Someone recently tossed out the coffee mug I kept at work, a
cracked and infirm piece of pottery that had seen better days and superior cups
of coffee than the foul brew that fills the break room with a the aroma of
soggy scorched grounds. I didn't, though, mourn a bit, did not muse with
tortuously extended metaphors over what the loss represented symbolically, was
not , generally, willing to attempt the ironic connection between the
manufacturing process and region of origin with geo-political concerns that are
relevant, it seems, in another conversation.
What I thought was that crap, my cup is gone, dirty and
cracked as it was, someone tossed my private property, it was mine, ugly and
gross as it had become, it was my cup and it was my coffee that would have been
in it on the fifteen minute break I am allowed by law but no, I am denied that,
I am without coffee and now I have to go to the machine in the hallway and
drink something less savory than the brackish blend our staff coffee pot
contains. And that was it; my concern was local, not global, my solution was to
move on to the next indicated thing, getting coffee from the machine and some
minor-key grousing, not, shall we say, writing a paean to a cup that is, when
all is said in done, only a material stand in for other matters, global and
personal, that poet Michael Ryan can drum up in the composing of his poem
"Mug". http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/poem/2012/03/_mug_by_michael_ryan.html
There is a sense that Ryan wants to offer up a concentrated
rant of a kind, an Albert Barth style tirade (or offer a tribute to John
Ashbery with an investigation of how his mind associates the present world with
the chambers of history the mind stores in so many sequestered boxes) in miniature,
but even here this poem swells with literary bloat. Nothing sounds natural;
there is no comic timing, no pauses for effect. There is the padded vocabulary
of winking sarcasm that hides a contempt for the whole subject matter of
ownership and the constructed ironies contained in the concept with
grandiloquence , the hollow elegance of someone writing until a good line
appears. All told, Michael Ryan would have done better by reducing this poem to
something much sparser, nearly skeletal.
Better to leave the bloggy-asides out of the poem, I think,
and leave the reader something truly tactile, visual and genuinely provocative
as a result. The poem has lots of one liners, but lacks a single idea we can
walk away with.