THE WAY DOWN AND THE WAY UP:
THE LANGUAGE OF YES
The Language of Yes is by a poet who takes her craft both seriously and playfully. Joan Peternel obviously knows the business of style: meter and rhyme and traditional forms. But she also knows how to vary, invert, and enlarge upon traditional style and poetics to create new structures for her poems. Her rhymes are musical but not singsongy; they're usually hidden and subtle, yet they support the out-loud sound of her lines. Her meters are loose iambic, giving structure, but not stricture, to her poems. And Ms. Peternel does not just have an ear for words, she has an eye for detail. She knows that the magic of poetry is in the finely observed details that bring moments into focus, like the picture of an aging house that resembles a Dali watch or a Dagwood sandwich.
The poems in The Language of Yes show the poet's respect for poets who have come before, and there are tips of the hat to Frost, Joyce, Eliot, Rilke, Goethe, Lorca, and especially Homer and the medieval troubadours, who knew that the essence of poetry is music. There's also respect for human history and traditional lore, from Odysseus to Captain Kirk, from Adam and Eve to Neil Armstrong. Her own personal history is intermingled with that of humanity, and we get a good look at her childhood in Indiana, where a collection of miniature elephants had special meaning to her and her sister, to her migrations from city to city as an adult, during the process of which she became a poet.
And being a poet is what this book is about, whether the poems be autobiographical or philosophical. In the end, these are poems celebrating and understanding what poetry is and what it means. The life and work of a poet can be difficult, and the rewards are sometimes sparse, even when a poem is published ("and is never heard from again"). But there is reward in knowing that the poem will survive, even if it is to be read by someone twenty years hence. For that reader, the poet has a duty: "Pray, brothers and sisters, that our works may be acceptable to the Creation."And how will we know? We'll know. "So at my desk, I write four lines about the insect, eight lines, more, until I'm dancing on the page--."
Joan Peternel has taught literature and writing at Indiana University, American University, Catholic University, Georgetown University, and Long Island University. She is the author of Howl and Hosanna (Whelks Walk Press, 1997), Nintotem: Indiana Stories (Whelks Walk Press, 1999), and many poems, stories, and essays in various publications. She is currently at work on a book about the double character in modern fiction. Peternel lives and writes in Southampton, New York. |
