Singularity: Poems

At the heart of Glazner's poetry lies an effort to take pieces of language from marketing lingo, academese and technobabble and recombine them into something meaningfully whole. Glazner (whose first collection, From the Iron Chair, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1991) works often with ""words made of smoke,"" the matter of the ""unreadable, four-color features"" on the back of a businessman's newspaper. Brand names occupy a stratum of his consciousness: ""But driving, I'd meet the usual lane of grimaces/ remembering what I was, and the signs/ would have me, Firestone, Sun West,/ Tastee Freeze."" But he consistently resists the deadening force of this ""show of gloss"": ""It's only dailiness./ It's just the way the hours go, numbed/ and building up, the way one trickle/ from the eaves has gone on/ freezing itself back for days."" There is a kind of pedantic romanticism suggested in these poems, along with discouragement. Behind the television gaze of late-20th century life is a focus on a condition he observes in a college student he meets: an ""almost invisible implosion of suffering."" By paying intelligent attention to his surroundings, Glazner successfully converts the dross of the quotidian, including the media, into poetry. He asks: ""Isn't it all TV by now,/ the world made over as a thing/ you can eat with your eyes, calling you/ to the channel selector, the Heineken,/ the sweet, hard wax for your car?"" Glazner's response is to write poems you can eat with your mind. (Nov.)