Dolls
January 30, 2008
I got an e-mail from GUD magazine about this contest they’re having. If you give GUD your e-mail address and tell them you’re spammable they will send you all kinds of contests. The nature of this contest is that they gave me a free sample work from their current issue, and if I review the work on my blog then I am entered into a drawing for a $20 gift certificate at Amazon.
I’m attracted by the idea of random fiction showing up in electronic accounts with my name on them, so I looked to see what they’d sent. They hadn’t sent fiction; they’d sent poetry: “Dolls,” by Kristine Ong Muslim.
Poetry makes me uncomfortable. I don’t dislike it absolutely as an art form, but I do almost always dislike reading it myself. This is entirely a personal flaw and has nothing to do with the actual value of poetry, or of poets. You know when you’re in fourth grade or whatever, and a couple of somewhat dumb kids have learned what the word “virgin” means, and they ask you whether you’re a “virgin,” and you’ve forgotten whether it means you have had sex or you haven’t had sex, and you aren’t sure anyway whether the dumb kids will consider your having had sex an awesome thing or a gross thing, and so you can’t answer? That’s how poetry makes me feel.
Anyway, “Dolls.” There are some dolls in boxes under the stairs. I think they would frighten me if I could read poetry, but I can’t, so instead I just wonder about them. They remind me a little bit of John Zorn’s Music for Children, because that has dolls on the cover. There might be some things about sex in the poem. The main thing it leaves me with is the feeling of finding things under a staircase. I think if any poem includes reference to a space under a staircase, I am likely to forget about the rest of the poem and just remember the part about being under the staircase. I always imagine that sometimes, when you open the door to the closet under the staircase, you might unexpectedly find another staircase, one that wasn’t there before, going down. And your house doesn’t have a basement or anything. But that doesn’t happen in this poem (at least I don’t think it does); instead there are dolls.
Kristine Ong Muslim has published many poems and stories.
It seems like a good poem. Maybe other people can read it and tell me whether it is actually a good poem. I have a copy of Paradise Lost that I look at sometimes. I enjoy the first part, where the fallen angels are in hell, but when it starts talking about Adam and Eve I usually put it away.
January 30th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
awesome. that’s what poetry does to you. yep.
January 31st, 2008 at 3:00 pm
i had a brian conn moment yesterday, went to the gym at nite, uncharacteristic for me, i ususally go in the morning. i thought i might spy a shya or a brian, but i didn’t. i was on the ellipsis trainer or whatever it’s called, listening to a radio show about poetry and heidegger. i thought about how my older sister hates poetry. today i read your entry here, laughed out loud, and sent on the ‘virgin’ part to her. it’s true, it’s true, sometimes poetry is poo.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:02 am
Brian,
No wonder that poem makes you uncomfy. It’s no good. It reminds me of Billie Collins. It does nothing, there are no turns of dialogue, nothing found, nothing new. Also, it’s boring.
February 7th, 2008 at 12:12 am
I might add, somewhat belatedly, that there’s a lot of poo out there, fictitious or poetic. I hope to contribute to both.