I was reading Latchkey.net & came across the poems of Elyse Friedman, a Toronto poet whose work I’d not encountered before. Her pieces immediately appeared to be short, direct, deeply ironic & risked being confused with comic one-liners, sort of Deborah Garrison or Sophie Hannah with a mind. To wit:

 

Screenwriting 101

In movies
characters must always have an
arc.

 

Canada's Greatest Living Poet

We're at the Imperial Pub
for a reading
I expect little
and there's even less

 

Defending Rebecca

At a cafe on Queen
girl says:
"Sherry's got the dirt on
Rebecca E."

 

Sad but True

there was plenty of fucking
but very few words
hardly any talk at all
except about work
which made sense
since he was my boss

 

It was at this point that I realized that there was a hyperlinked word – Read – at the foot of each piece & that the titles were themselves hyperlinked to other pages. These were not, in fact, complete poems, but rather just the opening lines. Thus, for example, that last piece really reads as follows:

 

Sad but True

 

there was plenty of fucking
but very few words
hardly any talk at all
except about work
which made sense
since he was my boss

 

i would crack jokes
he would laugh
then go about his business
and me about my worshipping
later, we'd meet in terrible restaurants
then off to my place before home to wife

 

he was remarkably shallow
smart in some ways
stupid in more
but much charisma
i'd never encountered
anything like it

a monstrous light and shake
every time he entered a room
cigar in one hand
drink in the other
each time I heard that voice in the hall
i would pull myself up and prepare

petty, vapid, cruel
and i revered with every drop of blood
every cell
like never before
completely content to be in orbit
around the dark star

 

once only, genuine bliss
stretched out on a warm island in july
miles from work and city
squinting at the sun and the silhouette of a man
gathering blueberries in a cup
for my lips

 

Sadder, certainly. Truer? I don’t know. But not the kind of poet I was expecting at all. And I felt disappointed, ultimately. It’s not that I don’t have my problems with the poetry-as-one-liner aesthetic, something that’s rather disappeared here in the States in the past 15 years or so. But that sort of poetry, when done well – think of the poems of Richard Brautigan as sort of an apotheosis – demands an efficiency of language that is exceptional, and which I can admire in poem after poem. Those excerpts above all function like just such poems, only to become aired out & far more sentimental & puffy over the course of, say, 36 lines. I feel as if I’m trapped in the underworld of lesser values – the short takes aren’t necessarily the world’s greatest poems, but each is notably stronger than the longer poem that is hiding underneath.

 

What does that mean? At some level, Elyse Friedman is an exceptional poet, but not necessarily of the kind of poems she appears to want to write. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt that a poet was somehow missing a tremendous opportunity in or with their work – Jack Gilbert, to pick an example, has often struck me as somebody who should have been a language poet. In what other context does something like Helot for what time there is in the baptist hegemony of death come across as anything other than posturing? I’ve sometimes felt that the vehemence with which Jack has opposed language writing over the years is fueled by just such a recognition. Like Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, he “coulda been a contender.”

 

Friedman would appear to be a poet with far more of a future. I wonder if she will ever recognize what little gems are hiding there in her poems, in plain sight.