Thursday, January 31, 2013

George Bilgere: Light Touch, Serious Business




We found the work of George Bilgere anything but “glib and trivial.” Certainly “well meaning,” though.

“Janitorial” In an easy, entertaining style, Bilgere comments on race and class in America, and on college life. The skillful choice and placement of detail (“dumpster-colored/Olds…heads home/Across the barge-laden river in servitude/To East St. Louis…”) suggest why Billy Collins found Bilgere’s work worthy of the University of Akron Poetry Prize.

A couple of small touches not mentioned this morning. “Gleaner” (line 2) is interesting—refers to someone who picks things up bit by bit, but the basic reference is to gathering of grain left behind by reapers. Note also that while Kant, Heidegger and Bergman are identified by name, the ambassador is not.

This link will take you to another poem by Bilgere and an interview in which he says he works at “a sleepy Midwestern college, teaching sleepy Midwestern students.”

“The Garage”  “The Garage” is a more complex poem, which seems to juxtapose the triviality of ping-pong (“the problem of topspin”) with the unspeakable horror of the accidental death of a child (he lets us conclude that the child dies) The narrator speaks of the loss in matter-of-fact terms and may appear at first self-absorbed and insensitive. But it’s more complicated than that: retrieving an “errant smash,” he realizes that his reality can never be the same as the young mother’s—she will have fewer boxes of family history. He returns to the garage, his cave, like Plato’s, a world of shadows. The stanza break before the last two lines lets us breath and appreciate the complexity of emotions, “the white moon of the ball”—a satellite alone in space, “a fragile, weightless thing.”

In Martha Golensky’s lovely poem “For Henry Shapiro,” we have a tender appreciation of the poet/editor, his city, his faith and culture, the first and last stanzas surrounding two stanzas that deal with strangers, nameless, who likewise value language.

Next we will look at poems about fathers and daughters, the first, the more challenging of the two, in the voice of the father, the second in that of the daughter. We will look at two other poems by daughters (Cynthia Schaub’s “Dumas-pere”” and Kathy Coe’s “Business Man”) and, time permitting, another by a father.


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