly interested in "Important Poems" and I want to read this poem, not as embarrassed retraction, but rather rebuttal to the detractors of a poetics of the quotidian. But unlike Ken Babstock’s "Brave," whose unflattering portrait of the pompously dismissive blows an unmistakable raspberry in their faces, "Prologue" doesn't readily invite such a reading.

The three other sequences offer more direction. "A Holy Experiment," and "Weeping Willow," are each moving tributes to remarkable women - the latter to Angela Bowering, and the former to Frances Boldereff, correspondent, intellectual provocateur and sometime lover of Charles Olson, their letters available in a volume edited by Thesen herself. I'd like to say it's ironic that, in a volume where two fifths of the poems are about women artists/intellectuals who have occupied that fraught space of intimacy with a male literary figure of some renown, the blurb on the back of the book fails to mention a single female writer from whom Thesen, and readers of Thesen, might want to trace a lineage. But it's not ironic. Irony requires that element of surprise. And poking around to see what others have said about Thesen's influences, you'd think that the West Coast scene was entirely dominated by men.

While these and the remaining section, "The Fire," certainly offer a clearer focus, and offer the occasional memorable moment, I just can't get excited about what I'm reading here.

Alex Good: Couldn't get excited? For me that would be an understatement.

To be honest, I just wanted to say something like "D.O.A." here and move on. I thought this was the weakest book on the list and I had some trouble finishing it. But I guess in the interests of being a responsible juror I should say a bit more.

In the first place, Thesen's sense of the line seems to have only a hit-and-miss connection to a rhythmical unit. Look at the short story "Scenes from the Missing Picture":

Alice agreed. She drank a glass of water and looked around.

"Hey," she said. "What happened to that painting that used to be over there?" She indicated a large empty space with a nail hole at the top. I squinted my eyes and puzzled at the wall. We both remembered at once: "The Great Outdoors"!

Except that's not the way it appears here. Instead we get this:

Alice agreed. She drank a glass of water
and looked around. "Hey," she said. "What happened
to the painting that used to be over there?" She indicated
a large empty space with a nail hole at the top.
I squinted by eyes and puzzled at the wall. We
both remembered at once: "The Great Outdoors"!

That poem sticks out a bit in this collection, but I found a similar moments throughout the other poems working with shorter lines that seemed to invite me to skim.

thereafter she carried him
on her back until the dream ended.

Or:

     It was in
a not-nice book, especially the part
where the blameless woman's heart was broken.

They'd met for the first time at a clinic
with a terrible insect bite that would not go down.

The clinic has an insect bite? Is that really what she means?

It isn't all this bad. In fact, rhythm is (believe it or not) Thesen's strong suit. I mean, you're not reading this stuff for its imagery or use of language. The latter is a pure distillation of the plain style in poetry, rarely showing any inventiveness or wit. The imagery follows suit, contenting itself with matter-of-fact observations which grow dull:

Icy parking lot but only on the shady side.
The other smokes with rising steam in sunshine.

Oh well. At least it's better than:

Quickly the sun rises like a big monster.

Ugh. And I'm still trying to figure out this account of sewing a button on:

The thread moves to the right
or to the left like a barker's booth
at the circus where you throw softballs
at the passing ducks, it looks so easy

and you really want to win the large pink jaguar

Huh?

I could say the same for the tomato "like a crying child bride . . . brutally / wed to a tuna." These similes don't work for me at all.

I thought there were some nice moments here too, but nothing that made me think I was reading great poetry. And the book as a whole just never came to life.

Alex Boyd: Talking about the Bachinsky, I tried to suggest that I loved how the images felt organic, emerged out of the poem feeling right, building on the strengths of the previous images. It's so easy, in poetry, to say this is like a fish and that was like a bomb, and it all becomes very scattered. And to me, it's the difference between taking a running leap at something and standing on the spot, trying to spontaneously generate the impact on the reader.

I have mixed feelings about the Thesen book. I thought there were solid poems that hold together very well, like "The Rooftop of Opposite," or "Nameless Dread," and strong images like "A shiver climbs down from the telephone poles." But at the same time there were lines like "I pay for my Sweet Marie," along with overly scattered poems and some limp, non-endings. The poem "Wish" is about simply wishing she'd hadn't missed an opportunity to buy some shoes, and I can't help but feel poetry should desperately avoid being this trivial, as an art form that's already marginalized and dismissed by a lot of people. In short, I think this is a good book with a better book hiding in it. It should have been edited into a tighter, stronger collection.

Alex Good: You raise a good point. I think it can be hard to put your finger on what a poetry editor does in terms of refining or shaping a collection, but just on the level of tightening the line here I think more might have been done. Or something with that bit about the clinic with the insect bite. What makes the editing question interesting here is that I take it Babstock had a hand in it. It makes me wonder what sort of an influence he had, or could have had, given that his own aesthetic seems quite removed from Thesen's. 

NEXT: The Jury Deliberates