Rocking the Bemused: A Review of Bad Bad by Chelsey Minnis
Poetry, much like comedy, relies heavily on timing. This was always my struggle when my only exposure had been meter reading exercises in high school and college. Not only did such assignments make proper intonation feel like the most stressful activity in the world, but it also made me that much more unsure that I could even fathom the original intention of the piece if I would be stumbling with the very fundamentals of its conception.
While I have thankfully broken out of that initial hesitant shell through thoroughly attacking such predispositions with the combined straight forwardness of Wendell Berry’s pastoral visions and John Berryman’s bitter cries, experiencing the negative space of an artist’s work has never left the periphery of my readings.
Enter Chelsey Minnis’ second collection Bad Bad released by Fence Books. At its apex it is just pages and pages of continuous dots only broken up by a few lines of marooned text waving as though they are the remaining survivors of some cataclysmic shipwreck.
If this would have been the world you walked into from the get-go, one could have easily written it off as over-indulgent. Yet Minnis circumvents this potential hurdle with a preface unlike any other by exchanging the would-be cursory blurb one can casually glaze over reading for 68 inter-connected poems detailing exactly her conundrum with poetry in and of itself. Lines combating with the context of being a poet, the luxury and exhaustion that allows for poetry to be one’s outlet, and the literal and symbolic relationship with mentors both academically and canonically to the point it feels both predatory and erotic – all of this turmoil told deadpan and without an additional layer of theatrical perception to earnestly explain the burden of having a singular poetic voice.
Even within this blossoming phase is the potential deathknell of alt writers by way of ham-handed meta-commentary or outright deconstruction which would counterintuitively rely on “more learned” academics to continue the propagation of the messaging. But Minnis keep the knife close to the bone without looking back and faltering. En lieu of clenched pensiveness, she instead clouds the liminal space with terse comedic non-sequiturs. Lines like "[T]his poem will not be too good for anyone ... It will be like a fake fire in a fake fireplace ..." and "A poem that doesn't have any intellectual filler in it ... / Like two blondes fighting on a roof ..." continue to prove without proving a far-reaching imagination by framing in through a laconic manner embroidered with both a languid buffer a Minnis’ steady introduction to the enveloping world of ellipses.
By the time Double Black Tulip begins you realize you were frog and the pot of water just reached its boiling point. You feel each mark as the ripple of gurgling and microtonal texture sizzling in the air as Minnis hesitantly yet ever-intently rambles through cannibalistic notes of self-love and self-sabotage.
From there the cypher fully opens as the rhythmic silence stays both consistently drawn-out yet forever modular to the atmospheres jarred within the remaining collection. Truck presents the ellipses as the plateaued vibrations of a road between the semi-lucid thoughts that only come from a sunbaked drive, Aspen captures the frigid stillness of serenity plagued with encroaching memories repressed or otherwise, and perhaps the wildest use of all is in Foxina. Foxina feels as playfully sensual as if e.e. Cummings was invited to a strip club. The ellipses are quickly established as the hypnotic bass flooding a club to accentuate the dancing and further eradicate any standard thought processes. Such enchantment not only forces you to perceive “the foxfur with their pouts...................................... with their shiny legs ...................................and their springbok fur ..............” but also the intensely microscopic details such as "odontoglossums ......... behind ..... their ears," "their mouthfuls of fog," and "their.............................sacra-cranial vertebrae." While sexuality isn’t a stranger leading up to this moment in the collection as previously discussed in both the preface as well as the titular poem Bad Bad which is far in a way worth reading without prior contextualization, it is the masterful hand that deals out these intricately layered moments of dissociation and hyperstimulation that validates the word choices as more than just a trip to the thesaurus but rather an invitation to magnify the undulating microcosms of the moment. The screaming silence that is anything but silent.
It is in this sheer level of calm and collected confidence to be quietly radical that I read through the likes of fellow contemporaries Sam Pink, Tao Lin, and Zac Smith that either proves to me the there’s a return on investment keeping up with the online Dimes Square of undercase twitter handles or I have truly drunk the kool aid on vicariously living through those that know how to write within a justifiable word limit and leave what is best unsaid truly unsaid.
