Review: Did You Know?

Did You Know? by Elizabeth S. Wolf
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

First, the content: This seems a heartfelt and honest autobiography of a difficult life, often without self-pity. Wolf's relationships with her parents, other family members, ex-husband, college professors and administrators, health care professionals, and bureaucracies in general are fraught--but she seems to exhibit little malice but much (probably appropriate) anger.

Second, the poetics: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads argued for a more natural language in poetry than what had come before, a poetry that was a form of heightened but still common speech. The Modernists found 19th Century poetry post-Wordsworth still too stilted and artificial. Post-post-Modernists have continued this journey away from "poetic speech," often going to the other extreme of writing what seems prose with broken lines or even casual conversation strung out across the page. This style is one of today's orthodoxies, and Wolf's work falls here.

If you heard someone read from this chapbook, you would think it a transcript of a woman mulling over her life. That is fine, as far as it goes.

But I read poetry for language that is a selection, or a distillation of normal speech and writing, a "making new" from what is too trite, too used up. Yes, this means there is "artifice." But art is artifice and artifact. Does it ring true in that artifice, speaking in ways that we normally do not but without feeling false? Given this aesthetic preference on my part, you may discount this review if you disagree.

But consider "The Next Night My Mother Called" from Wolf's collection:

"I can't talk to my parents,"
she said. "I am so mad.
My mother came over with a hot lunch
and I didn't open the door."

"Good for you," I said. "You talk
to who you want,
when you want.
It's your house.
It's you life,"

"Life sucks," said my mother.
"Also true," I replied.

Wolf's collection allows her to face and deal with much trauma. It has value. But it does not reward second reading as the best poetry does.


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