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TriQuarterly 128
In Triquarterly’s issue 128, the voice of Tony Hoagland’s poems sounds so much like Mark Halliday’s that I got them confused: I could have sworn I was still reading Hoagland when I had actually moved on to Halliday. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence, a product of lazy reading or the fact that the two poets perch on the same branch of the poetry family tree. But the other reason why the poems sound so alike is that both come in an issue dedicated (by guest editors Barbara Hamby and David Kirby) to the “ultra-talk” poem. The ultra-talk poem, a term coined by Mark Halliday in a 2003 review of Kirby’s book The House of Blue Light, is “one in which detailed anecdotes, bits of pop culture past and present, and references to books read, are woven together.” The distinction seems located most firmly in tone, in the way the speaker allows disparate elements to surface and meld. All told, Hamby and Kirby have put together a collection of truly pleasurable poems. [Note: image above is of the issue following the one reviewed here.]
Of course, the most important question to ask—and one that Kirby and Hamby account for in their introduction—is whether or not ultra-talk is truly a “type” of poem, or if it is just something that poetry does. Is the ultra-talk poem really an ultra-talk poem, or just a poem? I admit I was skeptical, but, in the end, I do think Kirby and Hamby and Halliday are on to something. Reading the issue, there’s a certain prevalent voice: it is loose, casual, a lot of “ands” and “buts” and “sos”—it’s darting, chatty, witty.
Many of the poems, not just Hoagland/Halliday’s, feel as if they could have been spoken from the same tongue. If you are like me, you’ll put down the issue and it’ll feel like I think it’s supposed to feel: like you’ve read a batch of poems that have carved out a niche together.
They tend to be longer than the average poem. I’m a short poem kind of gal, generally speaking—if a poem goes on to the next page, I’m known to skip it. I want to talk about something else. But that’s what’s wonderful about the ultra-talk: it talks about something else whenever it feels like it. It switches setting, switches gears, flip-flops emotions, spans centuries or continents or weeks. The ultra-talk poem has a big mouth. It can swallow everything.
For example, I’ll provide just the proper nouns from a Rodney Jones poem, “Deathly”: St. Louis, Aimee Mann, Rio, Gore Administration, Carbondale, Eros, Busch Stadium, Saarinen’s Arch, 1973, Neruda, Keats, Fanny Brawne, Holland Tunnel, 1971, Mississippi River, Bush, and Cheney. The ultra-talk deals in proper nouns, skids between them, flips them over like playing cards.
And the poems are easy to read. Reading Triquarterly’s issue, I wasn’t sorry when poems spanned pages. It felt like a chance to eavesdrop longer. The voice is a pleasant one. I’m trying hard not to use the overused words here: “conversational” and “accessible.” But maybe those are the best for the job. The poems are conversational; they are accessible.
But not all of them are ultra-talk. Don’t get me wrong. With few exceptions, the poems in Triquarterly 128 are Cadillacs, new pairs of socks, fat sun-warm peaches. They rarely disappoint. But as I swam through the poems, the poets meshing together, talking to each other, talking in the same pitch, there were a few that seemed to hit a different note, that muddied the waters of the definition that Kirby and Hamby set up in the introduction. For example, Denise Duhamel’s poems read more like short-shorts, Billy Collins doesn’t seem to be doing anything ultra-talk-esque, and Catherine Bowman’s “Sylvia Plath’s Paper Dolls” series seems more interested in sound than in meaning. Again, it is not that the poems did not do good work, it is just that by the time I got there, I had a reading expectation that wasn’t fulfilled.
More specifically, aside from some product placement (Cool Whip, Chiquita, Hershey), Jon Schneider’s clever poem, “What do I recommend?” stays focused on an elaborate description of a dessert, in a voice that seems too performative to be conversational: “the sinners come running with forked tongues / and knives in their back pockets, / because, Baby, it’s like you’re cheating // on somebody when I set down that inch-thick dimpled sugar cookie ….” Although the tone is casual, it doesn’t actually sound like talk, and it doesn’t dart around enough to feel ultra either.
Perhaps I don’t fully grasp the definition here. Perhaps it’s broader than I understood. But even if it’s not, even if there are some non ultra-talks in the ultra-talk issue, it’s still a good one. If my only complaint is that some high quality poems in the issue don’t quite fit the stated style, that’s not much of a complaint. The issue is worth picking up, worth reading cover to cover, worth talking to.