There is a sureness in Prageeta Sharma’s writing that is so straightforward that it’s disarming. Particularly after the signaled complexities of Martin Corless-Smith & intensity of Catherine Wagner, the other two poets whose Fence Press Books I’ve been reading this week, Sharma’s The Opening Question almost feels easy & relaxed. But then trying to settle on something akin to a “typical” poem to focus on, I get stuck on the realization that there is no such thing here as a prototypical Sharma piece & that the range of this relatively slender volume is in fact extraordinary. In this sense, but perhaps in this sense only, she reminds me of two other poets with great technical ability & a will to explore huge swathes of the literary landscape – Cole Swenson &, going back a bit, Curtis Faville’s work in the 1970s. Neither of whom write anything remotely like Sharma, nor like one another.

 

Like Faville, tho, Sharma has an evident interest in the New York School, even as her take on it intersects that literary tradition at a later historical moment. A poem could begin, for example:

 

My sweetie’s underpants have argyle on them and grip his thighs.

O his European underpants with pastel colors,

how they illustrate his unassuming ways.

His secrets are feasts and traumas

and he is sometimes the loneliest under blankets.

 

Or it could, in fact, be an “Ode to Badminton,” precisely as advertised. Yet consider the three-part compression that operates in “Performance Test”:

 

There is subtle sad aggression

Is it self-defeating or congratulatory

a trashy venue or damn good success

Now consider peaceful animal life

 

What appears on first impression to be two simple, possibly unrelated statements yoked together by the four alternatives posed in the conjoining rhetorical question is ultimately remarkably complex assertions: subtle sad aggression is one of those phrases that, once it gets into your mind, hooks on & won’t let go. It has an intuitive rightness, a fit, that immediately invokes an enormous payload from within the reader’s experience. You might not even notice its constructed – i.e. cultural – element until you contrast it with its counterpart in the fourth line: peaceful animal life. The way those latter schema blend effortlessly is precisely what is being contrasted with that first phrase. Thus what is most important about the four options posed in between is not how they fit, but rather how they don’t: if the affect of contemporary urban experience is what is being tackled here, what matters most is how all of our explanations for it fall short. That, by the way, is why this poem bears this particular title. Imagine, if you will, something like the four alternative “answers” contestants must face on a television program like Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Here, each alternative presents a conundrum, not a solution.

 

The risk in such poetry is not unlike the one that Frank O’Hara took in his. One reason that it was Ashbery & not O’Hara who was first invited in by the institutions of the School o’ Quietude had to do with the recognizability of Ashbery’s project. The equations Ashbery = Auden, O’Hara = Williams are way too facile, even though Ashbery benefited greatly precisely because of that association, whereas O’Hara had to overcome his. It’s not evident that Sharma, two generations later, will have to struggle against such biases. Yet it is worth noting that the apparent ease at the heart of Sharma’s poetry is not unlike, say, the grace in the dancing of Ginger Rogers – who did everything Fred Astaire did, just in high heels & backwards.