Idiolexicon

Moraine -- Poems by Joanna Furhman

A moraine is a mound, ridge or ground covering of unsorted debris left behind by a melting glacier. Joanna Fuhrman’s form follows function as the melting away of her lines and verse deposit perfect piles of metaphor and imagery building to pyramids of postsurrealism, and at the same time questioning the very things they left. Her ridges are the frustrating dynamics of relationships, her ground coverings the asphyxiating place of gender roles in the world, and her mounds the poet struggling with this vague idea of poetry.

Ted Berrigan once said that being a poet is possibly the most ridiculous thing you could be, so you might as well have some humor about it, and Furhman has it in droves. That humor, married with sass and grit, becomes a plea to poetry and for poetry. Some people might say Furhman’s poetry is line after line of wild horses without a hitching post in sight, but these poems were not meant to be tamed or ridden. That isn’t to say there is a lack of control -- Fuhrman’s chaos is mathematical, what on first glance is an endless string of wild digits becomes a wonderful algebraic truth as the poems continue to build their mounds of sticks and mud and until an entire city of glacial debris springs forth.

The urban landscape is not to be denied in Fuhrman’s poems, and in true post post New York School she melds city life with historical influences, friends and lovers with the endless movement of city life. Think Baudelaire meets Sarah Silverman. In the poem "You Should Have Been There For The Hangover! Moraine," Fuhrman invokes O’Hara, Whitman, Rukeyser, Parra, Breton, de Campos, and Lorca by name, but that list could easily go on to include Bishop, Vallejo, Knott, Berrigan, Tzara, Apollinaire, Schuyler, Edson, Notley, and so many more. She piles these things and more until the forest is lost before the trees, until the reader has to adjust his or her eyes to see the reality going on just below the sticks and leaves.

--Patrick

Labels: Recommended Reading