Selected By Cyril Wong

I chose this review by Ray McDaniel as it offers an alternative way of looking at Lucie Brock-Broido's poetry (which is more often lauded than not). McDaniel's elegant remarks shed light on the dangers of writing this kind of overtly "layered" verse, as well as offer funny insight into how such dangers can be reflected in our own mistaken interpretations of such poetry. This critic first puts forward the humorous possibility that the poet has abused her own talent:

Whenever I hear tell of an Artist Who Has Abused His or Her Talent, I picture one of those little Keebler elves, bent over a cauldron, manipulating chocolate...that will then go forth to, oh, I don't know...turn to alum in the mouths of trick-or-treating innocents? Something evil.

Then the critic forgives the poet guilty of this by suggesting that it is perhaps "more likely and more common that our talents abuse us." Lucie Brock-Broido's poetry, or her "Broidoverse", in his mind, smears the distinction between "talent well-spent and talent on a spending spree":

Her worlds lack the texture of the manifestly quotidian. Processed food products do not defile the Broidoverse, and while I have absolutely no objection to this absence per se, these types of absences, this abdication of internal compass or contrast, begins to leech something vital...Brock-Broido's poems are, even at their least and slightest, remarkably fertile—the musicianship of her language is such that even apparently careless constructions constitute true beauty. This beauty, however, can both happily and unhappily obscure the consequence of her perhaps haphazard choices. Brock-Broido suffers from a version of Midas's gift: All language blooms under her attention, but the blooming thereby made so overgrows the poems themselves that the shape of the garden beneath becomes lost. We do not need to distinguish between garden and jungle to appreciate the scent and texture of full flora, but such confusion obscures indiscriminately—archaic or facile barriers disappear, but so do poetic distinctions within the poems themselves.

Distinguishing between poems that are "layered" or unnecessarily "obscure", McDaniel argues that the poet, in her earlier work, has been the former and not the latter. But her book, Trouble in Mind, with "its nothingness by way of its myriad individual somethingnesses", is full of texture that takes the place of structural properties; and without clear structure, "petals of her language unfold to wonder, but sometimes fail to describe or induce unities." Then the critic attacks the book's jacket copy, showing how it points to the "difficulties" in reading such a book:

'...There is a new clarity to her work, a disquieting transparency, even in the midst of wild thickets of language for which she is known.' A 'new' clarity! To what does this refer...And what in particular about her transparency disquiets, and how does transparency manifest in the midst of 'wild thickets'?

Using another description from the jacket—"Brock-Broido searches for a lexicon adequate to the extremities of experience...she recalls, 'I was a hunger artist once, as well. / My bones had shone...'"—McDaniel points out that such description show how one could easily mistake the poet for someone "who eats ether and shits silk, and they do not fairly represent either the poem cited or the poet's work." Although the poetry is sometimes so affected that it can lead to such unfortunate readings, the critic insists we should not forget that "one can also find fabulous riches of association and music" in the poems. In reference to a particular piece in the book, McDaniel points out that a main weakness in the poetry manifests in "Brock-Broido's movement away from 'density': the savories of the poem sit in a pot, neither strategically arranged nor transformed to soup or stew. Where once Brock-Broido depended on sheer weight of language to heat and alchemize her poems, this newfound 'transparency' reveals the language as too often abandoned."

And discipline is key, McDaniel eventually concludes:

...language must be met with some mode of deliberation, of discipline; the poet must marshal its agility to maintain motion, lest the undirected grace of the language lose focus. Reading Trouble in Mind sometimes feels like watching a gazelle trip; one can marvel at the animal's power and posture while simultaneously wishing it greater coordination. I agree that Brock-Broido will follow language where it will lead her; I just wish she would lead it in turn...

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