Macular Hole

by Catherine Wagner

Catherine Wagner's poems proclaim a finitude that is anything but final, that is instead embodied and generative. That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions--perceptions, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise--allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical.

Genres: Poetry, Read For School

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Catherine Wagner teaches creative writing at Miami University in Ohio. Her publications include Macular Hole (Fence Books, 2004), Imitating (Leafe Press, 2004), Exercises (811 Books, 2004), Miss America (Fence Books, 2001). Individual poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Black Clock, Chicago Review, Fence, Five Fingers Review, New Review, and Soft Targets, among others, and in several anthologies including Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets, (Verse Press 2004). She’s working on a new book of poems, and editing two anthologies, both to appear in 2007 from Fence: one of poems by mothers and another entitled A Poetry and Politics Primer.

Reviews

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I hate you coming over my life like a bag."

"The scary several light."

[Brandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty much the whole reason I keep this blog is to maintain an electronic substitute for the journal entries I used to make about the things I read. This makes it especially frustrating when I have an entry like this one to write, about a book which truly made me think about things differently, yet about which I can come up with little to say. Part of this is because there is such a backlog of books to write about that all those fresh impressions are long gone, and part of it is because the changes in understanding this book brought to me last year are still a little nebulous in my head. My turnaround for entries, moreover, makes me realize both how little I actually read in the grand scheme of things (of course, working at Powell's for the summer can make anyone feel illiterate, I suspect) and how slow I am to get the things I mean to do accomplished. Of course, the fact that I'm this dogged about doing it anyway says something about my dedication, right? ...right? (Why am I asking? I know one reads this but me-- it's sort of a public private blog. And, well, I'm only really writing it for myself, after all.)

I came to this book on the recommendation of a friend with whom I'd been having long conversations about poetry and what it does on the page these days (which in some ways can be pretty different from what it did on the page fifty or a hundred years ago. In some ways, not, of course). My sense of how to pull something together had been stagnant for a while, and I knew it. I was, therefore, trying to make sense of poetries which didn't easily make sense to me. Wagner was a breakthrough.

So when I realized a couple of days ago that I didn't know what to say in a write up for this Prissywig blog, I was fairly disappointed. My first course of action, naturally, was to go back and gloam through the poems for shreds of those first responses. Lines I landed upon and which stood out in my memory:

"Delver, what is sexual?

Sexual is the secret and uncontained."

--from "There was a place in the brain, a red knot"



"Oh my god. My

chest got cut off in

the mine.

I was mine & I was going

to dig myself a jewel.

I dug a little bone in me.

I dug a little boneshaped

hole in me, I loved it

Hello you fuckers!"

--from "My greed was outrageous..."



"And to remove myself from scene

I flew outside sky.



To re-enact the effort of my thought

I left the house



and retroactive slammed transcendence

inside metaphor.



Trying to walk out of there. You can't."

--from "The violent career of God"



I'm sorely tempted to quote several shorter poems in their entirety, but I'm pretty sure that's a no-no. Suffice it to say that there are some pieces which aren't even half a page long which somehow hold Wagner's strange linguistic violence in a lovely golden late afternoon light. And that's...me trying to be too pretty. Which is exactly what Wagner shows me needn't happen.

Maybe that's part of what draws me to this book: the utterly unromantic presentation, the shattered center, the fractured..well, not self, not speaker, I guess. This poet comes across to me like a solid whole, but multifaceted. I don't say that in the "oh, aren't they so very complicated?" sort of way; I'm thinking of those mosaic garden sculptures covered in small mirror shards mortared around a cement center. They're not pretty in any way but some standard they set for themselves--and that's sort of what works about them. Here, there's always some contrarian pressure pushing up from just under the surface--against the roles the poet is supposed to take on as a woman/mother, against easy and neat metaphor, against decorative language. The poems are fighting, and it sometimes even takes a moment or two to realize they're fighting against something outside of themselves.

Still, though, I think that even in the three passages I chose, there's some fine beauty, so even that assessment of Wagner's aesthetics isn't entirely accurate. What is it that feels so broken here, so sharp? Maybe it's that turn at the end of the second passage, so just when there's a tiny glimpse of a tenderness something crass or, well, edged emerges to subvert it. Even the final line of the third passage puts a honed point on what could have easily been a fuzzy musing. Subversion at every turn. It works for me.

[john steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant shit. her first book has all those spicer-esque poems that make it readable and entertaining; this one has a defined, avid, ravenous voice to it.

[Kristine · Rating 4 out of 5]

while i like it, it isn't love. it's very childbirth focused. my true love is ms. america.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuck. I love this book.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

"nigh said I made that up to / get some sweeteye from you all" is how C.W.'s superior 1st (?) book starts--Miss America, which works as (among other things) a (~)translation of Spicer's Book of Magazine Verse. Macular Hole is good, I like the anthemic "Scary" ones, poems about child birth.

& I'm Total I'm All I'm Absorbed In This Meatcake may be one of the grtst titles for anything ever (or a close runnerup to Bukowski's "you & your beer & how great you are." I'd start w/ Miss America however.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

a study of motherhood, to oversimplify. a lot about identity and the body, and nothing cliched or touchy-feely about it. beautifully, boldly written.