Prime Time Apparitions

R. Zamora Linmark

I have encountered enough books of this type now that I'm tempted to try and create a subgenre of them. We'll call them poetentials-- books of poetry that are unerringly, awfully, ear-shatteringly bad, with the exception of a poem or two that show you that when the poet is on his or her game, s/he can write poems that are, if not the best you've ever read, at least worth your time.

Submitted for your approval (or disapproval, depending): R. Zamora Limark's Prime Time Apparitions, a book that comes with a glowing introduction from poet (and Zamora's former teacher) Faye Kicknosway, in which she mentions that of the first batch of poems Linmark showed her-- the batch that eventually became Prime Time Apparitions-- "only three lines ended up not in the wastebasket." Given the ratio of awful to good in this volume, I'm wondering how much of what ended up getting published to the flames was worth reading.

There is certainly something to be said for using poetry to satirize the media establishment, and it's something that has, of course, been done successfully many times by many different poets. The problem here is that Linmark's attempt (I assume that's what he's trying to do, anyway) to tread the line between satire and homage is never close enough to the satire side of the equation for us to be entirely sure that he's satirizing and not writing in the same tone of blissful adoration usually adopted by fourteen-year-old girls nosing after the latest boy band. It gets worse when Linmark is looking at the wonderful world of technology; here's an example from the poem "Screening Desire."

"...I tried to reach your cellphone
says your voicemail but will try again
you forgive him you're Catholic
you wait by the phone all day Wednesday
that does not ring until Thursday
morning comes it is nobody special only
your mother asking for fashion advice
Madame Imelda's 75th birthday bash
at Manila Hotel go minimalist you say
Prada or SoEn..."

Here's the big problem with poetentials-- with books of poetry that are outright bad, it's easy to dismiss them, to never think of them again. Here, however, we have a couple of poems that show what could have been, had a good editor been unleashed on this manuscript:

"We need more than caffeine
To convince our brother
Johannes that he is not Jesus,
But a somnambulist passing
White windblown sheets
On his way to the sand dunes.
Every morning, he greets us
With 'I am only a bricklayer,
But no one lives in my house.'"
(from "After Carl Dreyer's Ordet")

Linmark shows obvious promise with the second poem, which stays that good, and takes a few chances along the way (the ending, which could have gone so very, very wrong, is executed with a fine sense of understatement that rarely surfaces anywhere else in the book), but you've got far more of what you see in that first excerpt here. I'd wait for the next book to see if Linmark can get a bit more consistent.