city poems, Mia Kang
Ignition Press, 2020 £5.00
Urban play
Mia Kang writes slippery poems which often mock contemporary poetry’s seriousness. This is refreshing amongst waves of political earnestness and feverish virtue begetting. ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’, for example, begins:
I lack
the libido to write city
poems, writes Cam, and he professes
to like New Haven, smiling up
at the architectural
pastiche
There is a winning self-consciousness here which is both dryly ironic and does the sort of perspectival backflip that invites you to adjust your reading specs and re-ponder the poem’s semantics.
The writing feels casually detached, as if the poet can’t really be bothered to be a poet, reflecting perhaps the analyse-the-text-to-death methods inherent to English Literature classes — a feeling especially reinforced in ‘Univers/ity Poetics’, with its taking-the-piss-out-of-pretentious-punctuation title:
I have told ten undergraduates
To properly signpost their topic sentences
For which I was paid
Twenty-three dollars an hour
and later...
I feel I must signpost entitlement
In the title of the poem, naming
What I have not named before
My friends, how much have I left
To the text, what is my
position or argument, or are those
Coterminous, but didn’t identity
Politics fail us already
What I loved was how Kang’s city poems highlights the dangers of being heartfelt and literary. The poet reminds us that sometimes Creative Writing classes are just someone’s job.