Matthew Yeager's "A Jar of Balloons or Uncooked Rice" is one of many works in Best American Poetry 2010 that don't really look like a poem. That is to say the poem is a mass of unorganized text. "Balloons" narrowly avoids this accusation with the use of clearly defined line breaks.
Compared to a poem like Corinne Lee's "Birds of Self-Knowledge," Yeager's work seems less like a work of poetry simply because of how it looks. But I find greater interest in "Balloons" than "Birds." So does it matter?
The above pictures are each culled from a Google Image search of the name "Matthew Yeager." Each of those people is named Matthew Yeager, yet only one is the author of "Balloons." But each face was included in the same search result. They are all Matthew Yeager, but they are not the same Matthew Yeager. They would not each call themselves a poet, just as they might not all call themselves a student, or a budding filmmaker, or a sales representative. But they would call themselves Matthew Yeager.
"Balloons" and "Birds" are both collected in a book of poetry, and (presumptively) their respective authors would both call these works poetry, but does that mean they are exactly the same? Is poetry a function of form or is form a function of poetry?
No comments:
Post a Comment