Underwhelming
It is rare that I have reason or occasion to use the word “underwhelmed.” It comes up so rarely that I sometimes question whether it is, in fact, a word or when (if it is) Oxford will purge it from its records for lack of use. Fortunately, as of June 2010, it is an actual word: fortunate because upon reading through the most recent Greensboro Review, underwhelmed is exactly how I feel.
I believe it important at this juncture to remind you, good and faithful reader, that what you are about to see in this review is merely one person’s opinion – you may disagree, as could my editor herself, and as surely Jim Clark (editor of the Greensboro Review) and his staff will. But then again, is not one of literature’s greatest beauties its ability to appeal to some but not to others; to be and mean one thing to its creator yet be and mean an infinite number of things to an infinite number of readers? And on that note, let’s discuss their 87th volume, the Spring 2010 Edition of the Greensboro Review.
Let us start with the Robert Watson Literary Prize winning poem, David Bruzina’s "The Whale". It begins with quite a nice bit of imagery: “There is still a spotlight aimed at a paper moon.” It jumps rather suddenly, however, to “the whale… pulled through the streets in the evening.”
Bruzina goes on for the remaining 7 lines of the poem describing a secondary society-of-sorts existing within the “hollows,” of the whale, presumably including the speaker as well as the reader. It ends on the lines “In the tail, / someone is stirring a soup, someone is baking bread.” The decaying whale and those that live within are obviously a metaphor for something (perhaps society itself) but it is either too personal to Bruzina or too obscure to be accessible to readers, and that is something that bookending with nice images and pretty alliterations can’t fix.
Opposite of "The Whale" is "Nothing About Your Life", by Julie Funderburk – opposite in that where Bruzina becomes obscure and inaccessible, Funderburk becomes explanatory to the point of obviousness. Much of this poem, built in couplets, reads more like filler, which is unfortunate given how important each and every word becomes due to a poems succinct nature.
The core of the poems meaning, as I read it, isn’t touched upon until the last two lines, which read “still too far away for them to see // you shivering in the wind-chilled weight of your clothes.” Funderburk has a good start here, but I think publication was premature – I’d much rather read the powerful five or seven line version of "Nothing About Your Life", than what appears to me to be a watered down, 21 line draft.
Then there is Jeffrey Greene’s "A Condensed History With Wolves" which, at two and a half pages, was the least spatially condensed poem in the whole magazine. Composed of 10 numbered and titled subsections, "History With Wolves" read more like a mish-mash of random thoughts with the word “wolf,” or “wolves,” scattered throughout them than it did a poem.
Admittedly there is a draw to Greene’s poem, but that and its possible value, as far as I’m concerned, are wildly overshadowed by its often choppy and fragmented sentences, an awkward overuse of commas, randomly staccato line breaks, and a faux-worldliness forced through by the name drops of Eastern European cities and beginners-level French. Here’s my favorite stanza:
Trapped, shot,
dressed as the burgermeister—
mask, wig, beard—
As far as my research was able to show (yes, I researched) “burgermeister,” is the name of a 4-location burger chain in San Francisco and nothing else.
As a poet myself I tend to favor poems both in literary magazines and in general. As such, it feels weird for me to think this, much less say it, but here goes – the short stories in The Greensboro Review are, while falling into their own set of traps, as a whole more promising than the poetry.
