Best Gather Poets You've Never Read: Susan Budig and John Kimball

In grade school, I fell in love with English Romantic poetry.  Who wouldn't swoon over a phrase like "willows whiten, aspens quiver, little breezes dusk and shiver"?  The gorgeous visual imagery and rhythm of the English Romantics defined my notion of good poetry for years.

When I joined Gather, I received a rude awakening.  A lot has changed since the days of the English Romantics.  Modern poetry began as a rebellion against the precise forms and speech of Victorian poetry, much as modern painters rebelled against more traditional forms of painting.

Modern poetry is full of fractured phrases, unconventional words, free verse, and shifting points of view.  Rhymes are few.  Modern poetry isn't designed to confuse readers (although it does that uncannily well), but rather to persuade readers to examine their own thoughts and mental constructs as they read a poem.

As a visual analogy, compare the 1888 John Williams Waterhouse painting The Lady of Shalott (quote and painting above) to Picasso's groundbreaking 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (left).

While Waterhouse's painting looks fairly natural, Picasso's painting is anything but natural.  You can see the principles of modern art, including modern poetry, at work here.  Forms are fractured, point of view is inconsistent, and there's little structure.  Although the Waterhouse painting is easier to look at, it's the Picasso image that makes you think, because it challenges your ideas about painting.

The same is true of modern poetry.  If you can get used to its unpredictable structure and shifting points of view, reading it can be an enlightening experience.

After joining Gather, I bloodied my nose on a few modern poems, then threw myself on the mercy of Gather's poets.  Thanks to their coaching, I've learned the basics of reading modern poetry (I think).

I have no academic background in literature, nor do I write poetry.  This makes me uniquely qualified to tell you about my favorite Gather poets.  If I can read and appreciate them, so can you!

Susan Budig: Tugging at Your Heartstrings

Susan Budig is a wonderfully versatile, mature poet who works in both traditional and modern styles.  She writes free verse as well any poet, but she also loves traditional forms and tight rhyme schemes.

Susan's poetry is unequivocally feminine, speaking clearly and wisely about emotional issues such as love, sensuality, nurturing, and loss.  In The Bike Man, Susan transforms mundane bicycle repair into a sly, humorous poem full of sexual innuendo:

"Who knew a man named Wade
would know all about the intricate
details of my derailleur,
by only spinning my two wheels.

Who knew a man named Wade
would fix my purple vélo
with nothing more than
a thin gloss of lubricant

stretched between his two fingers
firmly pressed on my clotted chain,
easing deeply into my bearings
until the kink came out."

Susan writes frequently about the loss of loved ones.  In The Last Fugue, the narrator ponders the death of her sister, while a friend plays the violin.  This poem is written in a difficult and intricate form (a "pantoum"), which requires that lines be repeated, but their meanings change within each stanza.  Susan makes pantoum-writing seem as natural as breathing.

The tight structure and repetition of this poem gives the rhythmic feel of a violin being bowed.  Susan's visual imagery is full of grief and loss.  Jet-streams (contrails) hang in the sky, suspended like the narrator's heavy heart.  Realizing that a part of her died along with her sibling, the narrator wants a two-headed coin buried in her sister's grave:

"The contrails in the sky
Hang like my heart in stasis
When you say her name, I wonder why
I give you my last quarter with two faces

Hang like my heart in stasis
Until it bursts into a fistful of coins
I give you my last quarter with two faces
Throw it in her grave, I enjoin"

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John Kimball: Urban Alienation

While Susan Budig writes both traditional and modern poetry (see her award-winning modern poem Flying), John Kimball is a modern poet to the core.  This young writer's stark verse depicts human alienation in a technology-filled world that's devoid of love and divine presence.

Kimball excels at depicting altered mental states.  Listen to his dead-on evocation of depression from Deaf Dumb Done (Blessed are the Poor in Spirit):

"I know how to disappear completely

It's not that hard-

all you have to do is look at the sidewalk

eyes trained down constantly

and it will absorb you

in its muted gray shade."

Notice that there's not a single word describing emotion in this excerpt.  Instead, Kimball uses a ruthless metaphor to depict his narrator's depression-- the disappearance of color from the world.

Kimball's protagonist, fearing eye contact with others, seems less than human and about to melt into his monochrome urban surroundings.  When I read this poem, my heart sinks along with the narrator's.

For a self-proclaimed atheist, Kimball talks about religion a lot.  He has three poetry sets: The God Series (in which he personifies God and does all but spit in his face); The Beatitudes (based on the Biblical verses), and a new series about Lucifer's duel with God.

In Kimball's poem God Sweats, an arrogant, nihilistic God looks down on his human creations, considering whether to let them live.  If you read this poem aloud, you'll feel the driving rhythm characteristic of this poet's work. (Or check out his creative multimedia presentation of his poem here).

Notice how Kimball forces us to examine our place in the universe by writing from a God's-eye view:

"if I take away their music

they will lose their will to crawl

I will take way their music

they will spin

they will fall"

But Kimball's poetry doesn't always strike a somber note.  In Confession, he's acutely aware of life's sudden moments of grace and illumination, even in an urban environment:

"But now, every so often there is a moment of clarity

when the sun jumps from the sky and splashes all over the streets

leaving some brilliant stain all over me

and if I stand still enough, long enough, I can almost see

that I'm made from the same fragile mechanical pulse

that makes everything and everyone dance."

I hope you'll read more of John Kimball's and Susan Budig's work.  They are the yang and yin of Gather's poets-- Kimball with his fierce confrontation of God the Father in all His manifestations, and Budig with her feminine emphasis on nurture and emotion.  The work of these two literary artists runs deep.

I'd like to continue this series, and I know that Gather has many good poets who deserve a wider audience.   If you're a poet who's working hard to reach your audience, and I'm not reading your work, please drop me a line.

Susan Budig's Poetry Blog: http://susanbudigs-poetry.blogspot.com

Thanks to Djon Reed, my poetry teacher and editor. Thanks also to Ed Nudelman for his poetry coaching.

Photos courtesy of Google Images.  Portraits are courtesy of the poets.