Our roving Reb sends in appreciative prose about her Jewish-Irishy colleague—though today in honor of the holiday, we're going with Irishy-Jewishy, so indulge us. Could Ms. Crucial Rooster, beloved poet and esteemed editor really have an evil twin? We're not sure the world is ready for two Rebs!
Crucial Rooster: Poetry Column by Reb Livingston
Poet Laurel Snyder is my evil doppelganger. OK, she’s not really evil and she’s probably not truly my doppelganger, but our lives have eerie overlaps and coincidences and well, let’s just say I’ve been keeping my eye on Ms. Snyder for quite some time. After some lengthy correspondence, we finally met last week at a writers’ conference in Austin. They say keep your friends close and your doppelgangers even closer and I did just that by bringing her to dinner with some grad school friends. As we enjoyed our inexpensive and potent margaritas, Laurel told inappropriate joke after inappropriate joke, at every turn raising the stakes to a new and enviable level of naughtiness. Everyone exclaimed, “Well, no wonder you two are friends!”
Yes, every one of her racy comments was one I believed I could have said, if only I was a little more on my game and this leads me to her new chapbook Daphne and Jim, A choose-your-own-adventure biography in verse (Burnside Review Press, $9), a fictionalized biography of her parents' courtship and marriage. Oh, why didn’t I write a choose-your-own adventure poetry chapbook? Years ago the thought did cross my mind. I’ll tell you why – because when I tried, it was hard and I never got anywhere and I thought it was such a brilliant idea and I had all the time in the world to get back to it. Well, it still is a brilliant idea and I can still write my own, but to the best of my knowledge, Laurel Snyder is the mother of choose-your-own adventure poetry. Yes dear reader, in Daphne and Jim, you can choose where this poem goes, just like the choose-your-own adventure books of your childhood, but you won’t end up in a forest or fighting a dragon, you’ll be deciding if you’ll be following the characters to the beach, college, an abortion clinic or a wedding. It’s a chapbook you can read over and over again for a truly new experience, when you find yourself at “Jim sees Daphne: Pomona College, 1969” and presented with:
“Some things last because they’re impossible, like this, / this beach, Pacific and full of this skinny girl. Someone / will pull her out, but I’ll remember it better, later, once / they’ve forgot it ever. I’ll remind her, once I’ve / thought it through, unlaced my boots. Once she’s dry.”
you have the option to select:
“To follow Jim home turn to page 12”
or
“For a birds-eye view of life in the dorms, turn to page 3”
This chapbook is a pleasure on so many levels, from the spare and quiet language, to the direct yet delicate handling of the situation and the overall ease it’s presented. It's an ambitious project that’s so successful, it looks easy. It looks easy because it's done so well. This is yet another example of the vital work poets are doing right now – the work that for whatever reasons are being ignored by the more established poetry presses, but embraced by the independent, boutique and DIY presses. Evil doppelganger or not, Laurel Snyder is a poet who should not be ignored – not because we fear her stealing our friends, our husband, our very existence, no, no, that’s the paranoia getting the best of us. We should pay attention to Laurel Snyder’s poetry because it’s engaging and thrilling and because it’s doing the things some of us still aspire.
{Crucial Rooster image from the Elvgren concordance}
I stumbled upon this website by mistake...but a fortunate error. Much more cerebral and literary than I intended. I thought it was "the happy hooker" - but this has landed me in trouble before, so I should have realized it wouldn't work out.
Posted by: Charlie Sheen | March 17, 2006 at 10:06 PM
Laurel rocks.
I'm gonna pick up one of them chapbooks...
a
Posted by: Antoine Wilson | March 18, 2006 at 02:13 AM
Can you please tell me when the 2007 brackets will be out for March Madnes?
Posted by: Pat Parker | February 28, 2007 at 06:12 PM