Speaking for Everyone: An Anthology of “We” Poems

 

Speaking For Everyone

An Anthology of “We” Poems

Edited by Eric Greinke

Amazon

ISBN: 9798332054433

181 Pages

Review by Off the Shelf Correspondent Dennis Daly

Use of the third person plural in poetry not only draws the writer away from the overly fashionable confessional style of versifying but adds a sense of universality and transcendence to the wordcraft. The ability to connect the emotions and thoughts of a multitude suggests either deep arrogance (in bad poetry) or collective insight and consciousness (in good poetry). There are obvious pitfalls. For instance, “we” could simply be used as a metaphor for “I.” Or the writer may project his revelations onto others without any real sapience. Eric Greinke’s masterfully edited anthology entitled Speaking For Everyone avoids the pitfalls of this genre and, in his inspired choices of good poetry, bonds together the fears and hopes and commonalities inherent in the nature of mankind.

Greinke’s informative introduction gives his anthology context and gravitas. All the poems included were written in the past 60 years except three by Walt Whitman. According to Greinke, Whitman’s theme of universality foreshadows the other pieces in this book. He’s right. Looking back on the book’s setup, Whitman’s delightful poems do add ballast to the timelessness of Greinke’s poetic ship.

W. D. Ehrhart’s poem The Cradle of Civilization directs us back to our archaeological beginnings. The “we” persona examines the commonalities of birthright that presumably made us what we are. This begs a question: What happened? Ehrhart provides the answer with not a little irony. His “we” has a destructive side, an incomplete evolution of “our” souls. Presumably he cites the recent wars in Iraq. This pessimistic view is part and parcel of the human condition. The poet’s lament ends this way,

How very far we’ve come

that we should come to such a place

not in gratitude and wonder

but with bombs and guns,

that we should not find this odd

that we should so believe our otherness

that we would rather kill and die

than search for common ground.

Alienation takes center stage in Eric Greinke’s piece, Flood Tide. Adrift in a strange and terrible ocean, we swim through the waves of life, experiencing both pleasures and pains, but utterly confounded and beyond comprehension. Are we on course or deluding ourselves? Love comforts, but even that emotion is illusionary. In the end we die alone. Greinke’s poem begins in measured time, in human time,

Another day surges over

the horizon, flotsam

sloshing through the dark

sluice. Loose pages

drift in pools, like

travelers, asleep beneath

the hills. There is no

bowl to contain our

tears, just flooded floors in

a hastily abandoned factory.

In his poem The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel, Doug Holder expands on the themes of isolation and estrangement. Set in the New York tunnel which runs under the East River between Manhattan and Queens, the poem’s objectified man devolves into a blur of fumes and pressure. Despite the continuous traffic the man loses his identity as he gains familiarity. The “we” persona, consoled by its multiplicity, can only observe a fading individual in isolation. Understanding has absented itself. Here is the heart of the poem,

And he

Has lost

His face

Long ago

In a blue

Uniform

And the sun

And the fresh air

Merely throw

Him hints

In our car

We pass him.

Faceless

And a blur

Phantoms behind

Thick plates

Of light-bleached

Glass.

In Here, We Are Gathered, a poem by JudyKronenfeld, death descends onto our reclining faces like a soft pillow. The “we” persona notices each detail right up until the end. Details comfort. So do connections. We love to share images of illness and decrepitude until, well…just until. Then the bottom falls out into the mystery of individuality. The poet perceives the end is near,

But no, not quite there,

not quite then,

for there is esprit de corps

in Shearly Beloved—where everyone’s

hair starts out frizzled, or orange, or white,

and highlights, lowlights,

ombre, sombre drown out the fear;

and even in the infusion center,

there is quiet communication, comparing

of wigs and scarves, hope-woven threads…

Universally experienced alienation perplexes mankind in Paul B. Roth’s piece entitled Strangers. Here the faces of “we” experience the same anxieties, but separately. They individually share their photographs with others, hoping for a reaction or perhaps a tidbit of information. The results, always the same, are melded together in the third person plural. This “we” transcends time and territory. But in the end the self is still a stranger. A good night’s sleep in Roth’s reality never ends. He puts it this way in his prose poem,

We realized we were not waking up, nor were

we hitting ground, as if nothing were below us.

We slept on, unable to awake, unable to

unscramble the millions of neurological micro-

seconds that prevented our eyelids from

opening…

In Hayden Saunier’s Shape Shifting we are all the same under our various coverings, Even this poem moves from second to third person. Thus, our multiplicity is real. Nothing we experience is unique. We are every other person struggling through this life and dealing with the paradoxes embedded in our human condition. The poet says,

Maybe you’ve heard this song,

how the screech owl sounds

like a horse’s whinny

slight wind shifting through a sycamore

precisely like another

sleep-scented body shifting in its sleep

how those glugs and whirrs

from the amphibious

crowd at marsh and creek

match the murmurs and leaps

of your own underwater heart.

Every single thing’s

like every other single thing…

Like Greinke’s magnificent book we are all anthologized through history, each of us edited as a reminder to our fellow homo-sapiens to keep it going, to find life’s final destiny. And, yes, we are all in this together.