Customer Reviews

Miss America

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Wagner's poems are not for the common mind. Jack Spicer meets Anatole France and bomb's away. You've got to read these wild poems.

CATHERINE WAGNER's work attacks from a primordial angle. Emerson, calling for a true American poet, said that language is a fossil record of poetry: every word was once a poem. If poetry is, therefore, some kind of life-animal, then Catherine Wagner's Miss America is a glorious beast.

Her first book is cocksure and wailing, stinky, rude, and actually happening. Miss America is not self-thrilled by its (her?) own intentions and inventions, but running fast ahead of them. We have here the strangely visceral truths that fall from children's mistranslations, something undeniable slipped from the angry, drunk, or otherwise possessed. Wagner warns us of herself (and her propensity to invent words) right from the start. The opening poem of the book begins: "nigh said I made that up to / get some sweeteye from you all / some glance at me even if my / story is boring and a lie / . . . and who...cares they don't / want me to be likem and borem / everybody dead. / Since I been here SCARED / and my natural EBULLISHNESS / held back by a warning finger. / Mo lady! Poop it out!"

Anyone who thinks this is babytalk should remember how we react when encountering a talking baby: fascinated and mesmerized. The further these nascent communications seem to be from "language," the closer they feel to an emotional core. Wagner's tongues, however, are never an escape from meaning. As she tell us in "Poem for Poets & Writers," "I like understanding so much I want it to happen over and over." Wagner is not just playing with the readymade materials of poetry, she is working from inner fiat: "Not here with joy but under pressure / from my superego" ("A Poem for Art in America," one of her "Magazine Poems").

On the contrary, this book does include joy (much of it, um, very natural). "I Am Darling You" begins "let me king around / you king all over, mighty" and continues, building gut-felt affection with mere words: "slavish all over me, please. // Darned mighty, sleeping, / oyster eyes. // Feel little. Little my head to sleep. // I suffer you, you basic." The final line of this poem, if read alone, would remain the merely prosaic: "He made enough for me to take to lunch." But the pressurized accumulations of off-phrased adoration force something miraculous into this final sentence. By the time the reader reaches the last line, each of its words tremor with the bursting love that speaks it. We suddenly experience the no-difference between correct and incorrect when human feeling overwhelms language.

Wagner's yawps run from the clever/cultural ("If you are Gwyneth / You are never toenails on my rug / Abounding") to the crisis/existential. But, as we see in "Café Rouge," even the cerebrum's old complaints about its fetid meat-vehicle are freshly horrifying to Wagner's mind:

Shoulderblades frayed the cloth I'm made of
Sewn up my neck round speaking hole
and ragged with snot
pale salmon concealer sodden
I pick and pick the seam all day
does I really think anything covers me up
this my swan is it

Wagner dives more into the skin than the conscious mind to find her way. These poems are raw, pre-lapsarian in their instinctual connections (not to mention their naked and naughty refusal of sin); they feel more than our language usually allows us.

[note: a version of this review appears in Provincetown Arts magazine 2002]

A quite original collection of contemporary lyric exercises that marry O'Hara and Catullus with Spicer and Notley. The poems track the construction of a lyric identity, showing the self as an amalgam of experiences and cultural influences. These cultural influences range from Wittgenstein to Sports Illustrated and the experiences range from waiting tables to waiting for a lover.This unique inclusivity reminds us what poetry and the world might contain.

Catherine Wagner's iconoclastic poems cast a wide net over her witty critiques of contemporary public culture. From national anthems to irreverent folk songs to the staples of mainstream news magazines, Wagner's hauntingly, rhythmical voice redefines poetics and the nation with a sharp stroke of genius.

I read Miss America and highly recommend it. This book is a cryptic marriage of teenage girl-speak ... with the structure of Jazz and I love it! Hints of narrative flash forward and back, in and out, revealing places which can be explored not by matching the beat but by investigating the spaces in between. Like "e;Bitches Brew" it is a highly intelligent and layered work where images and stories interweave and lay on top of each other in a ferocious and often hilarious way. These are transportative poems-- interplanitary voyages where the visceral ... and the silly ... mingle. I think this book is great and hope more people enter and linger in Wagner's strange world.

At no point in Miss America does the reader suspect anything in the entire world might be commonplace. In spite of this, Wagner provides many common spaces: magazines, restaurants, commutes, "bitchy thoughts." Unfamiliar blendings throughout this unfaltering book establish skewed, new vistas.

Wagner's book has been compared to Jack Spicer's work and to the work of John Berryman. Both poets have clearly had an influence, but Wagner's poems are far more combative. I thought to say, put your hand in Wagner's book and she'll slap the tar out of you. That would be my blurb, and I mean it in the best way. Reading Miss America, you engage an intelligence -- much as if you were forced to really read a miss America rather than just look at her treats and snacks. The treats and snack are here, too, but you got to pay the lady her propers.

Miss America is luminous and rewarding. Catherine Wagner has given us a book of poetry that is profoundly unpretentious, honest and goddamn brave. Though the arrangement of language may at times seem demanding, one gets the feeling that the poems are demanding infinitely more from themselves than they demand from us. Poems like "Bleak Apt" and "When I Asked You to Marry Me" have illuminated my stupidities for me more than once, and have kept inviting me back. Miss America is generous company.

At no point in Miss America does the reader suspect anything in the entire world might be commonplace. In spite of this, Wagner provides many common spaces: magazines, restaurants, commutes, "bitchy thoughts." Unfamiliar blendings throughout this unfaltering book establish skewed, new vistas.

I ordered this book because the cover blurbs reeled me in. This book is a fine example of an "original style," and there's nothing keeping me from recommending it, EXCEPT for the fact that I've seen pictures of Catherine Wagner, and she looks, at least to me, like a skinny white girl from a good family. I have a hard time with the voice in this book (which has been described as either "ethnic" or "baby talk") coming from this person. It just reminds me of how contrived poetry is these days. Plus, lets not fool ourselves, kids -- there really IS NOT much to grab onto if you're looking for social commentary in this book. It is another book that is wholly more about the language and innovative turns of phrase, than it is about saying anything (suprise, suprise?) I like this kind of poetry just as much as the next MFA candidate who has abandoned meaning altogether, but something about this book seems like a lie to me. Which would be the exact opposite of what this book claims to do: I guess.