Is it worth my time?

Corinne Lee


When a person approaches a poem for the first time, he or she might ask, "What does this mean?" I tend to ask, "Is this worth my time?" That's certainly what comes to mind when I first saw Corinne Lee's "Six from 'Birds of Self-Knowledge'." Perhaps there was a meaning behind the seemingly random use of line breaks; maybe the word choice was not pointless but purposeful; probably the poem means something, I guess. There is also meaning behind the Egyptian hieroglyphs. I think both, for me, hold equal levels of interests, which is to say basically zero, outside of a passing fascination.

Reading about Corinne Lee (here), I find that she had a hard time starting out as a poet in the most literal sense possible. After taking writing courses at college, she gained a great appreciation for poetry and hoped to be published by age 25. By her second year at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she was suddenly overcome with a physical pain when she attempted to write. Her doctor told her it was purely psychological, the result of the stress of writing. But as it turns out, she had bone defects above her elbows. Ten years of surgery fixed the abnormality and she resumed writing.

One could make a handful of mean-spirited jokes about correlation between the absurdity of her line breaks and her bone defects, but I will refrain from that.

According to that article linked above, she "compose[s her work] on scraps of paper while the poet was standing in line at the grocery store or sitting in a parking lot." No wonder everything appears entirely disjointed, unrelated, and needlessly abstract.

In the final section of Best American Poetry 2010, in which the poets provide a biography and short summary of their included poem, Corinne Lee literally goes through all of the difficult or unusual words or phrases in her poem and explains them. Sometimes, such explanations require only a definition like "bobolink." But others explain, in detail, the original idea. For instance, there is a long, unbroken, single line that reads "afterthreenightswithoutsleepIcatchmyvaginadentatabarrelingdownthehighway." In the final section, she explains that this image came out of a fever dream.

In other words, there was no real way to know what that line could have meant without asking the poet. And perhaps more unfortunate, the only person to whom that line could hold significance or meaning is the poet.

It is no wonder the article affirms - quietly, respectfully, and hidden within several statements - that Corinne Lee is "a relatively inexperienced poet."

Is such a poem worth my time?