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Monday, February 23, 2009

Arts The Critics Weigh In

Posted by Christopher Frizzelle on Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 12:05 PM

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A selection of the critical response—literary, emotional, economic—to Sherman Alexie's poem in The Stranger this week:

I loves me soem Sherman Alexie, but I think this poem misses the mark...in more ways than one. If you're gonna start publishing poems, how about some Jorie Graham or Louise Gluck???

Can you guys do this every week? These are wonderful (not that I expect less from Sherman Alexie).

Lovely poem, but are times so bad with literary journals that Sherman Alexie is being forced to publish in The Stranger? Sign of the times?

Forced to publish in the Stranger? I'm guessing that's about as lofty as this piece of crap could rise.

I enjoy this poem more and more with each successive reading.

I
Find
Those few lines
Were for the pale and weak of mind.
I read that mild tripe, taste bile,
I double-bend, retch, and puke butterflies

I'm not concerned about the faithfulness to Fibonacci’s principal, I just don’t see how it adds anything to the poem. True, it provided him a framework within which to work (like sonnets or haiku) but the structure should never over-power the content. Alexie didn’t do that, exactly, but he let his prose overpower the whole piece. It wasn’t a poem, it wasn’t 6 poems. It was prose, competently written, with a gimmick of syllables and rhymes (numbered for no good reason) as a header.

Dear Stranger, unfreeze your hell, you haven’t published a poem yet.

You can add to the conversation here.