Wounds of an Artist

Detail from cover

A clever modern young poet might write like Emily Axelrod, if he or she could. In Minor Injuries, whose title references the wounds of the artist in modern legend, she practices automatic writing, as understood by Andre Breton and the French Surrealists. Her most successful poems are all full of run-on lines and run-on thoughts, as if by speed on could out-run thought and leap upon emotion.

One example is “europe on no dollars a day,” in which the poet is portrayed on the plane home not watching the movie, nor eating the styrofoam-packaged food but remembering her trip:

what did I do but eat bread cheese and apples could barely tell the hash bars from the department stores...

Also, from the same poem,

and then there was zurich two australian boys I got high with the dregs of amsterdam on a purple painted overpass passed out with cold and elation hunger pangs...

So, no majuscules, some grammar but not a lot, a rush of adolescent boasting. What feeling are we reaching here?

Of an Artemisia Gentileschi painting (unattributed by the poet in “To a Forgotten Painting in the National Gallery, London”) we have a repellent ventriloquism for the first line: “Look, ‘I ain’t no slut,’ sayeth Susanna” followed by more imagining of Suzanna in the vein of modern mockery: “She pads/her bra and goes out dancing.”

Some of these strategies work fine upon occasion, as in stanza one of “How Much Older Do I Seem?” I quote this stanza in full:

How much older do I seem than in the Black Forest? How much snider do I smile than when you baked me a cake? How many dances can I trip and stomp out lovingly while you wince? How can I do this to me? After I traveled alone (dangerous, they said), do I seem, now, more attractive than when you pulled my pin and called me a grenade? I sailed through European capitals, sorting mail for criminals, spying, and not altogether devoted. Always, the older ones get boring—but how much older do I seem than when I lifted my skirt in public—a flash of purple—you loved me, and I felt tired and bored, a little annoyed, a lot older than appearances dictated, in a low voice?”

Here were have rhythm, propulsion, grammatical mixes and japes like those in the poems of e. e. cummings (also a lower case poet). Why am I happier at reading “You Haven’t Called in Ten Days”? I think it’s that an Other appears here, modigying the mad exuberance of the poet and changing her self-description. The fish are also Other, though ill and possibly dying. I quote it in full:

You haven’t called in ten days and I watch my fish swim in their ten-gallon prison. The tank needs cleaning. The pleco that sucks the wall is getting spotty. The betta’s iridescent fins flap limp and slick. But the last time you came over I had just finished the job. My hand dripped from stirring up debris from the gravel and you said, “Boy, those fish get a lot of attention!” I wanted to say, “There’s still some left for you,” but you kissed me too quickly and we moved to the couch where I let you do as you wished, while those fish worked the surface of the water, their mouths begging for release.

“What I am Missing I do Not Let Show” continues withthis odd relationship, in which the poet keeps touching her lover in a movie theater, but surreptitiously, as he doesn’t care for “public affection.” “Taken” seems to allude to the same withholding man who is “feeding ME/ CRUMBS.”

A poem about the Pythagorean theorem (“The Shortest Distance”) works well in that it uses folk proverbs intelligently even when it mixes them up: “Which is why it pays to cut corners,/and why haste makes the tastiest pudding.” Its...