November 11, 2008

My B & E Just before four in the morning I would break in to your heart take off my shoes and pad the long hall full of portraits and mirrors like dreams to a vaulted great room the fire as though filling a wall and the furniture splashed with flame. I have in my bag my tools petulance anger as ever all in black and with a mask I wear when alone so as not to be known. The dog lifts her head hello. I ignore the Persian rugs the silver service the bound signed editions of your childhood loves. I am here for the painting over the rough table in the corner yellow gray white green the flowers waving their petals and I take out my pen and draw myself in. I have burgled I am done. I will be the man dashed upon the day in the armchair by your bed when you awaken what you imagine where I have always been. "My B & E" by Alan Michael Parker, reprinted from Elephants & Butterflies © 2008 by Alan Michael Parker. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd. www.boaeditions.org

by Rachel Andoga

Professor Alan Michael Parker lets his imagination rip in his new collection of poetry, Elephants & Butterflies.

“In a way, Elephants and Butterflies combines some of the working methods of each of the previous four collections,” he said. “It has the tidiness of some of the lyrics in the first book, it has the imaginative work of The Vandals, and it has some of the reverie and excitation of Love Song with Motor Vehicles.” But, Parker says, the most notable thing about his new book is that “it’s not the previous four books.”

“I think some of the concerns that have always been there are there; it’s a book that considers some of the larger metaphysical questions with which we deal and places them in the context of how we see ourselves through words and in words. But I am most anxious about the notion that an artist’s work, at some stage, resembles self-parody. So reinvention is always at the top of my list. If it’s not new for me, it’s not going to be new to you.”

So what is “new” in this book? One of Parker’s major projects in Elephants & Butterflies is an examination of free verse conventions.

“Of course we know what the received forms are -- forms like the sonnet, villanelle, and sestina, etc. -- but over the last 20 years, specifically, in American poetry, there have been a number of kinds of poems that people tend to write,” Parker said. “And my goal was to try to identify some of those and write radical, if not perverse, versions of them through my own idiosyncrasies.”

He cites “Peaches and Plums,” a poem about a first kiss, as an example of this investigation of forms: “It’s a convention in American poetry that people often write about -- the first kiss as this sort of idealized, nostalgic, almost fetishized experience -- and in my case, the speaker doesn’t even remember the kiss, so the poem is about not remembering.”

“Another project, and maybe fundamental to the aesthetics of the book, was my commitment to letting my imagination rip,” Parker said. “I live a fairly pedestrian life -- I ride my bike, I come to school, I read books and talk about them, I teach and read student work, and then I ride my bike back home. Then I do it again the next day.”

“So at the level of autobiography, I don’t think I’m a very interesting person, and the challenge of writing poems that are both personal and approachable is a challenge of thinking about how to make the lives that are being presented interesting, and that was a test of the imagination.”

The clearest case of Parker following his imagination is in the title poem, Elephants and Butterflies. “That particular poem was, for me, a breakthrough, because it showed me how I could learn to trust myself and my imagination. Very wild things happen in Elephants and Butterflies, and that was fun to see me allow to happen, rather than put a cork in it.”

Elephants & Butterflies borrows the iconography of the title from a posthumous essay by Italo Calvino in his volume Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which examines the value of lightness and the literary image, an idea which emerges in Parker’s work as an exercise in the metaphysical.  “What is often true of my work is that the most quotidian experiences, the dailyness of our lives, is in some kind of dynamic with the imagination, and with the higher reaches of our intelligence. One tends to be an elephant, one tends to be a butterfly. I’d like to think that the poems have a kind of metaphysical gravitas, and by choosing Elephants & Butterflies as the title, and title poem, I’m communicating that ambition, that metaphysical pursuits are dear to the collection.”

Alan Michael Parker reads from "Elephants and Butterflies" at the recent "Davidson Reads" literary event.

Since its release, Elephants & Butterflies has been met with glowing reviews.  “I would guess that Parker’s brand of ironic inquiry will keep the critics busy for quite a while,” wrote John Freeman of the University of Detroit-Mercy in Mid-American Review. “Not since Wallace Stevens has America produced a poet as complex and varied as he is accessible. This collection is a must for any serious reader of American poetry.” Poet Rosanna Warren describes the book as one that “chases metaphysical questions with a combination of whimsy, hominess, and subtle urgency.” “He writes a language of gleeful inventiveness, utterly unpretentious, and distinctly American in tune and tone,” she said.

Parker is also the author of four previous collections of poems, including Days Like Prose, The Vandals, Love Song with Motor Vehicles, A Peal of Sonnets, as well as a novel, Cry Uncle. He edited The Imaginary Poets, and co-edited two other volumes. Parker has taught at Davidson since 1998.

 Elephants and Butterflies is available for purchase through BOA Editions, Ltd.  and Amazon.com.

Posted By: Bill Giduz