Customer Reviews

American Incident (Salt Modern Poets S.)

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If you're not interested in poetry so much as what poetry might be for, then welcome to Mr Henry's airless classroom of poetic "technique". There's some good--not great--writing here and the references and bag o'tricks on display leave no doubt that Mr Henry was always at the head of his class (which is their intention, no doubt). You don't get too far into the book without realizing that the desperate alterations of voice and register are not "signs of a restless and probing poetic intelligence" (the typical explanation offered for such pointless post-modern kerfuffelry) so much as an attempt to hide these poem's essential hollowness. Anyhow, the beat goes on. There are undoubtedly nine or ten people who read this and are sure Henry's a genius.

I'm not too fond of this book, though there are a few phrases I like here and there (phrases, alas, are not poems). I, for one, am very aware of the artificiality of "production" when I read these "poems" and take it as a given that there are indeed no critical schema that can account for the non-poetic posturings of poseurs. Henry has some talent, however, albeit in its infancy, and I'd check out a book of his from the library if I saw one. I might even buy it if he were seen to break free from the academic self-consciousness that has stunted the work hitherto.

This reviewer is happy with many of Henry's decisions as a magazine editor, and feels that Henry does a good job including the good and excluding the bad. Henry's own work as a "poet," however, is to this reviewer a mere byproduct of the international M.F.A. revenue-generating arrangement. In fact, in this reviewer's opinion one could compare Henry's book "American Incident" to, say, a megavitamin health shake in a pyramid scheme purporting to sell megavitamin health shake home kits-the product itself isn't particularly valuable or worthwhile; rather it's the `recruitment possibilities' and perks that are important. Frankly, this book could have been written by any moderately verbal, relentlessly self-promoting individual with lots of time but no additional gift. On one level, that may be part of Henry's presumed appeal-i.e. if Henry's poems continue to be printed, then some of those hordes who are mortgaging their futures writing and trying to publish cloddish poems feel justified and encouraged. If American poetry has any integrity left after an extended institutionalized assault by reciprocating egoists and faddish `right-thinkers,' Henry's next book should begin to demonstrate real growth and real facility with language, an improved ear, and greater depth of feeling and of thought than that which is available in "American Incident."

This is a panoplic book (sections of verse are broken by sections of prose), one well aware of its main intention: to mirror the fractious nature of the speaker (who is simultaneously erotic, condescending, guilty of "Patricide") through the fractious nature of language. Through the collision of poetry and prose we're reminded of the artificiality of production: these are not easy poems, and this is not easy writing. Any attempt to read or discuss this book using old schema is a woeful exercise. Sometimes Henry's tone and insistent syntax grates, but American Incident is mostly mindbending.