It is not every day that a new poetry collection is published — the bar is high enough, in the contracting publishing world, for nonfiction authors to break out. Poetry, deemed less accessible and with a smaller readership, is in a little league all of its own.
So it is a bit shocking to see Andrew Calis’ Pilgrimages lying on my desk: because new poetry does have that high bar to pass. This particular volume is more startling because I know the author. He and I belonged to a group of English graduate students at The Catholic University of America who workshopped each other’s writing. My praise should, under the circumstances, be taken with a grain of salt; but I think it is no exaggeration to say that Andrew’s work deserves to be read, even in a time when poetry in general is not.
It is almost hard to recall why anyone ever did read poetry. Most generally, poetry shares with the other arts the ability to evoke strong feelings, and that mysterious, perhaps transcendental quality called beauty. But the sort of feelings that used to be evoked by the strongest poetry are found today, if anywhere, in popular music. One does not seek sonnets to lament a broken friendship, but rap.
As for beauty — beautiful songs are still written — but those who speak most persistently about the beautiful are also, frequently, those who seem to find it chiefly in the old. Beauty, after all, depends in part upon the form, and that most modern of “forms,” free verse, is supposed to have no form at all.
But there is a school of modern poetry that has not in fact abandoned form altogether. One does not need to go to Shakespeare for a sonnet, or Tennyson for rhyme:
A fight was in the air before the first
fist, when knife-sharp words were flying. We hunted
for predators, tooth-bared faces, cursing
in their heads, their unstained skin youth-stunted.
Read the rest at the Register: https://www.ncregister.com/blog/andrew-calis-pilgrimages.
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