[Turner Cassity]

Café Noir


He turned her bedroom into a garage,
just ripped a hole in the wall and gutted it.
He never could hold on to a parking space,
you said. That month we suffered a barrage
of demolition noise; Annette had split.
Then one day he pulled up in a beat-up Lexus
with inanition chiseled on his face.
He said Annette was somewhere in West Texas.

I dreamt I wrote this living in a canyon
outside Malibu. Pacific waves
sent salt in through the trees; a massive banyan
stood near a fresh-dug grave.
At breakfast we were drinking café noir.
You said we wouldn’t always need a car.



Comments:

The octave and the sestet seem to belong to different poems. “Inanition” is too scholarly a word for the context. Even in West Texas Annette may be having more fun.

[Catherine Chandler]

Café Noir

Deliberately written in an oneiric, low-key yet brutally spot-on style, “Café Noir” is a brilliant poetic evocation of the “film noir” genre. It is “dream-like, strange, erotic, ambivalent and cruel”, the five qualities generally – but not universally – attributed to the genre. It is an attar of Cain, R. Chandler and Hammett. “Annette” could very well be Stanwyck or Hayworth, and the hapless home renovator Thelma’s Darryl or Louise’s Harlan.

I wouldn’t presume to nitpick the meter in L12. Scan it carefully…. And that killer-diller couplet – not only café noir and film noir, but black humor at its best. I haven’t guffawed so much in a long time. This one’s a wrap!

[A. E. Stallings]

This is electric with energy and some fun rhymes. I'm OK with the meter being deliberately rough, but line three feels wordy as well as hyper-metrical. Ah, wait... "you said" must belong to line four. Is that a typo? Or a deliberately prosaic dividing up of rhymed/metrical lines? Hmmm.

Not entirely sure about the plot of this, or the sudden introduction of "I"--but I'm willing to overlook a lot in a sonnet that rhymes Lexus with Texas.

Maybe it is part of a series?

PS line 12 scansion doesn't bother me--a trimeter is an acceptable sub. in ip anyway. I like the odd short line in a sonnet, if it is emphatic.

[Kevin Cutrer]

I am confused about the plot here, too, but I love how evocative this sonnet is, and its daring metrics. I would probably just drop the "you said" and leave the italics, whether or not it's a typo.

My favorite sonic feature here is the rhyming. Not only Texas and Lexus, but canyon and banyan.

[David Rosenthal]

How can you not want to root for a poem that has both a Lexus/Texas rhyme and a canyon/banyan rhyme? There are some metrical oddities. L12 is interesting -- it works short for me on some readings, or as five beats on others. Either way it manages to work for me -- neat trick. L3-4 is a bigger problem. It seems unnecesary to me to lengthen L3, especially since L4 comes up a beat short, and it hides the space/face rhyme -- maybe that's the point? Anyway, the narrative is not terribly accessible -- but of course noir plots never are. What bothers me is that the noirishness doesn't fully come across for me -- the poem is too bright and bouncy to come off sinister and creepy, but too twisty and dreamy to come off sharp and snappy. I am not sure what to make of it.

David R.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Can one turn too many in one sonnet overwhelm the form? That's what I think is going on in this one, where the noirish light-and-shadow approach to narrative angles and emotional corners seems to obscure the more leisurely hinge of the sonnet form itself. Not that I am opposed to stretching that form, to making it yield fresh insights; but in this case the form seems to have become irrelevant, subservient as it were to another form that is interesting in its own right but perhaps incompatible with the sonnet's.

Abruptly compressed, this does manipulate its noir echo well. And yet even on that level I am suspicious because of the somewhat mundane subject matter--a story in which I confess I do not develop much keen interest--. In noir the crosscutting and crooked framing and dark corners work because of the momentum of a mystery that tempts one forward to plumb its tilted depths. But the set-up here doesn't lure this reader on in that way, and so the editing seems artificial somehow, and leaves me distracted from Annette--with only the house as a main character. Such a deflecting of focus, well, that's an artful technique, and in the proper context I might enjoy it more. But here that fracturing of narrative expectation seems at odds with the sonnet form into which it has been wedged and splintered.

This sounds more negative than I mean it to be, given that many of the aforementioned angles and corners are confidently handled and that the rhymes are full of smoldering verve. The voice is wry and knowing, but in the end I'm not convinced that what it so caustically knows is more than meets the ear.

Nemo

[Wendy Sloan]

Love the rhymes, and the noir dream of the second stanza -- who wouldn't like to dream they were in that canyon in Malibu? And the whole idea that the second stanza is a dream about where the poet/narrator wrote the first ...

But ... I'm not impacted by the story or the characters at all, and the whole noir thing ... ends up somewhere in between true noir and something more mock-noir like Dylan's "Black Diamond Bay". And, despite the truly clever device of the second stanza dreaming the writing of the first -- the two really don't seem to have any substantive connection.
In other words, as far as the actual poem goes -- I don't get it.
Maybe the story's just lost in a fog of escapism...

[Shaun J. Russell]

I was set to write a long-winded reply, but Nemo wound up encapsulating my thoughts exactly.

This sort of poem is NOT my cup of tea, but objectively I can see its merit. It's certainly different isn't it? I don't think it "succeeds", per se (too obscure for its own good, even in the context of noir), but I respect the ingenuity of the poet's intent here. The end of L3 must be a typo.

As a side note, I'm quite impressed by how diverse Catherine's selections have been. All of these sonnets, to this point, have been decidedly distinctive. Kudos!

[Catherine Chandler]

Apologies for the typo. "You said" belongs to line 4. This was cut-and-pasted from another file this morning at 4 a.m. and only saw the typo now. Sorry.

[Michael Cantor]

I remember a Boston workshop back in my baby poet days when I had "Dream" in the poem title, and explained that much of the poem was a dream, and it was pointed out to me that "dream" is a warning signal, a sign that the poet may be using it as a free pass to avoid the drudge work of making the poem work at all levels.

That's the sense I get here. The octave is borderline incomprehensible, but also energetic, and gripping in an oddball way. But then the sestet - which should tie the thing together - waves, smiles, and cuts out for Malibu.

The rhymes, of course, are great. As is the voice. But I had trouble with the octave in figuring out who was doing what to whom, and with which.

I'm not against "dream" poems in principle, and have continued to try it myself. But I think it's extremely difficult to get beyond the "free pass" hurdle, to make it simultaneously dream-like and abstract and believable - to make readers care.