Jumping the shark.(Verse chronicle)

Kim Addonizio is that New Formalist dream girl, a hot babe who can bang out a sonnet on demand. If your vice runs to forms a little more obscure, how can you resist? Her come-on seems to be, "Wouldn't you like to peek at my sexy little sonnezhino?" The question isn't why sexual intercourse didn't begin for Larkin until 1963; it's why--after Chaucer and Rochester and Burns, after all the ways they found to load every rift with sex--modern poetry is as erotic as a meat locker. The anaesthesia and impotence of Eliot (when there's sex in Eliot, it's grimy and repulsive) seem to have become, not just the model for English verse, but the ideal.

Addonizio's poems are always looking for love, and in What Is This Thing Called Love they take their desperate pleasures where they can. (1) The hot sex takes place with a Baedeker in hand--against a chain-link fence in one poem, against a fridge in another. (If you're going to be one of her lovers, I suspect you have to sign a release first.) Since the men who straggle through these poems are never named, it's hard to tell them apart--there's Vulnerable Kiss Guy and Orange Wedge Guy and Guy Who Drinks the Rain from the Hollow in My Throat Guy and after a while they all seem the same. When you look at the world through her glasses, sex is everywhere; and even the muse is just a hottie on the make: "They fall in love with me after one night,/ even if we never touch. // I tell you I've got this shit down to a science" (It's not clear if this is a bimbo acting like the muse, or the muse acting like a bimbo--but, hey, does it matter?) We know sex is war, all strategy and tactics and lost battalions (and mostly Pyrrhic victories), but it's refreshing to hear it said with such panache.

The only contemporary poet who treats sex with much animal pleasure is Sharon Olds, and for her it's an Olympic event, pursued with an athletic single-mindedness that, in one poem, is not distracted even by a recent rape elsewhere in her building. (My favorite, however, is her paean to her early mastery of the arts of oral sex.) Addonizio is wittier about the physical acts that occupy so large a mental part of our waking (and, as Freud reminds us, sleeping) lives. She records some of the ambivalent appetites that seethe within the body politic and is not beneath ranting about her secret desires, like strangling people who miss her literary allusions.

Such facetiousness is part of the latest contemporary manner--ha! ha! poetry can be just as dumb as television, too! When you stoop so low to conquer, however, it's hard to stand up again. On occasion, Addonizio tries a subject more serious. (Bathing her elderly mother, she tries "to be more merciful/ than God, who after creating her // licked her clean with a rough tongue"--so God is a cat?) Alas, she's so used to primping and posing and smirking, she can't recall what it's like to be reflective.

It would be pleasant to blame Billy Collins for the dumbing down of American verse, but there's so much dumbing down I fear he's more a symptom than the cause. The trouble with being a crowd pleaser is that, after you have the crowd, you have to please it--too many of Addonizio's poems are made in Betty Crocker style, all helpful hints and ingredients whipped up in a jiffy for a dish tasteless as a stuffed pillow. When Addonizio uses some arcane form, you never feel the form is happy to be there--it's used just as carelessly as her lovers, discarded when she's had her way with it. She finds charmingly weird subjects for poems--dead girls in movies, serial killers, why the chicken crossed the road, liver-transplant surgeons--but often the idea is all there is.

After so many poems about partying and drinking (there's a whole section devoted to them), the poet turns just as woozy and sentimental as that loner down the bar surrounded by shot glasses. Awful things may be happening elsewhere, things the poet can't stop, but

 
        I separate 
   the two halves of another cookie and lick 
   the cream filling, and pour myself one more 
   and drink to you, dear reader, amazed 
   that you are somewhere in the world without 
        me, 
   listening, trying to hold me in your hands.