Check out my photograph, Erqi, in GUD Issue 6.

Sound, sentence structure, and rapid-fire images combine to make Jane Augustine‘s CBGB’s Claustrophobic in the current issue of Marsh Hawk Review a subject-appropriate assault on the senses. Percussive consonants dominate, though a few more elided words might have heightened this effect.  Verbs, nouns, and prepositional phrases pile up against each other without commas to slow them down, while periods continue to divide sentence, providing the only respite while preventing it from sliding into smoothness. Images flash from audience to stage to audience and on to something more symbolic.

Overall, then, the poem does not tell us about CBGB’s but, rather, transports us there. Even if we are not prone to claustrophobia, we can experience it through these lines. I only wish Augustine had not brought it to a stop on the unnecessary and cliché line, “Hammers it home.” We know this is what the music and the club do because we have lived it through the last several lines. Poetry need not sum itself up, least of all in ways that make the end less expressive than the rest.

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1. Progress, Change, Poetics

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