Spar (Volume 1)

by Karen Volkman

Karen Volkman's award-winning collection Spar has as its central form a highly compressed, musical variant of the prose poem. Volkman develops a new lyric density that marries the immediacy of image-centered poetry to the rhythmic resources of prose. Her first poem begins, Someone was searching for a Form of Fire, and this wild urge to seek form- and thus definition-in the most uncontainable of elements propels the book forward; each poem maps the mind's evolving positions in response to its variable and perilous encounters. Sometimes the encounter is romantic or purely carnal, a sensual landscape of human relations. At other times, nature itself has an almost humanly emotional connection to the speaker. While very much a living voice, the poems' speaker is not a consistent self but a mutable figure buffeted by tenderness, terror, irony, or lust into elaborate evasions, exclamations, verbal hijinks, and lyric flights. As its title suggests, Spar embodies both resistance and aspiration, while its epigraphs further emphasize the simultaneous allure and danger of the unknown within the sensual and material worlds and in the mind itself.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 2002

Reviews

[Farren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Way back at the beginning of the semester I stated my intentions as looking for a way to allow lyric to marry narrative naturally in my own poems. My assumption has always been that narrative should allow lyric elements; in Karen Volkman's "Spar" the focus seems to be quite the opposite. In the incredibly deft acrobatic wordplay, concise and provocative imagery, the outlines of a love affair gone horribly awry shift and fade, materialize only to shift again. There is no pinpointing:

And when the nights, the May nights, the moan nights, when they
come. When they come, the wrong words will follow, glancing sorrow.
My idiot Spring, with its hot heart and figures, the flowers lame
laws in the weatherbane wind. Where is my silver harrow, my ore-waif strewing
pierce-bits with every skip?
...And when the morning, the bruise morning, the brine-morning, when
it *thens*--cracked alphabet of revelation--stitch and line--*then* the foot
marries the forward, the fall the toward. Then the null and the next are
cousins, in high-noon hammocks of incestuous list. Then what should I
do with my waver, my very war, my sky-blue exigency, bloody with min-
utes? Which extremest west will swallow this ending?


But pinpointing is not the point. Volkman's language and imagery carry pure emotion, the ballast of relationship anyway, and arguably the real story of any connection between two humans.

I am going to read this book like 694 times, I can already tell. I am not exactly sure how to achieve this but I have an idea. I can't wait to try it.

[Loren · Rating 5 out of 5]

My copy of this is almost unreadably destroyed from use. I quote it whenever possible. It's like my "Catcher in the Rye." This book contains prose poems, many of which are badly overwrought and obscure and I often can't figure out what I like so much about them until they smack me in the face with some impossible organic truth that I would have thought was impossible to articulate. I find myself perpetually in need of a long-term mystery to unravel, and apparently this book is mine. In a few years I'm going to catch myself asking it questions, opening to a random page, pointing, and basing the rest of my life around something like: "There comes a time to rusticate the numbers. The way the birds, jug jug, mount in steepleless processions, or the barely comprehensible division of our hands."

I think if you tried to read this book too fast it might actually cause psychosis.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one has thoughts as pale as these--till they bleed them. I doubt more the less I grow, I taste the dark cognition, it is everybody's random.

In case you didn't know, Volkman is one of America's greatest living poets!
*insert standard don't-review-poetry caveat

[Wade · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book more, as I quite enjoyed Volkman's reading at GMU last spring, but found myself getting annoyed at the sound/alliteration heavy prose poems that form the bulk of the book. Ultimately, the poems here are too self-conscious in their reliance on sound as a device to carry the work. Worth a read, I guess, but...

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

But yesterday, imperious echo, knows who you are.
*
[…] stoic as the sea’s black
silence. So skewedly, dispassionate, one absence destroys its opposite.
*
Beyond blue night, […]
the stars all coiled in their tremulous wheel, the thin moon summers
in my goldenest gaze, awakening dreaming oceans, to drown, to roam.
*
On the highway of our lost intentions, all signs are strident, all exits
goodbye.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excerpts:

The death of water is the birth of air.


. . constellations called
Scatter or Spent Memory or Crown of Yes or Three Maids Slow in Pleasure.


An all-day, all-waking wideness schools the room


A light says why. From all the poor prying. Again we attain a more
regal posture--small bird accompanying slips between our whim.
Where will we flicker, loose as two feathers from a wren's back? Gone,
do not brood for all the hands that miss you. They hardly hold. Don't
wait, one who thought a dark eye could save you, like night with its black
paws curled and gone to sleep. There are only two names to remember,
Loss and Pleasure, crossed in this field like no man's borrowed light. Call
the far-sighted foxes to the launching. Call the small deer scattered in
the back brush, swift as flit. Contingency has arms and hands and wasted
faces. And a body, shrunk and scurvy, built to burn.

[Craig Morgan Teicher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book I ever reviewed, when I was a wee grad student. I thought I would hate it, arrogant as I was, but it just kicked my ass. It's really one of the best and strangest explorations of what really makes a poem tick, of where rhythm lives in the language--in the line or in the words themselves. Volman finds many brilliant answers to that question.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please, tell, what part of me is turning curmudgeon, so that I'm unwilling to pull the images of these poems together into a cohesion. I hear it in there, I respect the intelligent and vivid images, I see thematic shadows like some sixth sense. But it lies just beyond me.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

i have a feeling the search engine pulled this up from michelle's page. thanks shel!

[Gabby Grinaway · Rating 5 out of 5]

A variant of the prose poem (mostly) and an exquisite use of language. This collection is about a lot of things, but for me it’s mostly about not knowing and it embodies this will. Volkman’s tricky, sound based language and imagery centers a lot around nature and the nature of not knowing things. Of figuring things out as you go and that’s how I felt every moment of this book, that I was still figuring everything out. It’s a tricky read if you’re trying to really get it. A plainly beautiful read either way.

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prose poems, mostly, but with off-rhyming schemes. Lyrical, verbal spars, nonsense, free-style. Context for me is lacking, and not especially trackable syntactically. Word play, riffs of sound. Non-sequitur, which sounds a lot like the "fat" that I cut off of poems that I'm pushing toward revision. Am I doing it all wrong? See also her first book, "Crash's Law."

[Zackary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant collection of poems. Volkman's imagery and use of sound is remarkable, familiar, and yet also so fresh.

[silas denver melvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

fantastic meter but well above my reading level

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some interesting uses of language in her poems, but overall they seemed to be very disjointed to the point where I couldn't really get any meaning out of them. Her style of poetry in this book is not anything I can relate to.

Interestingly enough I heard her speak at a conference and although I knew the meaning of the words she was speaking, their combination wasn't comprehensible. She may as well have been speaking a foreign language I didn't know. I bought her book to see if her poems made more sense to me on the page (they didn't).

[cristiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is hard...i was thrilled when i first read it, and in general, i like karen's work a lot. i haven't read it in a while, but when i went back to it, it read a little stiffer and slower than i remembered. maybe this is more based on certain expectations that my memory had built up.

her new sonnets (soon to be published) are pretty great. you can find some published in the last edition of _the canary_.

[Ines Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult reading and interpretation.