‘Toward a New Masculinity: Five Poets and the Politics of the Male Body’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
There is so much good poetry right now, and that’s a wonderful and overwhelming and necessary thing. There have also been some good conversations about how we write about poetry: namely, how poetry, if it’s reviewed at all, is pretty much also done in a positive light. The negative poetry review is a rare thing, and that’s good, ultimately. There are so few reviews to begin with, and the practice and reading of poetry so deeply subjective and variable, that a culture of uplift and visibility is far preferable to one of negativity and point scoring (there’s plenty of that in literature as it is).
What I appreciate most about Porochista Khakpour’s essay review in the Virginia Quarterly Review, titled ‘Toward a New Masculinity: Five Poets and the Politics of the Male Body’, is how not only is it an uplift-and-champion sort of review (of five different books no less), but also takes a longer approach to current poetry and finds an important thread to meditate on.
As I read the five male poets here, I tried to imagine a new masculinity. Could we be on the cusp of the sort of male identity we’ve waited for our whole lives? Is virility even a notion we could reframe and redefine? What if the unfairer sex could step out of themselves, too, and just be human beings?
There is more than enough incredible poetry to discover in this essay; on top of that, Khakpour gives us something of herself in the process, and that’s a difficult and important thing to do in poetry reviews.
Welcome to the season of our constant failure, I wrote a friend recently. I wanted to land on a theory of new masculinity, but I have failed. Still, I found that I want to sit down every man in this country and ask that he hear the songs and whispers and the shrieks and coos and the snaps of these poets.
Failure is terribly important, perhaps now more than ever, because there’s still so much work to be done in our poetry and in our lives.