A fearless and uproarious litany of contentions and revelations on poetry and the poetic mind, continuing the charge against the sacred in contemporary poetry. Poemland alternates brilliantly between the deadpan, the spectacular, and the outrageous. If you open your mouth to start to complain I will fill it with whipped cream . . . There is a floating sadness nearby . . . Chelsey Minnis is the author of three previous collections. A graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Chelsey Minnis was born in Dallas and grew up in Denver. She attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of Poemland (Wave Books 2009), Zirconia (Fence Books, 2001), Foxina (Seeing Eye Books, 2002) and Bad Bad (Fence Books, 2007). She lives in Boulder, Colorado.
read this on my 1.5 hour tube ride to work today. Instantly felt a little bit more free. One of the main things that draws me to poetry are the possibilities of momentary freedom. Through the ego to get out of the ego. The constrictive totalizing self! The anti-poetic! Skirting the market economy of the imperializing English novel this gives me something like the authenticity of conflicting emotions . . hm . . can poetry speak to the multiple you? This one did. All emptiness is form and all form is emptiness. YES! Thank you Chelsey Minnis whoever you may be.
Writing a poem is like trying to do something isn’t it? It’s like trying to have an ungroveling feeling…
I like to live a hard life but I know I shouldn’t do it.. I should live an easy life or else I am a fool!
This is a poem! You should be able to figure it out alright…
This is when you are trying to earn reprieve from self disgust with busy work The poem lies on the floor until you step in it and it sticks to your shoe
This is like a tear stained person Being gently misted with whiskey in a spray-bottle..
If you want to be a poem writer, then I don’t know why.. Nothing makes it very true.. Except the promised sincerity of death..
They say you have to try to be reformed like a girls reformatory! But I still run into every room laughing Excitably depressed After drinking a bottle of champagne in a roadside bathroom
"Now when I drive behind a Diesel-stinking bus On the way to the university to teach Stevens and Pound and Mallarmé I am homesick for war." ~Karl Shapiro, Bourgeois Poet
I love Chelsey Minnis and I think she is one of the most gifted writers publishing.
The problem with this book is the same thing that is so interesting about it: It is an encrustation in the shape of itself, made of the hardened guano of it's own self-loathing. This book is a self-fellating object. It is Poemland only--and nowhere else. It is about itself, the poem(s) that it is. It is also about death, futility, and the unsightly organs of human and poetic hubris, but ultimately these pledge allegiance to their country alone, and that country is Poemland. Everything else is façade, subtopical. Poemland reifies it's own futility in the shape of a book. It is like late Céline, not only for the ellipses. It is encrusted in its own gall as a shield from all touch or use: "With my poetry, I want to barricade myself from other people's poetry..." It broadcasts its limitations and ugliness from the pulpit of itself.
Page after page her characteristically cutting and alien metaphors are about the very page at hand. I would not be surprised if "This is..." appears 100 times in the book ("this" referring to the very poem being read, or poems generally). In a survey of the first 65 pages of the book (12 of which have no text on them, and none of which are longer than 7 lines) only 17 or 20 do not directly reference the poem at hand or poetry itself.
This is not why I think it is a failure. It is not a failure. It sets out to become exactly what it does. It is entirely, elegantly, vehemently resolved and internally consistent. It is even remarkable for this. It is a world unto itself and it does exactly and only what it acknowledges poetry to be capable of. It attempts nothing further. It is not a thing that aspires to travel, to get beyond the 'prison-house of language', to break itself against its style--or style itself--in order to get beyond itself. This is a planet that admits no visitors, no gases or creatures from other worlds. It can't touch them. It is a biodome of its own sequiny despair.
In this way I think the book actually occupies a position exactly opposite to the one an admired reviewer here has located it in. He quotes the book: "Sometimes I try to please someone that I hate... So that I can enjoy a range of satisfactions... You should always be doing a service for others... Even in poetry..." I agree absolutely with the cause he quotes this passage in service of. Against the "torrent of anti-usefulness" in poetry, he says that poems can and should "be of some use". But I think it is beyond dispute that this passage, in a book with 56 scanable bar codes, is deeply, deeply sarcastic. The "someone I hate" here is unquestionably the reader--if not someone else as well. It is the reader, who in a sense, is implicated in Minnis's imprisonment in the form. "Doing a service" here is just twisting the knife.
Still, there are here a few of the best aphorisms I've read in a long while. You just have to pop them out of the book like zits for them to be of any use. Also, I am intrigued by loathing. Also, Minnis is uncompromising in the extreme. Also, her gift is unmistakable. She is the old kind of writer. She would have made a better Modernist than post modern.
She needs a war in the way that the Dadaists needed them. WAR. Bombs. A physical crisis. This is what could make her certain of a usefulness. But Minnis has always let me down. It is part of what she does. Squander her immeasurable brilliance on sophmoric questions of style and self. It is as if she feels honorable for impaling herself on the limitations of what it means to write. The problem is that she overstates the limits, that insists upon them, dogmatically. In this she is kind of like Joe Wenderoth--an admirer of hers. Both seem to be allied with their own puberty in ways that are unseemly and also charismatic.
We should not forget what books and language have done to the world, i.e. make and preserve and destroy every inch of it. A world without The Bible, Freud, Marx, Darwin, The little red book. The Qu'ran. Various political declarations and documents. It is not this world. At the very least, these have been the funnel and implement of prelinguistic divinities and barbarisms only able to take on flesh by means of language.
Books are not meaningless. It is not necessary to build a posh little prison as Minnis has. Still, I loved being there. It was like doing coke off some model's cock in SouthBeach for 25 minutes. Then just leaving. But the hangover is that I am scared because we are so Roman. Scared that we have nothing to live for but our microscopic self-made hells.
This is a poem of audience, ego and poems. It is hilarious. I love every line beginning “this is.” It is too bad I hate the words snarky and zingers because both words apply.
One BIG DEAL here is white space galore. No more of Minnis’ signature trails of ellipses. I love the trails of ellipses, but this is good too. And don’t get me wrong, there are ellipses; the dots appear in "respectable" sets of two or three.
The uniformity of this poem is intriguing. I am particularly interested in the black pages with barcodes inserted every 7 or 10 pages. There are barcodes on the front, back and spine of the book, which is covered in a photograph of pink fur. The barcodes remind me of tramp stamps. I imagine the barcodes mean something obvious, like “poems are commodities.” A brilliant friend suggests that these are many poems; the barcodes stand-in for titles, “because poems are the commodification of thought.” Minnis likely has the barcodes in mind when she says “With this book I have made a very expensive joke…” or “This is a good thing to write…/Because it is a poem for money…”
This last paragraph makes me feel pretty ditzy, “but it is sad to be your own misogynist.”
When you first get cotton candy out of the machine, it looks huge, mountainous. But it's inflated sucrose, half of it is something you don't eat, but breathe. Poemland is a kind of Disneyland, a Disneyville. It's not a polis, and definitely not a world. Poemland is wantable: it's eccentric platitudes uttered one conversational line at a time.
Do you actually want to go to Poemland? More than you want to go to Nicaragua, or caving in Tennessee?Poemland is an extinct, submerged island, dinosaurean. It's a mining site on the ocean floor for cosmetics companies to unearth rejuvenating complexes.
The design firm Quemadura is half-author. It's curious how the title is a barcode, and the barcode is repeated as a design element, a dozen times, between every section. Some sort of hand. Some sort of biting.
Who's really sassy? Anne Sexton?
Isn't there some kind of critical practice that examines what the author is giving up (everbody has to!) what's not in the text, what's being steamrolled? After the sugar rush. Subtleties, extended nausea, depth.
Ellipsis overload: when irony has wrung out the language, it moves on to punctuation.
I learned that Chelsey Minnis' father is a dentist. That seemed to be the most important bit of information I got, and that was from the acknowledgments. Without a doubt, this is one of the most legible books I have read this year. So it will probably take over the world. You can read this thing in one sitting, which is invaluable. No kidding. I forget if it's here or elsewhere she is talking about Dorn being the master. Hmmm. I should look that up.
I guess what irritates me about this book and the other book of hers [Bad Bad:] is the sense of adversity that underlies all the writing. I don't accept the adversity. I mean it's great to overcome years of not winning poetry prizes. It takes a lot of heart to overcome that kind of disappointment. But there is this posturing towards Baudelaire and co. like "I'm going to bomb the Poetry Embassy, here I go on my final walk." What's being undermined? Not a damned thing. It's as about as subversive as listening to an Eminem CD.
I want to read Minnis as like Tim Gunn telling poets to smarten up and go out and buy a Gucci bag now and then. That's kind of brave I guess. The design of the books supports this position. Jeff Clark is definitely in the judge's chair. But that's not really happening. Something goes wrong in her books. It feels smart to not have an author photo, I'll give you that. But her luxuriousness / decadence / fuck you-ness isn't standing up. It's being supplied and then tempered with all the tricks. Minnis could hire Spahr as a strength and conditioning coach.
I would like to drop Catherine Daly's "Locket" or "Identity Theft" in a goldfish bowl with Minnis' last two books and see what happens.
I gave this book three stars because it really pissed me off. It survived the initial wrist flick impulse. But now I want to eat it without condiments.
Finally, I read this, and I loved it as much as I expected to. Chelsey Minnis's writing feels like coming home. Alongside writers like Zachary Schomburg, Hera Lindsay Bird, and Ariana Reines, I feel charged up when I read her work. There is something vital and exuberant in her style, and I'm not talking exclamation points (though there are plenty, alongside her iconic ellipses). Maybe this writing isn't fresh any more, a decade after publication, but coming to it with fresh eyes as a collection now I feel just as excited about poetry as I did back in 2009. It brings those old feelings back, with the power to update them. Her work has aged well, in my opinion, and still sits as a strong and compelling alternative for straight-up confessional poetry. It is in the spin, in the weird, in the strange otherness I feel most connected to Minnis emotionally. And in a way that doesn't feel cringey and make me want to pull away, but makes me want to shout confidently that I too am tired enough to lie down and fall asleep in the trash.
At the time of its first circulation, I remember several friends pressing this book into my hands (but somehow, each time it got loose.) It is finally my turn to press it back toward everyone who read it then and encourage a refresher, and forward into new hands who might read it now -- or 10 years down the line.
Emotional in the best sense, and I say this after reading these other reviews. I don't agree with some of what Timothy Yu said, but am glad he liked the book, it's one of those books I want everyone to read.
There are so many unexpected tripwires along the way here, you've got to trip on them to know them. AND LET ME SAY TOO how happy I was to hear a poet unafraid of saying poems can be, even should be of use.
There's a torrent of anti-usefulness in poetry, none of it I believe in. In fact, even those who claim to not be of use, or worse want NOT to be of use I don't believe them.
Here's the page that made me happiest, though I have many favorite pages:
Sometimes I try to please someone that I hate...
So that I can enjoy a range of satisfactions...
You should always be doing a service for others...
Even in poetry...
CHELSEY MINNIS I AGREE I AGREE WITH YOU ONE HUNDRED AND PLUS PERCENT!
THIS BOOK MAKES ME FEEL EVERY KIND OF FEELING, IT LACKS NOTHING! Everyone needs to read this to start to be of some use, CAConrad http://advancedELVIS.blogspot.com
A really nice, loose-feeling collection of poems that feels somewhere between one long poem with different movements and a collection of very short poems (each page has between four and eight lines on it, all of which end with the same ellipsis). I really enjoyed reading this once I got into the rhythm of it. It's funny and awkward and occasionally sexual and occasionally mundane, but pretty consistently readable and interesting. Definitely a good read and definitely something that warrants a second read at some point.
This is supposed to be an independent thought.. But it is just a strained leash..
This book seems the shallowest writing of all time on the surface, but it's actually very hard to know what to make of it. It has an extremely finetuned command of tone and style, which makes it very unique and different from any other "experimental" poetry that I've read. Potentially there would be a lot to say about its aesthetics. Less sure about its semantics though...
picked up the gorgeous cloth as my final-lap awp splurge. the tabler told me the designer told her the full text of the book is printed on the dust jacket (different design than the trade). which is to say the text is spare; however, words are well chosen, direct but spoken from the side of the mouth. barbed and vulnerable. kinda pissed. i want to read it again.
First off, this book has one of the best covers, ever. Hot pink fun fur, a slick, shiny print job, the sharp needles of a bar code. Inside there are references to writing poetry for money, it's not as glamorous as this looks. Minnis's poems similarly poke at softness with hard, glinty, seemingly glamorous things. "Painful effervescent candy," is a line that might describe the book. Or is it more like "It is a shimmer like flushing sequins down the toilet"? It's pretty/ugly, Marilyn Minter paintings, the colored pills on the cover of Valley of the Dolls ("a gravy boat full of painkillers"). Poison bon bons (I want to say that that's on the cover of "Hollywood Babylon"). The poems have such a vivid cinematic quality. With numerous references to chandeliers and walking on cakes, I can't help but wonder if Minnis was under the sway of Vera Chytilova's amazing film, "Daisies." Now all I want is "whiskey in a spray bottle"!!!
“i have a buoyant feeling of splendor even though everything is ordinary…”
this collection of poems grew on me. at first it was just nonsense, but then it became nonsense with nuggets of truth spread throughout as i continued to read. i dont know if id recommend it, but it was certainly an interesting ride for me.
i may look into other books by Minnis in the future. i liked the vibe.
A collection of poems that so relatably rejects the norms you know that you, like me, won't be able to resist annotating its margins with your own continuations of Minnis' thoughts. The perfect book for devouring in a park on vacation.
I'm blown away by this book of poems! Trauma, grief, loss, using poetry as a metaphor for love...never have I encountered a collection of poems like this one. Absolutely incredible. Will definitely read this again and I highly recommend it!
The peoms were short and interesting. There were a bunch of similies used by the author throughout each poem. It wasn't the kind of poetry I usually read but I can see why some people really love it.
A stream of consciousness inside the mind of a compulsive and caffeinated poet. I enjoyed every page. Wave Books does no wrong. A great introduction into the work (and headspace) of Chelsey Minnis.