Readable Poetry! Praise for Matthew Dickman and Devin Johnston

All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman (2008 - The American Poetry Review, 83 pp)
Traveler by Devin Johnston (2011 - Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 65 pp)

Readable poetry - it sounds like linguist Noam Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence, "green colorless ideas sleep furiously".  Yet these two volumes actually contain poems an ordinary, MFA-less human being not only can read but would derive pleasure from reading.  Strange but true.

Let's start with Mr. Dickman, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize.  (Do we have to disclose the fact that he signed this volume for us at a reading?  This Very Important Blog must adhere to the highest literary ethical standards.)   We enjoyed the live out loud exuberance of these poems.  One sees it right away in the first poem, The Mysterious Human Heart where he declares "...facing the street where my heart is president / of the Association for Random Desire".  The reader is right there with him on that street, willing to be led wherever he wants to take us.

It isn't all just wit and wordplay.  There's love and longing and grief in these pages.  Solace, too; in Byron Loves Me are the lines "You could have been in that car.  You could have / been like her / but you sat on the floor and pulled Lucille Clifton / off the shelf instead." 

Devin Johnston's poems in Traveler are not as immediately accessible as those in All-American Poem, and we're ashamed to admit how many times we wished to be reading it on a Kindle with it's built-in dictionary.  (Even though it probably doesn't have any listings for nacred, rhinarium, or pleroma.)  One hates to describe them as being "exquisitely wrought"--it might make them sound precious.  It's just that the skill in "poem-smithing" is so obvious one is willing to give the poems the second (or third) reading they deserve. 

I concentrated on Iona, which starts "Arriving damp with sea spray, fingers cold / I disembark a day already old..."   The reader gets to spend time with this traveler, watching with him as whiskey is made ("the kernels dried in ovens, milled to grist / oared to mash, the wort drawn off and mixed / with yeast in wooden washbacks").  We benefit from Johnston's keen eye, and we delight in his ability to tell us what his "Traveler" has seen. 

Readable Poetry - an idea whose time as come.