Damn, I did not like this book. But I read it in time! I finished it in time! With an hour to spare (as of this sentence's typception), I finished "Each Chartered Street" on the god-damn deadline.
Need to read more.
CONTEXT: I go to bookstores and buy books that look interesting. Usually, besides the cover/title/author check, I open them and read through at least a few poems in order to get an idea of whether I will like the book or not. One day a long time ago I was at a bookstore, I saw this book, saw it was written by a Philadelphia native and supposedly about Philadelphia, and I bought it. I enjoy art made by local artists and I really expected that this book would be a lot more specific and distinctive in terms of the place it's s purportedly about. I was wrong. I actually bought this book twice and gave a copy to a poet friend. I'm going to ask him what he thought of it.
THOUGHTS: Yeah, I didn't enjoy this book.
I'm sure Agudelo has a lot to offer for certain people who enjoy poetry. Those people just aren't me. Agudelo has a tendency to mix the most low-level slang in lines with ten-dollar words that sometimes, even I don't know. To me, this made his poems seem pretty pretentious. It seemed the big, fancy, esoteric words were chosen in order to impress his readers with his vocabulary and intellect. If he can use slang then he clearly knows how to express himself without that level of formality and aloof-ness, so their inclusion was done deliberately. I suppose Agudelo considers this a part of his writing style. I really didn't think it flowed well.
I think another one of the problems I had is that, although in theory many of these poems were about tangible, real things - people, places, objects - it felt and read very abstractly. I did not find the imagery or descriptions engaging. Instead I wasn't able to plug into them. That's what I mean when I say his poems felt abstract to me, ostensibly they were about everyday subjects like his neighbors or his block party or at court, as in his poem "Testimony," which probably perfectly illustrates this feeling of abstraction in the middle of a firm physical setting and an emotional setting which is supposed to be touching, or at least emotionally connect with the reader. A female character is in court for custody of her children. She's foreign. The narrator is watching because he will serve as witness (on her side) in this trial. The female speaks, and in the poem, it is wooden and unrelatable. The woman, of course, speaks in terrible broken English. She has no answers for the questions the judge puts to her. She is supposed to be stranded and lost, with a terrible husband in a country she can't navigate as she is neither a citizen nor English speaker.
This woman didn't feel real to me and I didn't feel sympathy for her. She felt like a wooden character. Many of Agudelo's poems feel, to me, like wooden poems.
The book is divided into three sections and in the second half of the second section all of a sudden he has like, three meta/self-referential poems. They come out of nowhere and they go to nowhere. I guess I just feel like this book doesn't make a lot of sense as a cohesive whole. I don't understand its underlying message/theme/point. It didn't feel or sound like Philadelphia at all except it had poor bedraggled occupants. So does pretty much any city. He named a few streets but never in such a way that made me recognize them, and I've spent a lot of time in Philly - it shouldn't be that hard.
I was disappointed by this book, but not terribly surprised.
NEXT: Paul Celan, 70 Poems
DUE: 2/28/2015
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