Rita Mae Reese on Mark Jarman
Mark Jarman is a sober poet. He’s so sober that he might be in danger of becoming the designated driver of American poetry. This sobriety is as natural to him as breathing, as we see in “My Parents Come Home Laughing” from his first book, North Sea, in which a young boy watches his parents come home from a feast for Robert Burns and collapse into helpless laughter. The boy does not join in the laughter or the weeping that follows but watches and draws comfort from it. This seems to be much of the perspective that this poems are written from—a secret, sensitive observer drawing a solitary comfort from humanity or nature. Jarman is the author (or editor) of fourteen books, including three collections of essays about poetry and one of the most vocal proponents of expansivist poetry. He is a co-founder with Robert McDowell of the now defunct Reaper magazine that featured poetry that favored the nearly quaint ideals of story and image. The pair also founded Story Line Press, which closed up shop in 2008, after championing the work of expansionist poets writing in both verse and prose.
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Expansivist poets are in direct opposition to free verse poets. The divide between the two can seem depressingly similar to American politics—conservatives (Expansivists) versus liberals (post-modern, fragment-oriented poets). The conservatives have a populist mission—to appeal to the general reader (which might seem like a quixotic goal) while the liberals have been accused of writing only for each other, or for no one. This lumping obscures a great deal in poetry, just as it does in politics, rendering invisible the many liberal, non-white practitioners of metrical verse and received form. It also provides a too-easy way to dismiss the work of a poet such as Jarman by category rather than evaluating him on the body of his work. Bones Fires provides the opportunity for critics and casual readers alike to not simply revisit the old debate of
Sarabande Books, 2011
Sobering Expanse: