Living for the Very Last Time: Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak

Mike Good
| Reviews

 

To end a poem with the either the idea of a life wasted or wasting life is a tall task. With this poem’s long title and short length, one could easily recall Rainer Maria Rilke or James Wright. However, Knapp avoids some pitfalls through playfulness, brevity, and a voice that revels in its sense of humor. The poem’s final stanza also alters the poem’s predominant rhythm of iambic and trochaic beats toward an anapestic prosody—including a delightful molossus of “bald heart fluttering”—further heightening lyrical intensity with rhymes like “flights,” “nights,” and “life” that envelop the internal rhyme of “near” and “year.” In just three sentences, after dangling its central theme in its title, the poem’s final sentence enjambs across five lines and concludes surprisingly and abruptly.
Often economy is the poet’s friend and spotlights surprising endings and beginnings. Knapp demonstrates a knack for dropping her readers directly into the action (or just after the action has begun), quickly confounding or circumventing title-to-first-line expectations. For instance, “Fourth of July,” arranged as an unrhymed sonnet, opens “In America, we like our flags fried / and rolled in powdered sugar.” The playful opening eases the reader into the poem while denying a personal “I” to attach, instead implicating the reader. The happy, funnel-cake mood quickly turns threatening in the lines that follow: “which is why fireworks always remind us / of bombs, the shock and awe / of a mighty nation....” “Shock and awe” (essentially “blitzkrieg” rebranded) reflects recent US military philosophy, cited often as the prevailing strategy during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and “mighty nation” feels tongue-in-cheek, gesturing at the militarism inherent in the US’s inaugural holiday. As the sonnet continues, Knapp juxtaposes joy and freedom with terror and fear, capturing a contradiction that has ostensibly intensified in contemporary US life. The poem also describes existential uncertainty plaguing the republic, continuing “If you asked / two of us the same question, you’d get / six different answers.” The poem ends in imperfect rime riche, “Some of us are sleeping. / Some of us would kill us in our sleep.”
Recurring patterns of poems appear throughout Requiem. For instance, one series includes a group of anniversary poems (fifth through ninth years), whose premise derives from traditional elemental symbols (Wood, Iron, Silk, etc.), in addition to groups of elegies (“Self-Elegy as a Hand Grenade”) and reimagined past lives (“My Past Life as a Supernova”). The most memorable series to me (and most recurrent group in the collection) is a group of self-portraits as different facades of Kurt Cobain.

Mike Good lives in Pittsburgh. His recent poetry and reviews can be found in december, The Carolina Quarterly, Five Points, Full Stop, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. He has received an emerging writer scholarship from The Sun, holds an MFA from Hollins University, and is the managing editor of Autumn House Press.

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