Arts & Letters is a new journal—with poetry and nice color reproductions of art, printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the center of the activity around this simple, modest, but essential magazine (and small press) is Ben Mazer, the important writer/editor, currently editing the Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz for FSG; and who offered to the public around two years ago his Selected Poems.
Arts & Letters is not burdened with an agenda, or mission; it’s primarily a clique of avant-garde friends. We think this is wise, because this is all Pound and the avant-garde “movements” really were. We suppose there were a few manifestos back in the 1920s, but in 2020 the avant-garde is more established, more relaxed. Who needs manifestos?
Our favorite passage in Ms. Balboni’s book (actually, Feb March Arts & Letters) is this one, which concludes her first poem in the book, from page 4:
i always forget what you look like
can i borrow some photos
or act all surprised
We love this delicate turn on romance: you remember, you want to remember more, but surprise is good, too.
Ms. Balboni is best when she’s being a bit funny, or when she’s describing the psychology of love and attraction.
We find in this a kind of wild, deadpan humor:
Never try again to photograph the four unlit candles on the mantle in the fun house mirror.
We sense in Ms. Balboni’s poetry the formula articulated by Mr. Eliot 100 years ago: poetry as an escape from emotion—with the highly emotional those who need to escape. There is little emotion in Ms. Balboni’s poetry, but underneath the poetry, emotion desires to well up—it just never does. For instance:
i bowed to it in a shaky collapse
i wept over the trouble it took to find it there,
some center.
Is this due to her art, or the personality of Ms. Balboni? Or is it wrong to ask this? Should we focus on her poetry alone?
When someone keeps a diary, are they thinking, or being emotional? Both. The diary is the attempt to reconcile thought and feelings.
What is poetry? Lyric poetry is: a diary—in which third person is changed to second.
The most interesting poems of Ms. Balboni use the word “you” frequently, and we like the ones which teasingly shudder about sex.
The use of “you” converts the mere diary writer (who writes of “him,” “her,” or “them”) to a poet; the risk is that in the public view, for protection, the diarist-now-poet’s rhetoric becomes more hidden, more obscure–and some would say, this act of obscuring is the poetry, is the art.
In the poem, “Come,” the longest poem in the volume, beginning on page 37, we get this passage to fire up the bookworm:
Using the wand in public spaces
Masturbating in the library
The library truly makes me horny
So what turns you on and how can i do it
Also makes me cum i wish
Do it all again for another chance
To see how you make me come
A few lines later, a terribly good description of what it means to be in love:
I usually think about this person most of the time but not intentionally in this new way that has been brought out in the open.
In the poem which begins on pg 23, “Healing Magic Through Words,” the poet appears as sensitive but stoic, fighting, perhaps, for her life. It begins, proudly:
You are so special
but I am more special
In the middle of the poem, the diary-turning-into-a-poem speaks:
I need to talk to you to get these thoughts in the open, when i have them to myself i have trouble fully believing in them
Ms. Balboni is very good at this: getting right to the point about something important, and being original about it. At the end of “Healing Magic Through Words,” she is getting drunk at a bar:
Drinking more, i fill my own glass to make sure there is enough for me then i give you the rest. We are close and i touch you so much more now. I expect and accept the pain later too in your bed.
This poem feels honest and brave, but we have to be careful when we assign morality to poetry. A poem which wears morality on its sleeve is no poem.
Ms. Balboni thinks—even when she is trying, for the sake of the poetry, not to think. Those who think, often offend those who feel.
To be less offended, poetry has gradually moved away from thinking (the Metaphysical poets) and towards feeling (the Romantics) and has gone even deeper into feeling, in the practice of the Moderns, who, with nervy touchiness, write obscure poetry which critics (the last vestige of thinking in poetry) can hardly understand. The pendulum will swing back, as it must, towards Romanticism, not for the sake of Romanticism, but for the criticism of it, and only in order that poetry in general swing back towards beauty, clarity, and thinking. Where Apollo, beaming and deep in thought, waits.
Punctuation is used little, if at all, in most of these poems.
In the second poem of XXX Poems, the poet experiments with the period. She uses it.
The poems which use no punctuation are no worse, and are often better, than the ones which do. The semi-colon is used once in the volume, on page 30. We find it in a writhing passage about aliens, after the word “continue;” perhaps, unconsciously, Ms. Balboni doesn’t like the semi-colon; many writers don’t; does creativity need it?
At times the poet becomes impatient with everything.
Body art
Secret art
Not doing anything art
Being so fucking high art
Fuck this im stupid art
But the next line rescues us from this impatience, because it is similar, seems more clear-headed somehow, and it’s also funny:
Obscurity is holding me back from being my full freak self
The one poem which rises out of the book’s searing ruminations into what might be called a story, or a Hawthorne tale, is “She,” on page 27, which begins with the lovely and mysterious:
She was in a secret relationship with one patch of trees in the woods
The poem turns out not to be a story—that’s not the kind of poem these are. The poem focuses on the “she” in the same, strange mood established at the start, in such a way that we soon believe the poet may be talking about herself. And yet somehow it does seem to be a story. This proves that Ms. Balboni is not your ordinary lyric poet; she is able to handle things.
Ms. Balboni is self-observing, without being self-serving. “She” is not actually a story, but it’s cohesive, coherent, and realized, in the way the best lyric poems are. These quotes will give you an idea:
what a mistake that was
getting to know her creepy bitch
~
she probably already knew i was
a freak let me tell you
she brought a Charles Bukowski book
and read it in the woods
the book with a title about horses and long days
her notebook had creamy paper dazzled with cold ink
and the smell of nauseous nicotine smoke,
of a deep breathing girl
leaning on a fence
she’s mine i think
but she’s like a barn cat
and i am the barn
I follow the directions to a ghostly hill wondering
~
She lived in a house that looked like a treasure chest
red rubies blue velvet emerald green
~
all i wanted was to see her up close
to see the way her arms blended with her neck
the sweet creamy skin, the smooth organ so there and soft
although it seemed my eyes played tricks on me when i looked at all
Ms. Balboni is poised for greatness; but she’s an introvert, and this may hinder her. Or perhaps not. Her book is full of observations such as the following, which uncannily depict love, and which only the sensitive introvert, perhaps, understands, because poetry, introversion, and love are the same:
People are outside having fun i am inside having fun
—Salem MA, Feb 2, 2020