Mr. Harmon Returns from One Place to Another
Jen Currin’s Hagiography
March 04, 2010
Even the examples of metaphor that you learn as a kid in school aren't taken from real poems; they were written by the textbook writers. But Currin's book uses it. In every single line.
Each tree had to be thanked
so I set to my task.
Some of the spirits were eating candy,
some had apocalyptic faces.
They asked after my bags,
if my brother had given me vitamins.
But the book doesn't pretend to tradition at all. It's unmistakably of this century. Here's what Currin says about her approach to gender in Hagiography:
Relationships are such a big school, they're such a big part of how we learn. It's a big part of what I write about. I love women, so those are the relationships I'm writing about, so the sexual content in my poems will usually be lesbian or queer. Sometimes not; I mean, I'm interested in having other voices, so there's poems in there where people are referred to as 'husband' or 'husband/wife' and that's interesting to me too, but that's also queer.
Her fluidity with gender is really interesting to me. It's not like, say, some of Mark Doty's poems, in which it's "accessible" to straight audiences because it stays vague about gender. It's specific, but specific in lots of different ways.
