W. K. Wimsatt, the New Formalist critic, opened his famous essay, “What to Say About a Poem,” with an assumption Sandra Doller’s newest book of poetry seems positioned directly against. Wimsatt wrote, “At the outset what can we be sure of? Mainly that a poem says or means something, or ought to mean something.” In Man Years, “meaning” is poetry’s predetermined enemy. With a sensibility influenced by the Language poetries of Rae Armantrout — who writes in praise of Doller’s “pinball wizard” deftness on the book’s back cover — and Charles Bernstein, Doller writes poems as syntactically liberated as they are emotionally arrested, as theoretically serious as they are slap-stick silly. Because the voices and attentions of this book are not of a single, placid mind, there is no point in pursuing a reading of it that would culminate in a single, placid meaning. Doller is a champion of the untidy, of the disorderly universe we would encounter daily if we dared to look hard enough. READ MORE
Man Years |
