Here’s a fairly typical poem by Lisa Olstein, who, according to the Poetry Foundation, has been associate director of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and who won the Copper Canyon Press Hayden Carruth award.

Negotiation

You take the mortar; I’ll take the pestle,
the weight we laid five years before the door.

You take the door, its flank and hollow.
You take the hollow morning we set out,

I’ll take the conch shell, the sea.
You take the sea, our kitchen window looking out on it.

I’ll take the kitchen; you take the potatoes,
their rough edges, their eyes.

You take the flashlight’s eye we turned skyward
to rebut the stars. I’ll take the sky it travels.

You take my fear of long journeys, of talking in my sleep.
I’ll take sleep and the first morning sounds

of the monastery on the hill. You take the monks;
I’ll take the way they sweep the ground

before every step, the way they nurse other men’s
crippled oxen through long flickering nights.

Reading this, one is quickly overwhelmed with questions. What is the point of one taking the mortar and the other the pestle when the one is of no use without the other? Does this mean that everybody loses in breakup, which seems to be the subject of the poem, though there’s nothing in the poem that would confirm it one way or the other? And is it even true? Or perhaps this is a metaphorical description of a breakup experienced by the poet. That also there’s no way of knowing.

Then what’s this about “the weight we laid five years before the door.” That would seem to be the pestle, but few pestles are heavy enough to serve as doorstops. But maybe it wasn’t the pestle, or it was a very big pestle. Then why mention it at all? In what way does it advance the subject of the poem?

And why “five years before the door”? One could place something five inches before a door or five years before a particular event, but not five years before a door. Is this a compact way of saying five years ago, five years before one of the protagonists went out the door? If so, it confuses rather than stirring one with the poetic sentiment, in contrast, say, to Dylan Thomas’s “Once below a time.”

I could go on, but the puzzlements merely pile up without edifying clues. One might be able to imagine a golden thread that ties all the disparate elements of this poem together, but I can’t see any way of verifying any such unifying theory from the poem. It’s rather like attempting to verify string theory by weaving cats cradles.

Now Hayden Carruth is a well-known poet and Copper Canyon is a press of high repute. I wasn’t able to find any explanation, in a quick search, as to why Olstein won the award, but the Poetry Foundation, also an organization at the summit of the American poetry world, quoted the following blurb on its page dedicated to information about Olstein.

“Olstein places the mystical next to the mundane, bees next to bricklayers, purple finches next to garage doors, reason next to faith, chance near fate.”

What is one to make of this? Does the blurber see bees as mystical and bricklayers as mundane? Both are really equally mundane. Perhaps the blurber meant poetic rather than mystical. But is that even true not to speak of edifying? Worse, is reason mystical while faith is mundane? Perhaps the blurber reversed the order of the examples here. But then, is reason mundane? And which is more mystical or mundane, chance or fate, though perhaps since they are merely near, not next to each other, the dichotomy doesn’t apply.

It’s difficult not to conclude that this whole business, and much of contemporary poetry, is an enormous scam, though my impression is that those perpetrating it fully believe in their own deceptions. It’s as if Bernie Madoff really thought his colossal pyramid scheme would enrich all the participants.