Review of MONEY POEMS by James Gendron

James Gendron’s “Money Poems” is small; its smallness is its modus operandi. A chapbook that propels itself to its end not only by the brevity of the individual poems and the speed at which you can move through it, but by the monologue that builds in all the voices. Each poem is its own voice because each poem is a single mood. For some it’s simple–fear, humor, regret–but in most it’s some multiplicity of moods fused into a single essence that has no name. For example, the poem “Love,” which I may as well quote in its entirety:

I bought my love a gallon of the ocean.
We walk hand-in-hand to the beach.

There! There! I think I see our gallon!

The poem works because it begins with a fanciful premise and extends it. That spark is the driving force of the poem, and the poem only lasts as long as it takes for the fuse to burn. Too often poets feel the need to apologize for a slight absurdity, over-explaining it and drowning it in realism until all the life and excitement has been drained and that initial bit of interest, the interesting (even if in a minor way) phrase or idea, becomes estranged from the very poem that it caused to be. And the poem is all the worse for it.

But Gendron knows how to ride that spark, and here that spark is one of love&naivety–a single unit–and so it ends with the maximization of that love&naivety in the wonder that obtains in being in love and the naivety that is required by that sort of love: of course he can’t ‘really’ see their gallon, but what good does it do to smash that joy? The love&naivety present is made powerful because, in fusing the two terms, they come to stand for something other than the two individual terms battling against one another; it’s about trying to grab on to a small piece of something immense and ungraspable, and the audacity of allowing oneself to own your piece of that, even if what your piece is a part of is incomprehensible and untenable as a whole.

Plus, it’s silly. It’s silly in a way that I find enjoyable, but I could see how others would find it not to their taste. Yet the fact that it is silly and contains these other, deeper implications is what gives it lasting value. When you’ve exhausted one route, the other opens up and refreshes the poem. And, despite all this time spent on it in this review and as much as I enjoy it, “Love” is far from my favorite poem in here. I chose “Love” as my example because it does what all of these poems do but in a more straightforward way. Its mood–that love&naivety thing I keep talking about–is more straightforward by its very nature because of what happens at that fusion point. For an example of this principle, take the first poem in the book, “Toolbox” (quoted, again, in its entirety):

To clean the dirty water: more water.
Our low, rough voices drift
over the shacks of millionaires. Nobody

is going to tell us what to do.
And here comes nobody now.

The mood of this poem is more complex. Its elements are filth, cleansing, wealth, authority, and submission. Its moods on these elements disgust, sadness, and, perhaps, peeking out beneath these and other elements, hope. To see this glimmer of hope, read the last two sentences again from the perspective of someone helpless to cleanse themselves of their sad drifting–someone who only knows of one way to solve a problem (“To clean the dirty water: more water.”) and could use the comfort of conforming to authority that vanishes with childhood. And it’s not an either/or with the hope or disgust. It is both hope and disgust (I won’t make it hope&disgust this time, because this one is more complicated than “Love”–it has more moods amalgamating than that).

Poems like “Toolbox” are the voices that build into the monologue. And while all the individual  poems of “Money Poems” remain heterogeneous, they work as a snowball rolling downhill, themes emerging, textual decisions from one poem influencing later poems, culminating in a final poem that ends the only way a book like this one should, though no one else would have thought to do it.

You can (and should) buy MONEY POEMS over at Poor Claudia.

 

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