She’s Ahsahta’s controversial editor; we often forget Janet Holmes is also a poet of remarkable talent. Her work belongs in our ongoing discussion of image and poetry.
Her 1999 book, The Green Tuxedo uses obituaries, slides, lists, and a number of other devices that would easily adapt to material format. The first piece in the section "Time Savers" is the last typical poem the reader will encounter for many pages. It begins:
"None of us know how to do the tidying-up one does
when somebody dies: family of slow learners, too lucky
and longer-lived than most. We went through
what we hoped were the motions,
holding something high: What about this?
Do you want it? (1)
What follows is the clutter of a lifetime, suddenly dumped out of its shoebox: lists, obituaries, insurance forms, address books, business cards, day timer entries, slides, clippings from the newspaper, and a host of other ephemera of daily life. It's a collection of the things we rarely pay much attention to. After one of us has moved on, however -- whether to another city or to the final rest - these innocuous slips of paper suddenly rise to the surface of our consciousness. Boring, informative, they remain as witness to the particulars of our lives.
In The Green Tuxedo Holmes uses these scraps to understand the father she hardly knew in life. Exploring them is an extraordinary journey for both the poet and her readers.
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If you are interested in Holmes' books, check out The Physicist at the Mall (winner of the 1994 Anhinga Poetry Prize), The Green Tuxedo (winner of the 1999 Ernst Sandeen Prize in Poetry) and 2001's Pablo Neruda Award first prize Humanophone.
- Holmes, Janet. The Green Tuxedo. Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press. 1999. 31
For more information related to image in poetry, please visit the articles on Sugartown.
For an article on poetry with image, please investigate Journal: The Short Life and Mysterious Death of Amy Zoe Mason.
