New content every morning!

Empire of Gimmickry

by Hugh Blanton

The poems in Marissa Davis’s latest collection, End of Empire, are personal but their tone is bookish and cold. It appears as though she took a thesaurus into an interrogation room and beat it with a rubber hose to compose these poems, but it’s more likely she picked up the rare words that have been shoehorned in here from her studies as a translator in Paris at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. As is trendy in poetry right now, Davis writes of climate change and takes a stance against capitalism—and even a stance against Western civilization itself. She only takes one potshot at Donald Trump but doesn’t bother to mention him by name, only writing of ‘the ministry of bone spur.’ There is a lot of religion in End of Empire. In fact you could describe Davis as a religious poet. Of the thirty poems here, five of them have Ecclesiastes in the title. Religious poets often pose as prophets, and Davis is no exception here: ‘None of us knew, no one knew/ then. we had been born/ too near the end of days.’ She would fit in well with the THE END IS NEAR sandwich board crowd.

Social justice and climate change poetry became trendy about a decade or so ago, certainly after 2020. Poems about the Greek classics have always been trendy—poets use them as a way to show off their scholarly credentials (and of course they are always offering up their own translations as well). Davis displays her mythology poems like a Hermes handbag, her poem about Demeter and Persephone is something like a call and response poem with stanzas for each on opposite sides of the page with center justified food-for-thought questions: ‘what if the body’s only an overripe fruit/ the heart a flaying rope?’ and ‘what if the heart’s only a dug out land/ the body a rusted shovel?’ Certainly if Homer and Sophocles could be transported to colleges and universities today they would no doubt say, ‘Guys, you are seeing things that aren’t there.’

Gimmickry results when poets try too hard to innovate. Davis writes some of these poems with what she calls ‘fragmentation’ which is really just breaking up lines with large swaths of white page in them; splattering would be a better word. Her poem ‘Ecclesiastes: Storm’ is a four page poem that could fit on the back of a postage stamp without all the splattering of the lines:

This isn’t the only gimmickry Davis resorts to. She begins some lines with colons, there are even double colons. Line breaks and enjambments are scattershot. There are slashes mid word, one poem being titled ‘Dys/morphic Dis/order.’ Some slashes are randomly placed within lines that make them appear as virgules. Then there are the brackets and braces. End of Empire must have been a nightmare for the copyeditor.

Davis sounds her climate change clarion with her poem ‘Spring in the Key of Pyroscene,’ the epigraph reading: June 2023, after the wildfires. June of ’23 was of course when Canada experienced a number of wildfires that burned for months afterward. ‘The solid centuries incinerate, vanish// into dust. & rage to challenge us.’ (Nice subtle rhyme there, one wonders if it was deliberate.) However, the Canadian authorities’ investigation did not turn up climate change as the culprit, but one Brian Paré, age thirty-eight. He was arrested in September and charged with thirteen counts of arson and one count of arson with disregard for human life. In her poem ‘Broke-Down Litany for an Empire’s End’ she makes it clear that Western Civilization is responsible for climate change and destroying the world:

if a bee is dying in a yard in West Virginia,

a bee is dying on a sidewalk in Beirut

if a bee is dying in an Alsatian creek,

a bee is dying on the small quakes of the Mekong River

one apocalypse is water,

one is the warmth that swells it

one apocalypse is that when a levee cracks

the brownblack towns drown first

Themes of apocalypse and pillaging run throughout End of Empire.

There are a few odd and puzzling claims made throughout the collection. In her prose poem ‘The Living Soil’ we get this line: ‘Palestine, long familiar, taught my people the treatment for tear gas;’ As there wasn’t any direct involvement by Palestinians during the American civil rights movements in the mid-twentieth century assisting black Americans, one wonders if this is just some poor choice of metaphor. In an April 2024 article in the British tabloid The Voice, a publication aimed at African and Caribbean diaspora living in the UK, they discuss how black Palestinians face racism from Arab Palestinians: ‘However unfortunately like the rest of the world discrimination and anti-Blackness is a pernicious feature both among Israelis and Palestinians. Some Afro-Palestinians have reported being referred to as ‘abeed’ which is Arabic for slave.’ Davis seems to be writing about a unity that isn’t really there.

Poets, especially academic poets (Davis has an MFA from New York University, graduated from Vanderbilt, attended the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts), love sentimentalizing the working class. ‘forty years my grandpa worked/ Ohio railroads iron tree branching/ from southern hollers sending coal sap’. Hollers is of course the phonetic spelling of hollows, she renders it in this fashion to give herself a down-to-earth appearance writing of manual labor. There’s also bellyaching about layoffs and evil hedge funds, and she writes corporation names without capitals (norfolk southern).

The poems in End of Empire are completely humorless, and Davis seems to be trying to make herself a poetry mascot for anti-capitalism and oppression. Although that doesn’t mean a reader can’t laugh while reading it—her climate chicken-littleism will of course take its place alongside all the other climate change doom and gloom that’s been printed over the years. Like the UN climate scientist quoted in an Associated Press article warning that climate disaster will strike within a decade if something isn’t immediately done—in 1989.

End of Empire
by Marissa Davis, 114 pages
Penguin, $20.00