Middle Earth: Poems Book

Henri Cole, Middle Earth (FSG, 2003)

First off, let's get this out of the way: this book has no ties whatever to Tolkein.

That said, it was the first proof I've ever had of an urban legend I've been hunting down for years. Skim through the Poet's Market sometims and look at the descriptions of the things magazine editors don't want. Most of them come down to one basic description said in a thousand ways: "pointless academic tripe." A few have, in the past, named names, but the names most often named I never thought of as all that pointless, some of them downright enjoyable. (But then, I'm an imagist, and from my POV the image is its own point in any decent poem.) Most of the "tell, don't show" poems, which are the very definition of pointless, don't fit the academic part of the puzzle.

Then I discovered the work of Henri Cole, and for the first time, I understood what all those editors are on about.

Archibald MacLeish once wrote that "a poem should not mean, but be." Cole, on the other hand, wants desperately to invest every word with meaning (instead of letting the words invest themselves with meaning, as any good poem does), and while in some existentialist sense they do achieve being, there is no life behind them.

The main problem here is that it seems Henri Cole has never met an image he liked. He's too busy floundering around in the world of vagueness to give the reader anything to latch onto, resulting in tortured lines like "Heart, unquiet thing/I don't want to hate any more. I want love/to trample through my arms again." ("My Tea Ceremony") It's not like we haven't read the same thing from a hundred thousand high-school-age teen-angst poets. Or the painful thud of perhaps the collection's worst line, "Tears represent how much my mother loves me" ("Self-Portrait in a Gold Kimono"). It would barely fly in a James Joyce novel; there is nothing at all poetic about it. * ½