Sholl reads unexpected 'Explain'

PREVIEW
	Betsy Sholl Shaman Drum Tonight at 8

In Betsy Sholl's poetry her concrete images and stories, for all their tightness, have more questions asked in the poem's telling than are answered.

Tonight, Sholl will read from her fifth book of poetry "Don't Explain," winner of the Felix Pollak Prize. As judge Rita Dove explained, Sholl's "revelation unfolds effortlessly. These poems are what narrative can aspire to... and yet the charm of the anecdotes ... never take precedence over the hard facts of our daily living."

Sholl's quasi-narrative style is gritty and full-bodied. Her thickly laced poems cross-hatch anecdotes, time and imagery to one flush image that is a concrete, tangible and vibrant read. With a fluid, bony grace she writes about that annoying child screaming in the art museum or a nephew with schizophrenia.

But fortunately, these poems are never monocelluar. With a feel for what is necessary to fill in the image, her poems are about real people and places. It's not entirely clear if the nephew has schizophrenia because the focus is not his mental disease, rather how this disease affects life at all levels: his mother watching; the conversation with his senile grandmother. "Who are you," she'd whisper. He'd shake his head and smile, eyes puffy with meds. "Good question."

Sholl textures her poems with an eye for detail. Between the brain-blood barrier of thought and the physicality of the world, Sholl makes poetry into an extension of thought. The blues in the park open to memories of love, and an unquenchable fire for love - "screaming love me, love me, till everyone ran." But she doesn't stop there.

Instead of being purely anecdotal, or purely abstract, the poetic elements are woven together. The fire inside becomes a trope that threads the memories: The need for love is a monster, a house burning consumes all the memories, yet Sholl always returns to the location of the moment, in a park, listening to a blues singer.

"A little fire here - could that spare us later, so when the light finally does become liquid and pours over us, we won't be all chaff and dross, turning away from its brightness?" This line is firmly entrenched within the texture of memory and location that Sholl creates, and yet her power to use abstract metaphors never makes these poems insular or exclusionary. "Don't Explain" presents itself as bits of flesh that are autonomous in their own respect yet with a power to reach outwards.

In part, this accessibility is created by the stories, spliced with images and re-coagulated and by the subtlety in their telling. In "Style" the character isn't simply "Billy the gay teen." Instead, Sholl works with the trope of style to both flesh out and move beyond Billy: Pride and courage in a high school hall (in part, a boy refusing to stiffen his wrists); the cycle of domestic violence; and in an off-angle, herself in liking the non-urgent kisses.

Billy is complicated in a way that is realistic. Sholl does this by evoking particular scenes: "I still remember our visit to that couple...teenagers with two babies, four parents giving them a week at the shore for passing their GEDs ... "Wouldn't you give anything," you asked later, "for that?"

Though the voice and author often appear to be one, the poet's presence is never overbearing or egocentric. Her presence transmits the image and makes it real without telling too much and, perhaps, reveals more general truths in their specificity.

Sholl uses the norm to extend to the abstract, like starting a poem with something that we've all done, "Of course, the gorgeous guy is really greeting the gorgeous woman behind you, and now you're some kind of alien from a hot red-faced planet." It's this familiarity and foundation in the "everyday" that she moves through unexpectedly, to jump into how embarrassment really makes the world go round.

But the great thing about these poems is their depth goes beyond one reading. For all of her clarity in line and verse, there's an understated complexity.

Part of these poems' power is to use images that lead somewhere totally unexpected - like loose keys. In focusing on a commonplace object, Sholl moves to a very 20th-century cry: "And ask how we got so full of ourselves, what it would take for something to reach down...into the switch box of our brains and shut off this incessant furnace-rumble of Self." Yet what truly lifts these poems are the flashes of description like "Butterflies - those sailboats of the insect world" that then move the reader to somewhere totally unexpected.

03-31-98