VOLUME 2 - 2007-2008
Meredith Walters's ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS ASK
Anhinga Press, 2007, 55 pages, ISBN: 9780938078975
Meredith Walters’s first book of poems, All You Have to Do Is Ask, has convinced me that what I’ve been taught is dead wrong. There is no difference between poetry and prose writing. For, certainly, the evidence is between the covers, just after the parrot and before the blurbs. Of the three blurbs, only one mentions any sort of music, and that is Shapiro’s, in which he lists “musical” right after “exquisite” and just before “full of emotion.” These are manhole-cover words that don’t mean anything unless you get knocked out by one.
Meredith Walters’s poems are flirty if not musical, churlish if not exquisite, and downright catty if not full of emotion. Take “Love Note to a Young Soldier,” where the speaker of the poem notices “Second Lieutenant Rodriquez” and wonders, “Who would it kill for you to loosen up a bit?” and “Would you mind if I told you we were closer to the moon than the clouds?” These are school-girl notions, something Holden Caulfield might wonder on his bus trip back from the shrink. But these are poems, aren’t they? The speaker never does accost the soldier, only derides him in reverie and, finally, telepathically lets him know that if he were to take off his pin and get loaded and maybe talk to the speaker, “no one will know [his] name.” This is one of the better poems, but it reads like the beginning of a short story rather than a poem.
My favorite poem of the bunch, “Faux Tough,” marks the point where I was seduced by the speaker, if not the book, and seduction has its price. The poem at first is about some tough Minneapolis youths “running the streets.” The speaker focuses on two “kids,” a boy with tattoos of “black scorpions on his arm” and a girl in whose back pocket the boy sticks his hand. The speaker then goes on to discuss how “Some lovers are so discreet and others you have to jack apart / with a rib spreader.” Then, quickly, she addresses you, or me, or perhaps the universal you of the title. I took it as me, the reader, the one writing this review, the one who fell in love. Walters writes,
My affection inches toward you
like a crab asserting itself, then with a wink, withdraws.
A dance to reveal my desire and anticipation
of your immediate departure. Although, if it’s all the same to you
I’d like to stop talking now and show you a series
of Japanese woodcuts. See that delicate line?
That’s how I want to make you feel.
I quote this poem at length because it marks the highpoint of All You Have to do is Ask.
Shouldn’t we be in love with our favorite poets? At least for the hour or so that we are between the covers? I think so. I remember carrying around Leaves of Grass in my back pocket, thinking that I’d never seen eyes like that on anyone, man or woman. I was deeply in love. Or the time I read Richard Siken’s Crush and felt that voice on my neck like a cadence, ordering me to turn the pages at my peril, crushing as it were. Again, I was in love. And when I read “See that delicate line? / That’s how I want to make you feel,” smitten. But love, also, has its price.
I began falling out of love on page 34 when I read “What Shall I Take of What I Need.” Walters and I had our first tiff when she used the word "Peruvian" in the first three out of four lines of this poem, and then our first downright fight when she metaphorically linked “hoof clops” with “pennies under a blanket.” There was much miscommunication, always the mark of a doomed relationship. We fell completely out of love on the next page with “Seaweed Theory.” This poem, filled with sea faring and war jargon, crumbles into a list of different kinds of bones, conjuring the educational jingle, "the ankle bone's connected to the chin bone, and the chin bone's connected to the knee bone, etc."
I longed for the days when we were courting, when I told her she had a fantastic “aura,” and she said she “belong[ed] to nothing.” But there we were, apart. Like all relationships, particularly love affairs, there is that moment when either party, in this case me, realizes what it was in the other person that made us give up the ghost. These are the seeds that cause the desperate phone calls, strange half waves, and also the averted eyes, or the random guffaw. In any event, the title poem is cause for giving it another go, perhaps in the next book, for one can only return so often to the sight of a tremendous jilting. Walters writes,
Someone wants to see you if only to mention
your beautiful skin and how the world could meet you differently
if it were just and pleasant
and wept at the sight of its own cherry blossoms
or enlisted the snow to fall on your umbrella.
This is the kind of love I’m talking about, the kind of relationship I expect to have when I read a book of poetry.
Rick Campbell, the editor at Anhinga Press, once said at a poetry publishing workshop that a unified book of poetry is superior to a book of individually good poems. I see no cohesion in this work. Perhaps Campbell was referring to an ideal that no one quite realized this time around.
So I stand corrected. There is no difference between poetry and prose, other than the casual line break and the few forms still sputtering for breath on the banks of contemporary poetry; this is to be lamented. Why wouldn’t a poet use all the tools available to build her vehicle, to seduce her reader? Music? Space? There is power in brevity, and narrative lives in prose. Oh well, I’d date her again. No doubt about it.
- Josef Benson