Kaleidoscope Recs: some poetry for people who don’t read poetry
Isabella Luna is a small kindness of ravens stacked together to form a writer, editor, and tea-enthusiast living on Dharawal Country. Here are some of their suggestions for the poetry-curious:
My cousin once asked me if I had any suggestions for how to read a poetry book for someone who doesn’t read poetry. I will admit, I catered my recommendation to him slightly, but I still stand by these 2 simple steps:
1. Make yourself a cuppa (any kind of beverage, but, if water, preferably in a large enough container that you can’t just skull it)
and
2. Read as many poems as you like over the duration of said beverage
The trick here is that poetry can be consumed by rumination or return. Sitting with a single poem for 10 minutes or sweeping through an entire book in half an hour; there is no wrong way to do it.
The following recommendations are a mixture of recent titles I’ve been moved by as well as older favourites I refuse to shut up about (because I’m right: they’re amazing) to be sat with on any day, regardless of weather, and consumed.
Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen (2021)
Winner of the 2022 Stella Prize, Araluen’s poetry is captivating and her quicksilver words are resonant with grief, love, fury, identity, place, history and legacy. I bought the last copy from Enough Said Books at the local Enough Said Poetry Slam and have been dreaming in rivers of ghost gum trees ever since. Lyrical without relying on whimsy, triumphantly unapologetic and viciously astute, poignantly political and personal.
Honourable mentions: “Moving Day”, “decolonial poetics (avant gubba)”, “Hold”, “Bahloo”.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong (2016)
An extraordinary meditation on grief, memory, love, and generational trauma. This collection was gifted to me for my birthday by one of my dearest friends and I read it in one sitting, alternatively clutching it to my chest as I swelled with feelings too big to name or laying it aside to put my head in my hands and weep. Vuong’s words are exquisite, delicate blades, cutting to the heart and hearth. If you end up falling in love with this collection as much as I did, see his new collection Time is Mother (2022), and, if poetry really isn’t your thing but you like his style, try his debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019).
Honourable mentions: “Homewrecker”, “Seventh Circle of Earth”, “Notebook Fragments”,”‘To My Father / To My Future Son”, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean”.
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen (陳琛) (2017)
Despite the unfortunately inescapable indie movie vibes, I found this collection while curled into a nook with Aggie the cat at Shakespeare & Company in Paris. It was nearly 7pm, and I’d walked roughly 30,000 steps around a city of art and history to which I had no connection feeling cracked open by a the sudden realisation that I’d been out as queer for years, but had engaged with very little queer literature and media. This was the first book I picked up and I read it right there next to Aggie, swept away by Chen’s rambling heart and literary references, whispering “me too” to myself more than once. Jericho Brown states in the foreword: “the major question in this book is how to feel”. Chen’s poetry—at once rumination, rant, and ode—put feelings into words I had never even considered, and reveal something more or different each time I return.
Honourable mentions: “Song with a Lyric from Allen Ginsberg”, “Ode to My Envy”, “Kafka’s Axe & Michael’s Vest”.
Clean Scott-Patrick Mitchell (2022)
I had the pleasure of taking part in a workshop at Bundanon Art Museum run by Scott-Patrick Mitchell this year then saw them perform a reading during Red Room Poetry’s National Poetry Month Gala. Their work is viscerally tactile: words and rhythms you can feel in your teeth. My favourite section of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet is on joy and sorrow and how they are inseparable: “together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed”. In Clean, Mitchell offers the same with hurting and healing. The harsh reality of the subject matter, truths about addiction and grief that catch in your throat or chest, are effortlessly borne by Mitchell’s boundless tenderness, holding the space for the reader to breathe.
Honourable mentions: “This Is Not A Manifesto”, “Kangaroo Paw”, “Ingredients for Grief: Imagined Endings 3”.
Contrapuntal poetry
If you’ve made it this far, I have 2 final recommendations for you. Contrapuntal poetry, a particular form of poem, derives its name from the musical theory and the concept is deceptively simple: multiple independent melodies or lines that form and/or sound like harmonies when played together. In poetry, it is the equivalent of multiple conversations taking place at once. Essentially these are poems that can be read in multiple ways—often from top to bottom, left to right, sometimes backwards—opening space for another poem to be read between or around the poem on the page. This may seem daunting, but I promise the versatility of the poems’ readability is more encouraging than overwhelming.
This isn’t a recommendation per se, but it is incredibly cool and fun introduction into contrapuntal poems. Star Gauge ( 璇玑圖/Xuánjī Tú) by Su Hui is a phenomenal 4th-century reversible or palindrome poem (迴文詩/huíwénshī) consisting of a 29 x 29 grid of of 841 characters, creating roughly 3000 poems that can be read in any direction, yielding nearly 8,000 possible readings.
“Star Gauge” in it’s original form
“Star Gauge” in simplified Chinese (Left) and traditional Chinese characters (Right)
Side note: any Chinese poets who want to talk to me about this awe-inspiring work, please feel free!
My bonus contrapuntal poem recommendations explore the everyday kind of loss that comes in waves: each reading of the poem in whichever direction reveals another kind of grief, another moment for reflection, another quiet memory:
“My Father” by Ollie Schminkey from their collection Dead Dad Jokes (2021)
and
“Operation Storm” by Lidija Cvetkovic from her collection War is Not the Season for Figs (2004).
This Kaleidoscope Recs was generously donated by Isabella.
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