Reviews
Mamaist Heartbeat Otherwise: A Poetry Roundup
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Alan Botsford avoids the two traps that often ensnare poets.The first trap is for a poet to become so smitten with a style that he or she starts to write all his or her poems in that style.The second trap occurs when poets write poems that leave one, after the last line is read, with nothing: nothing to think about, nothing memorable, not a belly laugh, a giggle, or a grimace. Botsford, in his most recent "mamaist" tome, writes in a variety of styles He calls some of his mamaist work "generic poems," by which he means poems that use "generic" language--everyday words and phrases--that he twists in a way that revivifies it. It's the creativity and wit in some of these poems that will stay with readers the longest. In a time when too much of what is offered as poetry is, in fact, chopped prose, it is a delight to find, in a poem called "a mamaist earth of heart":
Yes, you amigo of imago (no scold of clods)--
sing out your amens of names
with booms of bosom borne of boner,
and mania of anima under a cloud of could!
Armed of dream, takes your moods of dooms,
your swords of words and befriend the devil of lived!
Language is central to what poems are. This is so obvious that one feels silly writing it, especially when one has just been reminded of what a poem can be by language play as lively as Botsford's. One is happy to be so reminded, and also to experience in books such as these the vibrancy and vigor of the English-language poetry scene in Japan.
- David Cozy
