I’m analyzing poems by poets Marjorie Perloff deems “experimental” to show how unexperimental they actually are. I find I’m also in the process learning quite a bit about the mainstream’s “cutting edge.” A lot that’s going on there is better than I thought it was–it’s just not poetically adventurous. Here’s one, which is by Uljana Wolf, a poet new to me whose work I had trouble finding on the Internet:

The Applicant [4]    blew the interview. Cracked window        over a chest too baroquely  open for business. Mollusk of rancor        in a throat saying should've  let him do the talking. Should've left        them a foretaste of the whole  amalgam. What doesn't kill me        makes me wonder. Whatever it was  must have tramped off an afternoon        laughing so hard it forgot what I looked like  with my hat down and left me        ghost of infinite back rent to pay.

This is another example of “experimental poetry” that’s nothing but one oddly not-quite-right sentence or partial sentence jump-cutting to another—but doing so musically, with splashfuls of vivid visual imagery.  The intent (which may be unconscious) is to engage a reader’s curiosity long enough for the unifying mood the poem is expressing to sink in.  It’s interestingly complex, this mood—which includes among much else, what-I-shoulda-done regret, hostility toward the rejecting interviewer (and, it seems to me, the “whatever it was” ultimately in inimical charge of the interviewee’s life), objectivity about the comedy of it all, and melancholy at the thought of the back-rent that will not be paid).

Nothing new here—just a different personality bouncily disdaining transitions.  But concluding with a genuine keeper of a pay-off image in the poem’s last four-and-a-half lines.

I’m thinking a good name for the rather large school of Ashberians is “the Neo York School of Poets.”

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Popper’s Penguins