In his classic essay “Metaphor As Mistake,” Louisiana writer Walker Percy tells the story of a boy and his father on a hunting trip in Alabama. A bird swoops into their path. It “flew as swift and straight as an arrow, then all of a sudden folded his wings and dropped like a stone into the woods.” The guide who has accompanied them tells the boy that the bird is called a blue dollar hawk. Later, when the two are alone, the boy’s father tells him, no, that wasn’t quite right–it’s actually a blue darter hawk. Percy builds his essay around the idea that such misstatements convey a powerful, though unintentional, poetry.
Alysha Potente’s collection of poems HEART EXPRESSIONS has at least one such moment. The poem “Sinking Reality” includes the line “Sunlight creeps in, leaking within a minuet space between slated blinds.” This is most likely a typo. “Minute,” meaning “tiny,” seems a more apt descriptor for the bit of air between blinds. Yet who among us has not seen dust motes slow-dancing in such sunbeams? “Minuet,” then, could be a metaphor by mistake. (There are actually two mistakes, as “slated” should be “slatted”–unless the blinds were expected to be there, and thus served as unwitting spectators of the late-afternoon beauty?)
Other instances of language play feel more intentional, such as, “She’s casting sails that extend in the wind of a versatile boat.” Good internal rhyme. And the compressed passion of the line “Your blue eyes seep depth” threatens to erupt like the ocean itself. Potente’s poems take straightforward moments–a gaze at the night sky, a look between lovers–and put them on slo-mo, imbuing them with a significance unnoticeable at normal speed. Paired with her mostly excellent wordplay (there are infelicities, such as, “He ain’t a rarity among millions more. / Perhaps he will also open your car door.”), the poems form a worthy collection. At the end of the book are three prose chapters–”History of English Poetry”; “Types of Poetry”; and “How to Write Poetry Analytically”–that are wholly unnecessary. Leave stuff like that to the academicians, Alysha. Keep making your art.
Straightforward but not simple, Alysha Potente’s poems in her collection, HEART EXPRESSIONS, take everyday situations and imbue them with elegance.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader