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Martha Ronk
Why/Why Not
$34.95, £19.95 hardcover
978-0-520-23623-3
Available Now
$17.95, £10.95 paperback
978-0-520-23811-4
Available Now
104 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches,
April 2003, Available worldwide
Categories: Literary Studies; Poetry
April 2003, Available worldwide
Categories: Literary Studies; Poetry
"Answers questions that rise with enigmatic urgency -- why? why not? -- and the stranger in each of us... is courted passionately."—Los Angeles Times Book Review
"In Ronk's book, language is in the mood for mischief, while still being acutely attentive to its own unreliability. We're pulled into this sparklingly original work where ordinariness veers coolly and equivocation beguiles. These gorgeously agile poems reveal us as our never-ready and always-ready selves."—Molly Bendall, author of Ariadne's Island
"Ronk, in her 'looking for/ the conjunction of the past and the present,' produces a poetry that questions the context of living, its arrangements, its decisions. Her sure-footed investigation is equaled by its prosody of progression/recursion in a particular lexicon of grace and elegance. Reader, find surprises in this lovely packet of poems."—Norma Cole, author of Spinoza in Her Youth
"Ronk, in her 'looking for/ the conjunction of the past and the present,' produces a poetry that questions the context of living, its arrangements, its decisions. Her sure-footed investigation is equaled by its prosody of progression/recursion in a particular lexicon of grace and elegance. Reader, find surprises in this lovely packet of poems."—Norma Cole, author of Spinoza in Her Youth
Why/Why Not presents a speaker caught in quandaries created by changing perspectives, fervors, and locales. Why do we act one way here and another there; why can't a mind stay made up; why do we hate and love at the same time; why does memory fade or insist; why does the ordinary seem so uncanny? These questions are captured in lines that collide and merge, in irreverent and offhand jibes, and in plaintive repetitions.
Why/Why Not moves across a vivid terrain—the stage of Hamlet, Phillip Marlowe's Los Angeles, Prague, paintings and gardens—to push through a tangle of ways to make sense of the world. Martha Ronk's poetic language is that of the everyday slightly skewed, as if pieces of an ordinary sentence were missing. Ronk's poems use the repetitive and the banal to explore ways in which language is intertwined with thought and experience.
Why/Why Not moves across a vivid terrain—the stage of Hamlet, Phillip Marlowe's Los Angeles, Prague, paintings and gardens—to push through a tangle of ways to make sense of the world. Martha Ronk's poetic language is that of the everyday slightly skewed, as if pieces of an ordinary sentence were missing. Ronk's poems use the repetitive and the banal to explore ways in which language is intertwined with thought and experience.
From Why Knowing Is (& Matisse's Woman with a Hat):
Why knowing is a quality out of fashion and no one can decide to
but slips into it or ends up with a painting one has never
seen that quality of light before even before having seen it
in between pages of another book and not remembering who knows
or recognizing the questionable quality of light on her face
as she sits for a portrait and isn't allowed to move an inch
you recognize the red silk flower on her hat
and can almost place where you have seen that gray descending
through the light reversing foreground and background
as the directions escape one as the way you have to
live with anyone as she gets up finally from her chair
having written the whole of it in her head as the question
ignored for the hundredth time as a quality of knowing is
oddly resuscitated from a decade prior to this.
Why knowing is a quality out of fashion and no one can decide to
but slips into it or ends up with a painting one has never
seen that quality of light before even before having seen it
in between pages of another book and not remembering who knows
or recognizing the questionable quality of light on her face
as she sits for a portrait and isn't allowed to move an inch
you recognize the red silk flower on her hat
and can almost place where you have seen that gray descending
through the light reversing foreground and background
as the directions escape one as the way you have to
live with anyone as she gets up finally from her chair
having written the whole of it in her head as the question
ignored for the hundredth time as a quality of knowing is
oddly resuscitated from a decade prior to this.