“Filled with grit, integrity, a little blasphemy, and all kinds of hope. Favorite line—”i’m still a romantic / i guess the quota for bullshit / is full up / for the day.” Go get a copy!”—Dave Newman, author of Better Than The Best American Poetry, She Throws Herself Forward To Stop The Fall & others
“There comes a time in life when a writer begins to reflect on the work she’s done in this world. Enter Michele McDannold and her Collected Poems 2005-2025. This is a massive collection of poetry worth owning because no one tells you exactly how it is like McDannold. The poems are relatable, soul-crushing, painfully honest, and more on the side of maudlin than many dare to go. The work is both in your face and quiet. This collection is an inside look at what it means to be human in these dark times, what it feels like to be perpetually in motion both mentally and physically, and still, somehow, want to get up every day and do it again. There is love in here—sometimes sweet, but mostly jaded. It is a collection to keep by the bedside to remind yourself that it is okay to use your voice, to speak when others tell you to be quiet, and to understand that life is hard for all of us. “Do not become the poem/she will treat you/ as an open wound/in a salt factory,” this is what Michele McDannold speaks to, what she has spent her life doing not only for herself, but for others. She gives a voice to her own struggles and pain and paves the way for the rest of us.”—Aleathia Drehmer, author of Little Graveyards (Roadside Press)
“There is a point if a poet digs deep enough that the personal becomes universal. By writing her way across this country and deep into herself, Michele McDannold is brave enough to reach that point. From love, loss, longing, from words slicing to the heart of the matter, to volumes hidden in an awkward pause, these poems remind us what it feels like to be human. Fleeting moments of quiet contemplation stir seismic eruptions of eternity. Small towns can break your heart quicker than cities. Just as one line from this poet can break your heart, “you… look at me like you’re seeing yesterday.”
“These poems make a great companion on a plane, train, or a night of insomnia. You will hear a whisper turn into wind. As Michele writes in The Poets: “They are too loud, yammering and bullshitting, poeticizing, but when they are gone, when it is quiet, I am empty.” They say still waters run the deepest. Michele is one of the most tranquil poets I know, still enough that the blue returns to the waters reflecting the sky where the personal becomes the universal. She is calm, gentle, a maternal force in the poetry scene, but when she reads her work she is blunt as any man, and as much a force of nature as any goddess of poetry.”–Westley Heine, author of Busking Blues and others
“In the middle of all the fucked-up things going on in this crazy fucking world, Michele McDannold is still fighting to keep love and hope alive, in her own way, by writing poetry that turns the fuckery into poems of observation and prayer. You can hear the weariness between each line. Smell the hot, moist breath on the desperate primal screams of “why am I the only one that sees this shit?” The cries of “this is fucked. Let’s do something.” The prayers born of a stubborn refusal to give up on love, no matter how many times it has left us bloody and raw.”(from the foreword; By Plane, Train or Coincidence)–Dan Denton, author of $100-A-Week Motel
“Michele McDannold is a literary rebel and this irreverent, delicious book, her best yet, is proof. McDannold has a way of stripping everything down to its essentials, leaving the reader sated, and yet with a strange sense of longing. “i guess/that’ll have to/be enough” the poet says in the last line of the final poem of this fine collection. Indeed.”–Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Erotic, New & Selected, poetry editor, Cultural Daily
“Michele McDannold’s By Plane, Train, or Coincidence is a book that takes you to L.A. and lets you get lost in the gritty, quiet moments of a big city. She dials in on what happens to the mind in the desert, how all that space is damaging to the heart and mind if you are from somewhere in the Midwest. It’s a book about what happens when a heart sets itself free, gets knocked around, and goes home to the memories of what love used to look like. There is a lot of emotion and raw views about being in love in McDannold’s collection, but you’ll have to pick through the shadows and candor to find it. When you do, it will hit you squarely in the jaw.”–Aleathia Drehmer, author of Running Red Lights (Gutter Snob Books)
“If you re looking to explore your deepest dreams, Michele McDannold can walk you through the jungle they hide in. She unwinds the truth of the day’s ragged edge, while allowing the magic of the good night to breathe deep one last time. McDannold truly leads the life of a seasoned writer. She knows things, she shares them here. Her latest book By Plane, Train or Coincidence. I like it. Lots.”–Bill Gainer, A True Story
“McDannold’s mastery of language thrives raw and unsparing in By Plane, Train or Coincidence…lines living in “a city that gnaws on itself.” With pathos, humor, and her driving fearlessness she transforms any landscape into languid rhythms of fertile hauntings. She is a phenomenon, a fierce visionary. Get a copy of anything she writes!”–Meg Tuite, author of White Van
“Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of Days is the kind of perfect art that should be read aloud over a Walmart PA system as it begins to burn down.”–Bud Smith, author of Tollbooth
“So much poetry…classic poetry, academic poetry, award winning poetry, small press poetry…is pure shit. I read it and dismiss it and it leaves my brain, thankfully. Michele McDannold’s poetry is not shit. It does not leave my brain, thankfully. I am constipated with Michele McDannold’s lines and I am very glad. Here’s to the ones who are not cool, who don’t try to be cool, who just write their fucking truth line by fucking line in syllables that sing to the sky.”–Misti Rainwater-Lites, poet
“Michele McDannold does not waste a lot of time with fancy metaphors and pretty literary things. She builds straight to the punch, and she doesn’t hit like a girl. This is poetry as it should be. Not covered up and shrouded in riddles. Not poeticizing about flowers and Spring. This is truth. This is a punch straight to the gut.”–Michael Grover, poetry editor of Red Fez Publications
Independent, but not alone by Westley Heine
Michele McDannold, Roadside Press, GutterSnob Books, and her latest book of poetry By Plane, Train, or Coincidence.
I have come to realize that no one is going to save us. We have to save ourselves. I was never charmed by religion or politics, but Hollywood has chewed me up and spit me out twice. Also, I’ve spent years sending my writing to what’s left of the big publishing houses in New York. They are merging or crumbling, and refusing to take chances just like the record industry did after illegal downloading. Now big publishers are only interested in celebrity memoirs, political tell-all books, cookbooks, and the occasional kids book.
Despite the thousands of channels the truth still isn’t on TV. It’s not even in the news because they too compete as a form of entertainment. The truth isn’t in pop music. For me it’s at the blues jams in Chicago and Memphis, or in the garage band playing in backyards and dive bars. The truth can be heard at your local open mic from that poet, rapper, or singer songwriter. If your community doesn’t have an open mic than start one yourself. Your neighbors are wise.
I have come to realize that there are no proper channels, because what is left of the proper channels don’t want us. They don’t want the truth only sex appeal and distraction. As artists we have to do it ourselves. I know the value of DIY punk art. I know that punk rock is folk art. That folk music is totally punk rock despite the stylistic difference. I know that real art comes from the people not from the streaming services. Young people know this instinctively every generation start doing their own thing. The counter-culture has always been there. It’s a thin almost invisible line that has kept American culture from becoming a plastic dystopia. Someone has to tell the stories of the poor. Someone has to help us relate about how fucked up life can be. Someone has to say the wrong thing the ugly thing to remind us that the right to do so protects us all despite that it may be triggering or more offensive than sticks and stones.
How can an artist be both sensitive and tough? Poet Michele McDannold is a great example. In her latest collection By Plane, Train, or Coincidence the poems come out of thoughtful still moments but suddenly scream with angst of the recent years, of restless travel, and of heartbreak. These poems will sneak up on you and sucker punch you. She knows that life, real life, is not on the screen but out there on road, in the mountains, or at the shore. Life is to be lived. Roll the dice. Don’t just go through the motions. That it’s very possible to leave your hometown but never forget where you’re from. She knows when the muse is visiting and how to catch those moments like lighting in a jar.
Michele also knows the frustration of any poet who puts their work out in public has to suffer clichéd career advice. Why aren’t you on Tic Tock? As if we have to explain that what we have to say isn’t for the short attention span. In her new book she has a poem called Friendly Advice that reads, “Find another way to make money. Invent new ways to stalk your lover. Start a diet fad. Marry a rich man. Kill’em with your good looks and big tits. Don’t take a penny. Dig graves for a living. With your fierce competitive attitude sell, sell, sell. Aim high. Shoot low. Find an airfield saturated in hair spray. Tell the whole world about the mood you’re in. In other words lie, lie, lie.” Such free advice costs people their souls. Some of us don’t want to lie. Get those filters off my face. Perfection is boring. We want to be our real selves not the idealized digital footprint. I can’t believe we have to keep saying this but we do. It’s important that we do.
In an earlier volume Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of Days there is a poem called “Nothing to Lose (or Freedom)” where she writes: “I will keep on gathering great poems, sharing the news about great poets, new ones, old ones, killer ones, fucky ones, we’ll call it the ‘didn’t make it to twitter because it had too much character’ book. I want to drive down the great river road. I want a reading right now in bars, bookstores, and bowling alleys. I want to read/scream at bikers and rednecks, housewives and whores. I hope they throw stuff and spit on me, chase me out to the car yelling ‘We don’t like your kind round here,’ but they will secretly worship me and my freedom and my hoard of poets from the suburbs, the city, the farm. They’re multiplying like gremlins… I want them all (not to make them famous) to make them infamous. To spread their disease of think, of cut out the bullshit, and get to the point. I want America in her glazed over Red Bull eyes to really wake the fuck up.”
As I’ve traveled across this country I’ve learned that it takes time but eventually you will find your people. Those you can conspire with. I am lucky to have found Michele and a legion of underground writers who like rats are patiently chewing at the support beams of the brainwash machine. I am proud to be one of her “multiplying gremlins,” one of her not famous but infamous poets. Michele has created a platform where we can express ourselves without compromise. Take a look. And if you don’t like it, write your own book and show us how it’s done. Because like I said we can only save ourselves.
“As with anything in the arts, it’s time that tests the staying power of a body of work. Michele McDannold’s Collected Poems (2005–2025) spans 20 years and 294 pages, compiling Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of Days, By Plane, Train or Coincidence, and nearly 75 pages of previously uncollected “bonus tracks.”
“From the first pages, it’s clear you’re in the hands of someone who has something to say—and knows how to say it. McDannold sees clearly into a broken world, crafting words that cut to the bone, exposing raw beauty and pain while offering needed truth for lost and aching souls.
“She writes of the ordinary and extraordinary—country songs with jack & coke, strangely beautiful heartache, caged animals set free but unwilling to leave. Her words strike like flint, sparks illuminating the dark recesses of the soul. There are tales of kings and empires, trailers and metal shacks, odes to love, snakes, and lips—timeless portraits of the agonizing, entrancing beauty of this life-sentence we all share.
“These are poetic journeys down dark paths that can’t be refused. Strap in.”–Steven Meloan, Author of St. James Infirmary and others
50: Dear Baby Jesus & other poems (a review) by Dan Denton
I have said and written this statement many times over the years: Michele McDannold is my favorite living poet. And that remains true today. Long before Michele ever asked me to be a featured reader at one of her literary festivals, and way before she helped edit my first novel, or published my next two, I met Michele at a poetry reading cancer benefit. She read poems that got my attention that day. She was the first real poet that I’d met that was also from the cornfields of Illinois, and she used language that would make a trucker blush. I immediately wanted to be her friend, and to find and read more of her poetry.
Since that fateful meeting, Michele has become one of the biggest champions of my work, and has done everything she can possibly do to get it attention. I tell her often that I owe her for everything, for all my success as a writer, and there is a lot of truth to that (I owe others credit, too.) She’s become one of my close friends and a trusted confidant, and I hope to champion her work half as much as she has mine.
Unfortunately, most of the time lately, this is the kind of friend that I am. This small pocket-sized book of hers that I’m telling you about isn’t even available to buy anymore. It was limited run and it’s sold out. I’m the kind of friend that reviews a book that no one can buy.
The thing that makes Michele McDannold (pronounced Mi-shell Mick-dan-old) my favorite living poet is that she often says the things most are scared to. She writes good poetry, and writes about the roughest things in life with straightforward courage that most tough guy grit-lit dudes could never muster, and along the way she’ll make you laugh, make you shake your head in disgust and wonderment, and she’ll make you mad, sad, happy and sometimes her poems will make you cry.
In her book 50: Dear Baby Jesus & Other Poems, a small book with seven poems, Michele pulls off all of those feels plus some. She does that with seven fucking poems. That’s master level craftsmanship in my opinion.
The book starts with Dear Baby Jesus, a personal favorite poem of mine. It opens “Thank you for the best childhood ever/for the nicely manicured lawns/dutifully tended to every Sunday/after church…” and it ends fittingly with the poem america, great again whose last lines state “…somewhere/ baby jesus is weeping.”
Dear Baby Jesus gives thanks and credit to the son of God for racism, street violence, and says, “…but, wait…/I have more rights to my guns/than my own body!!/sweet baby jesus/thank you…”
Monkey Bars, a poem about “shit fuck.” A poem that takes you from a schoolyard through a job at a slaughterhouse and ends “…I hate to hear others say it sounds cheap,/‘cause baby,/it comes at a price.”
The first two poems will make you laugh, and make you perhaps angry and empathetic, but the third poem, And now she goes by some other name, a poem about losing a childhood friend to mental health, trauma and addiction, which is unfortunately a too common story in the Midwest, this poem will flat out break your heart.
Nothing to Lose (or Freedom) is a long love poem to the anarchist road poets, “…the ‘i’m okay—you’re okay’ is a dead hippie lie…” and “…get the fuck/OUT/out of your house/and stick a fist up their ass for doing this…” proves my point about Michele saying the things others are afraid to.
The final two poems, you enjoy the privilege of and america, great again both are straight left cross knock out punches to the white patriarchy and the evil bullshit it has rendered upon these United States. Both poems will shock you, possibly make you laugh, and they’ll definitely make you shake your head.
I wish that you could buy and read this book, and I’m sorry for being late to tell you about it.
I can maybe find redemption in passing this information on to you now. These poems and many more will appear in her forthcoming large book, “Collected Poems 2005-2025.” The pre-order link just went up in the last week, so this time I’m way early in telling you that there is a book coming that I know you’ll enjoy.
Richard Modiano reviews Collected Poems 2005-2025 by Michele McDannold
McDannold, Michele (2025). Collected Poems 2005-2025 (Poetry Collection) Roadside Press 279p. $20.00 (Paperback)
Michele McDannold’s Collected Poems 2005–2025 is a bruising, beautiful chronicle of two decades lived on the raw nerve of experience. The voice here is equal parts survivor, witness, and outlaw philosopher—one who has been scorched by the world’s indifference yet still refuses to turn away from its aching humanity.
From the early, hard-living urgency of pieces like “not recommended” and “monkey bars,” McDannold declares her allegiance to a poetics that bleeds and sweats rather than postures. “This poetry is not recommended for the high-brow sissified punk bitches,” she writes, and she means it. The poems reject the polite sanitization of language and experience in favor of a fiercely embodied truth: “we’ve got balls in our face and dirt in our shoes hot shit red blood cum stains on the inside pocket.” It’s an outlaw manifesto, one that echoes the rough-edged honesty of Bukowski and the moral reckoning of Diane di Prima.
Yet beneath the bravado and blue-collar grit, there’s a tenderness that keeps surfacing—often quietly, almost by accident. In “any day now” and “it’s not so bad,” the poet turns her gaze to the broken ordinary: the woman on the back steps without electricity, the extension cord looping over her head, the rabbits in the trash-lot cage. McDannold doesn’t romanticize these lives; she gives them their full measure of exhaustion and endurance. Her empathy isn’t sentimental—it’s rooted in recognition.
The West Coast Notebook series anchors the middle of the collection, chronicling McDannold’s move through Los Angeles and the mythic edge of America with the eye of a poet who has seen the whole ride from the ground up. These pieces—half travelogue, half elegy—trace a country fraying at its seams: “studies show even the helicopters are in on it.” Here, her humor turns darkly satirical, her tone wry and wise: “oh you writer people, aren’t you so cute with your angst & rebellion.” The “West Coast” poems record the geography of the lost—addicts, poets, and other dreamers trying to make rent and meaning in the same breath.
The later poems grow more introspective, haunted by love’s aftermath and the small devastations of aging. In “spacetime continuum for dummies,” memory collapses into grief with the disarming simplicity of someone too tired to lie anymore: “tick tick tick / in the morning we did not say goodbye.” Pieces like “simple question” and “the science of breaking up” show McDannold refining her raw voice into something crystalline and devastating.
The Prose Poems section — particularly “Dear Raving Lunatic” and “String Theory” –reveals another layer of her craft: surreal, expansive meditations where her working-class lyricism meets speculative metaphysics. Her prose is musical and jagged, filled with strange humor and melancholy wisdom.
Throughout, McDannold’s language is fearless. She writes with a directness that feels both confrontational and cleansing, like she’s trying to scrape the truth clean of artifice. There’s sex, madness, poverty, and longing — but always, always, an undercurrent of resilience.
Collected Poems 2005–2025 is not an easy book, nor should it be. It is a living document of a poet unafraid to look into the abyss and still find a way to laugh, love, and write it down. It belongs on the same shelf as Wanda Coleman, Lyn Lifshin, and Charles Bukowski — not as imitation, but as continuation.
Michele McDannold has written the kind of book that reminds us what poetry is for: to name the mess, to survive it, and to make something wild and human from the wreckage.
Are You Ready?: Alan Catlin reviews Michele McDannold’s Collected Poems 2005-2025
Michele McDannold, Collected Poems 2005-2025, 2025 Roadside Press. 294 pages $20-
As I began reading this substantial volume of hard-hitting, direct to your bloodstream poems, I could almost hear that country and western dude who used to yell, “Are you ready for some football?!” in the background. After a while, I learned that mute is a wonderful invention, and watching football isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (that’s another story, for another place) but the idea is here, “Are you ready for some smashmouth, in your face Action?!” Well, what this book needs is someone to yell, “Are you ready for some Poetry??!!” yelled as if you were at some spoken words festival with a full accompaniment of jazz men in the background, a chorus of soul sisters for voice enhancements and a huge spotlight to focus intently on the reader. Ok, yes, I exaggerate, Michele doesn’t need the accompaniment as she does fine all by herself on the page or in front of a mic as we learn on page 2,
this poetry is not recommended
for the young or bright-eyed
not recommended
for those weak in the stomach
or head
this poetry is not recommended
for the high-brow
sissified
punk bitches
who would turn a phrase
just to make you feel stupid
poetry is not recommended (period)
if you want to bury your head in the sand
and pretend the world is dying under corruption
we have a voice
(from “not recommended”)
What this poetry is for is to tell it like it is, is writing from the heart, the body, the deepest parts of soul. It’s no bullshit poetry. We need more of that.
REVIEW by a.m. stein: By Plane, Train or Coincidence by Michele McDannold
Review of Michele McDannold’s By Plane, Train, or Coincidence.
“Can you tell me where the yellow brick road goes
when unaccompanied
by red sequined shoes?”
–from “cityscapes while sitting on a cold, cold stone”
Reading Michele McDannold’s latest poetry collection, By Plane, Train or
Coincidence (on the title page, on my personal, signed, copy McDannold has added “or
any means necessary”—which is also the revolutionary’s credo) I am reminded of an
interview I conducted years ago with a then prominent poet who, like McDannold, came
from economic disadvantage and whose poetry, like McDannold’s poetry, carries the
born-into-disadvantage person’s outraged sense of fairness and unfairness, justice and
injustice. “Find another way to make money / invent new ways to stalk your lover / start a
diet fad / marry a rich man / kill em with your good looks and big tits / don’t take a penny
/ dig graves for a living / with your fierce competitive attitude / sell, sell, sell / aim high /
shoot low / find an airfield saturated in hair spray / tell the whole world / about the mood
you’re in / in other words / lie, lie, lie” writes McDannold in “Friendly Advice”. This is the
outrage of the disadvantaged witnessing the corruptions that create cultural success.
(Another reviewer might prefer to call it McDannold’s “comedy”.) This is the fire out
from which dance the sparks of McDannold’s poems. (Another reviewer might prefer to
call it McDannold’s “wound”.) “Hold on only / to what’s / important,” writes McDannold
elsewhere. “Love you.” By which she means yourself.
In that same long-ago interview the (then) prominent poet also insisted she had
formally “married” her “muse,” when she was 18 years old, in a no-kidding, third-eye-
wide, sacred-ceremony conducted, impromptu, in a bus terminal, at 2 a.m., in San Jose,
California, where the mystic opportunity, in the form of mystic signs and visions, seemed
to be presenting itself. “There was a service. I made vows,” the poet declared. One does
not ask more detail from such an anecdote. At least I did not. These private affairs of the
spirit are the real stuff of our human lives and language descriptors of their
manifestations tend to diminish, rather than augment, their verity and also to open the
doors for mockery. I do wonder, however, given the intensity and devotion with which
McDannold attends every line of her poetry, has any such experience as “mystic
marriage” ever befallen her? It would not surprise me. McDannold’s poetry, whatever
else it may be communicating at any given time, possesses that constancy of ferocity
which is the mark of the zealot. “God loves the gamblers,” the Sufi mystic Rumi wrote
somewhere. “Gamble everything for love, if you’re a true human being. / If not, leave
this gathering.”
(By “love,” Rumi meant “poetry.” In mystic lexicon the words are generally
interchangeable.)
In, “the idea,” when McDannold writes,
“I forgot how to write
& remembered it is just letters
to the best in us willing to listen &
when there’s no one there
aren’t we forced then
to learn the most”
she is revealing precisely how such a gambler thinks. When you are down to your last
penny, your very last penny, bet that one too. McDannold is a gambling poet. There is a
lot riding on her every line. They tremble with what they are upholding. All
McDannold’s lived experience, to the moment of the composition, seems to be riding
upon each line. Another reviewer might call this trembling suspension McDannold’s
“poet craft.” Another reviewer might even surmise a cautious, fastidious, poet behind the
poems. I see fever and something like desperation. I see Rumi’s gambler. I see someone
willing to bet it all on just one more poem. The next one. The one that had been waiting,
all the while, on the purity of our faith, to make its glorious appearance.
McDannold herself says, in “the science of breaking up”: “A worked-over poem can
be good / but can it be honest.”
Notice there is no question mark. For McDannold (at least unconsciously) the
question is rhetorical.
Commenting on a romantic disaster I had recently endured, a poet friend dryly
observed I should have told my prospective romantic partner I was already spoken for.
“A poet’s primary relationship is with their poetry. Between the inspired artist and their
chosen art, a wedding has already taken place. Perhaps even before birth. In the other
place,” my pedantic friend clarified.
I didn’t deny this observation when my friend made it and I don’t deny it now.
Poetry fills the space in me which for many others is filled by romantic love. I rush to say
it does not fill the space which is filled by sexual congress but sexual congress is not
love, is it? Sexual congress is not even, always, intimate. Poetry, though, is every bit as
deep and consuming and rewarding as romantic love and for that reason, those who are
inhabited by poetry may struggle to find room in themselves for the more traditional sorts
of romantic relationships (boy meets boy, girl meets girl, and so on) so deeply prized and
commended in our culture. The romance of life itself, the romance of language, the
romance of inspiration and of ideas…those become “the beloved”…fair warning to those
foolish enough to fall in love with a poet…
Nonetheless, a number of the poems in McDannold’s collection are (or seem to
be) girl-boy love poems, or poems of yearning for that girl-boy love. But are they, really?
In “what a fucking life, right?” McDannold writes, “Reduced to the / communications /
over wires / across time zones // I cannot find / the map / that says // you / are / here.”
Is this a poem about a human lover gone far away? Out of reach? Too far to
touch? It seems so, superficially. But really, isn’t it a poem about an understanding gone
so far from one’s pen? Isn’t it a poem written in longing for a muse? “Where is the muse
of my poetry?” the poet is asking. Does the poet realize this? Whether the poet does or
does not realize, does not matter, presumably. Only what the poem realizes, matters. That
is how the most estimable poetry is written. Probably, this is how McDannold’s most
estimable poems are written. With the poet formulating earthly matters and the poem
revealing spiritual ways. (“watched a flower slowly bloom / from the front porch / it takes
a long time /it’s still not done / i felt, once again, / the blooming of heartache / surround
my lungs / and settle in. // it takes a long time / it’s still not done.”) This is called synergy
in the board rooms but in poetry it is pure scintillation—if and when one is lucky enough
to stumble upon it. Michele’s love poems meander, idly, flow on, idly, then suddenly
tumble into lyrical turbulence, same as a meandering river flows to the lip of a falls then
tumbles suddenly over.
“the filthiness comes so very
naturally
inside his mind
and manifests via text
she is the only thing that is bad about me
we’re so good at delusions”
declares the narrator in the opening six lines of, “thanks for finishing it for me.”
Meandering, as I said, river-like, the poem flows to the ledge of a falls than, whoops,
takes a sudden plunge into the psychological turbulence, the underwater language (the
dream language) of “we’re so good at delusions.” One could almost suggest the meandering
ways of the river had been a wile meant to help realize maximum psychic impact from
sudden tumble over the falls. A neat trick of crafting, if only one could craft it over and
over.
Here is a truism courtesy of the spiritual masters who brought us the poetry of
Rilke and whom Rilke called his “angels.” (“We are not angels, but we are bound to be,”
one messenger told him.) The insight of a poem, when the poem has been written by a
“real” poet, is inevitably more acute than the insight of the “real” poet who writes it.
Since the poem is being emptied onto the page from the dark of the unconscious. Since
the knowing of the poem arises, in a sense, from the unknowing of the poet.
This is the understanding one comes to in reading McDannold’s poems. They are
fighting to emerge from unconsciousness. They still have one toe in that deep, dark pool.
As the poet Robert Bly once remarked of the poems of someone or other, “they are still
wet with birth fluids.” They are struggling to extricate themselves from chaos. They are
born in chains so the poet can unchain them. In “Curious Things,” McDannold writes, “I
find curious connections / in strings / words / the dog / licking his paws / the way his
head moves / bugs / these things make me / love / these things make me / sick.”
McDannold writes that she “finds” something behind these connections. Things
that make her “love,” things that make her “sick.” What she could also say is that she
“feels” something behind these connections and what she feels are the deeper connections
being forged by her own unconscious that will create the poetry (which IS the “love”, or
which IS the “sick,”) the poet must offer the world. The deepest of what there is in the
poet to offer. Their innermost experience. That is what a poet does. If need be, to their
dying breath. They feel their way to the poem that is trying to be written. That is what
McDannold is doing every time she lifts her pen and drops its point on the page of her
notebook. She is feeling her way to the poem that wants to be written.) “Find limits by
pushing past” McDannold writes. Searching for “the kiss that linger[s] longer than it
lasts,” McDannold writes—a perfect description of the poem as captured
inspiration—caged bird—time’s body…
“There is a home in the heart of every traveler,” writes McDannold. Poetry is
that home for McDannold. A strange sort of domicile, poetry, with its shifting
foundations, and its trap doors falling open beneath one’s feet. But, at least the roof’s
been blown off, so you can see the stars at night, the shifting cloud formations by day.
“If I told you,” writes McDannold,
“you wouldn’t believe me,
so I just poem it.”