A Chicago Journal Poetry Center Event Review
Originally Published October 30, 2003
By Lydialyle Gibson

How To Fend Off:
Words Of Wisdom, If Only A Precise And Prickly Few, From Poet Mary Kinzie


One of those first mornings during my junior year writing class at Northwestern, Professor Mary Kinzie, sitting cross-legged in a desk at the front of the room with a stack of student poems before her, offered us this pearl: "Good poetry fends off." The line wasn't hers--it was poet Louise Bogan's--but the lesson was altogether Kinzie's. Good poetry fends off wordiness, weakness, trite endings, triter emotions, the awkward impulse to overexplain. Easy verbs, overwrought metaphors, indulgent allusions, extra adjectives, tortured syntax, cliche--all this, good poetry fends off.

Our poetry, we learned later, when Kinzie handed back the marked-up rough drafts, had not necessarily fended off. We'd meandered, lost our way, lingered too long in the thicket of synonyms and adjectives and mushy ideas. A nip here, a tuck there in red ink offered correction.

Kinzie's poetry, meanwhile, fends off with a deftness rare and sharp. In her hands, words strip down to their elemental selves, emerge into stanzas as from a fire. No sound or syllable is wasted, even in her longer poems, where lines outstretch the page and slip down to the next ledge. In shorter snatches of verse, the tension is even more striking. In a poem called "Beautiful Days" every word lifts a palpable weight:

Blossoms lift the branches
So the birds move.

The first leaves shine.

These are nice days, shipshape and fair.
Birds over all
Are happy and gay,

They do not know
What life does.

Last Wednesday evening, Kinzie turned out for a Poetry Center of Chicago event at the School of the Art Institute's lofty ballroom for a joint reading with Christian Wiman, Poetry Magazine's fresh new editor. Reading from her sixth and most recent book of poems, Drift, Kinzie told the crowd why it had taken seven years to cobble it together. She'd wanted to write unlike she'd ever done before. Mostly, that meant chucking her reliance on blank verse. Her efforts yielded poems both very long and very short, with difficult and original forms.

"I'm in a period of many pangs," Kinzie said. "I'm going through a period in which I'm trying to keep my own poems interesting to me. ... It took Drift a long time to come into existence. That was because I was resisting sounding like anything I'd written before."

This is the kind of rigor Kinzie was talking about in that college classroom all those years ago. Everything about her pe
rson seems to obey that fierce poetical will--her appearance, her body's movement, the precision with which she pronounces each word. All straight edges and squared-off corners.

And yet, Kinzie's elemental, unwasted words manage to offer description that's supple, evocative, even enfolding. One suite of poems called "Book of Tears" opens with these lines: "The world is touched and stands forth./ Beneath the flighty maples, the blue/ and bruiselike deeps of shade whisper a sad trifle,/ as if one were never to see them again." A poem called "Dawn Swim," offers this description: "... running so the hinges of the leg/ shone as they struck the ground/ to bring a shock against/ a whole contiguous/ tightening of bone/ clothing/ would hang liquid/ on this frame."

Truth-telling, Kinzie told last week's gathering, is hard, and it usually steers her away from "pretty little poems." To wit, an insect poem called "Firebrat.":

In the basement
under the half inch
of fiberglass
on the boiler
when you press
with the hand a
stammering web
of vermin

Crusted
quick
fleshy

Haired as
warts are and
their feet
heat-hardened.

At last week's reading, where collegiate colleagues lifted their faces reverently to the podium, an old man in the corner took notes--and a punked-out girl with shredded black clothes and half-bleached hair sketched self-portraits into a tiny notebook--Kinzie offered little by way of poetical elucidation. Her verse, however terse, spoke for itself, slapping word by word into the silence of the room.

Ever a teacher, though, Kinzie did have a word or two of instruction. When the path smoothes out before you, it's time to change direction. And, when in doubt, read the dictionary. If you prefer, a Latin one.

"I always recommend this to my students," Kinzie said. "You can always read the dictionary. When I don't have any ideas in my head and I want to stay close to words--and I don't want to hear someone else's music (so I can't read other poets)--I read the dictionary."