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I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone
“A trailblazing work.”—Lewis Warsh
“An auspicious debut. . . . Stripped of artifice and the mere effects of formal pyrotechnics, these poems move by ear and intellect, pushing and pulling at the real with precision and mystery.”—Ammiel Alcalay
“Poetry reinvents itself in Plato’s cave, where nothing can be seen but the mind’s agile resources climbing the walls of our present, real world. Perplexed at the moment of certainty, estranged at the moment of intimacy, these poems illuminate, amuse, and provoke. Plato would have loved them.”—Ann Lauterbach
“An auspicious debut. . . . Stripped of artifice and the mere effects of formal pyrotechnics, these poems move by ear and intellect, pushing and pulling at the real with precision and mystery.”—Ammiel Alcalay
“Poetry reinvents itself in Plato’s cave, where nothing can be seen but the mind’s agile resources climbing the walls of our present, real world. Perplexed at the moment of certainty, estranged at the moment of intimacy, these poems illuminate, amuse, and provoke. Plato would have loved them.”—Ann Lauterbach
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2006
109 people want to read
About the author
Anna Moschovakis
25 books61 followersAnna Moschovakis is a translator and editor, and the author of several books of poetry, including I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (2006) and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award. She is the recipient of awards and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and has completed an apexart residency in Ethiopia. Moschovakis lives in Brooklyn and Delaware County, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 27, 2008
A. “I can’t remember what it is I’m supposed to be doing,” declares Moschovakis’ speaker from the poem, Untitled, which begins her collection of poems. What’s rather spooky about this declaration: it doesn’t seem to erupt from the margins of self, but is articulated as the crux of our new century’s vocalized dilemma. Words are mere plastic, and perhaps, we follow Yeats to where “things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The ironically speaking subject, finally absolved of discrimination as mental action, would like ethics to wilt, however much the memory of ethical behavior remains, in order to attend to a world of appearance. Finally, distinctions break down as in “I wonder when kinky became pornographic and whether that aspect is subtractable.” The speaker doesn’t tremble in her hyper-vigilance, but wants to be an abstract word with an “inscrutable ending.” Postmodern: we make up the rules as we go along.
B. “The last line between feeling and fact will choose a good point, and end. / Flattery will continue to make us immortal in the difficult years between the first word and the lost” (p6). The function of the word “between” acts throughout Moschovakis’ poems as a thread that taunts the surface of American life. Space between individuals and occurrences, are marked by the consumption of language devoid of consequence, where the conjuring of Plato’s allegory of the cave suddenly appears to be the topography of our deepest dreams, and our “ideal fallout shelter.” In many of Moschovakis’ poems, we are placed firmly in the idea of illusion. We are not the guardians of our own mind/body problem, nor interventionists, but receivers who stand at a great distance from the polis. “The pamphlet recommended/basements and caves./It recommended shelter/and water, and hope.”
C. The speaker of the poem cycle, The Blue Book, declares: “I sometimes imagine what sex would be like in a world without names” (p36). These poems evoke, not through the linguistic machinations of many contemporary poets, a sense of heightened rhetoric that recycles its explorations and erects a catalogue of spatiotemporal statements that ground our social and private lives. Like the “distances” and “betweens” that are constructed throughout the book’s poems, we again return to Moschovakis’ interest in relations: “Sex between two people contains a kind of coincidence. / Its meaning is both certain and changeable.”
D. When I enter the public domain, I wonder “who’s gonna foot the bill.” Dependence Day Parade understands “The dialogue is/Malfunctioning,” and that “one touchy subject led to another touchy subject/and we talked about it/while sitting on our hands.” Moschovakis’ speaker through a variety of formal devices, such as fragmentary sentences, repetition, and oblique shifts between thoughts and perceptions, imagines the topography of dependence that eventually reads as another kind of catalogue for the social, political, and economic disparities between public and private. “Thinking I might like to write/An optimistic poem/I loaded a font called/UTOPIA/It crashed my computer.”
E. The more Moschovakis’ poems sink in, I don’t need any more convincing. As one writer put it, we are an “administered population.” As this first book of poems makes clear through the topography of relational characters and institutions we can perhaps trance to “Roman law,” “it’s easier to carry the museum on your back.”
B. “The last line between feeling and fact will choose a good point, and end. / Flattery will continue to make us immortal in the difficult years between the first word and the lost” (p6). The function of the word “between” acts throughout Moschovakis’ poems as a thread that taunts the surface of American life. Space between individuals and occurrences, are marked by the consumption of language devoid of consequence, where the conjuring of Plato’s allegory of the cave suddenly appears to be the topography of our deepest dreams, and our “ideal fallout shelter.” In many of Moschovakis’ poems, we are placed firmly in the idea of illusion. We are not the guardians of our own mind/body problem, nor interventionists, but receivers who stand at a great distance from the polis. “The pamphlet recommended/basements and caves./It recommended shelter/and water, and hope.”
C. The speaker of the poem cycle, The Blue Book, declares: “I sometimes imagine what sex would be like in a world without names” (p36). These poems evoke, not through the linguistic machinations of many contemporary poets, a sense of heightened rhetoric that recycles its explorations and erects a catalogue of spatiotemporal statements that ground our social and private lives. Like the “distances” and “betweens” that are constructed throughout the book’s poems, we again return to Moschovakis’ interest in relations: “Sex between two people contains a kind of coincidence. / Its meaning is both certain and changeable.”
D. When I enter the public domain, I wonder “who’s gonna foot the bill.” Dependence Day Parade understands “The dialogue is/Malfunctioning,” and that “one touchy subject led to another touchy subject/and we talked about it/while sitting on our hands.” Moschovakis’ speaker through a variety of formal devices, such as fragmentary sentences, repetition, and oblique shifts between thoughts and perceptions, imagines the topography of dependence that eventually reads as another kind of catalogue for the social, political, and economic disparities between public and private. “Thinking I might like to write/An optimistic poem/I loaded a font called/UTOPIA/It crashed my computer.”
E. The more Moschovakis’ poems sink in, I don’t need any more convincing. As one writer put it, we are an “administered population.” As this first book of poems makes clear through the topography of relational characters and institutions we can perhaps trance to “Roman law,” “it’s easier to carry the museum on your back.”
December 28, 2007
I recently got stuck in the waiting room of a doctor's office for about three hours. Even the staff had left for the day. I was alone. All alone. I had Anna's book with me. Thank god, because I don't read German Elle (typically). The book is made up of several long poems in sections: "Dependence Day Parade" and "Preparations" stand out for me, but the whole thing is great. Check it.
March 23, 2008
This collection of poetry keeps drawing me back. It seems that Ms. Moschovakis wants to get through to me! Every time I return, I get something more - humor that I missed the last time, insights that I couldn't quite get my head around the first time. I look forward to bending back the cover, as if anew, each time. I would love to hear your thoughts!
August 30, 2008
The poem is the garden of the propositional; the result of this work, in its variance, disguised as poetry–– it's the garden news.
January 9, 2008
Anna's poems are like a bright, beautiful machine.
March 8, 2019
the blue book was the poem I like
the introduction of new concepts / seems a progression / but towards what
the introduction of new concepts / seems a progression / but towards what
June 30, 2009
Read that as 3.5 stars. A collection that I was more 'interested in' than 'liked' if that makes a sort of sense.
It is a collection very interested in the workings (and non-workings, you could say) of language. In that, it definitely works.
Thought provoking. Funny at points. Interesting.
Doesn't grab you by the heart, though. And that's refreshing from time to time.
The tiny poem I liked the most (when many in the collection are quite long) doesn't really exemplify the rest, but regardless...
(A Brief History of American Dependence:
one touchy subject led to another touchy subject
and we talked about it
while sitting on our hands)
It is a collection very interested in the workings (and non-workings, you could say) of language. In that, it definitely works.
Thought provoking. Funny at points. Interesting.
Doesn't grab you by the heart, though. And that's refreshing from time to time.
The tiny poem I liked the most (when many in the collection are quite long) doesn't really exemplify the rest, but regardless...
(A Brief History of American Dependence:
one touchy subject led to another touchy subject
and we talked about it
while sitting on our hands)
March 22, 2014
Plenty of good lines, but the cohesiveness of the work slants away; this may be because I prefer a more narrative form of poetry, but I often got lost waiting for delight rather than having it delivered--the language is fantastic, but the fireworks aren't as spectacular as I would have hoped.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews