Friday, July 11, 2008

Zach Smackdown


Now, I know that ZS works as hard and as long on his poems as anyone else. I also know that the best poetry is poetry that appears effortless. But for the life of me, I have never read such effortlessly beautiful poems as the ones I read here:

http://weheartfourthings.com/4-poems-by-zachary-schomburg/

The play between biblical and journalistic language pulls you into Schomburg's world in which both all things and nothing surprises you. In a sense, it's like opening the news paper to see what God created today. "Honey, look at this. God made US today...Oh, and newspapers." I'm surprised I never thought of this before: the dichotomy between these two styles. When you think about it, much of the Bible is just reporting, and much of reporting is about creating a world. This too feeds into the effortlessness of the poem (The Pond, from which these shorter pieces were extracted). Through all this, what is genuinely surprising are these moments when the speaker says something completely open, outside poetry's shell.

Anyway, A and I are watching WWE wrestling on WGN. Why? Because it's Friday night. What are you doing right now?

1 comment:

Jonathan Barrett said...

I'm watching WWE Smackdown as well. It's a family tradition on Friday nights.