Ange Mlinko, Poetry Foundation
Another quickie but with some substance to entertain you, I hope.
This month's Poetry magazine arrived some days ago, and in it three poems by Ange Mlinko are featured, including one called "Securitization," which on first blush I thought I probably would not like, but after a first reading I decided I like a lot.
In reviewing it, I thought I might pass on to you some of the criteria I bring to my own criticism of a poem, if for no other reason than to disclose them, but also, perhaps, to spark a conversation about them.
"Securitization" is a hot word in the frozen financial markets nowadays, and so Mlinko has accomplished something not many poets can do: Publish a poem that is current with the news over a traditional publication timeline that almost guarantees datedness because of the rapidity of today's news cycles.
Securitization refers to a practice of giant financial companies that have caused the nation's current crisis in worldwide money markets that threatens to make worse an economic slowdown that could rival the Great Depression of the 1930s. The practice bundles financial products like mortgages and commercial-property leases into securities that are then traded on financial markets as if they were stock in a single company.
The value of a single company's stock is at least as transparent as its trading price that day in the world's money markets.
The trouble with securitization, however, is the value of the security depends on the ability of the mortgage payer whose mortgage is bundled inside it to make his or her payments. When they cannot, the financial product inside the traded security loses value that is not transparent to a buyer or seller in the securities marketplace.
So the buyers don't buy, and the sellers can't sell.
All of this financial stuff actually is wrapped into the simple words Mlinko uses to tell the story of her poem. And her poem, as good poems do, actually gets to being about love and a marriage, death and art, as well as the mortgage that starts it off.
And you can understand all that upon first reading -- which is an important criterion for me in reading any poem. I really don't have much time for "difficulty" in poetry, and I suspect not many readers have much more time for it than I.
But I could be wrong about that. I invite you to tell me whether I am.
Mlinko writes:
"In someone's distant algorithm
your mortgage was bundled to another's
-- hedged --
and stamped a new "security."
Now, that's not the usual language of American poetry today, and yet it works: rhythmically, and as imagery (if you have any knowledge of financial trading), and narratively in terms of having meaning for an interested reader who wants to be carried into the story Mlinko wants to tell. Those three criteria are also baggage I bring to my criticism of poetry.
"Securitization" is only one of three Mlinko poems that Poetry has published in its December issue. One I don't get at all, and so can say I don't like it. The other, called "Year Round," I like a lot.
In it, Mlinko writes: "On the anniversary of our country/ we throw dynamite at the air/ we build into."
That's poetic observation, to my mind. It has power to move the reader to an emotional response because it is actually what we do: Every Fourth of July, when you think about it -- to celebrate our "year-round' joy of living free.
You'll see me use these same criteria when I review Michael J. Henry's new book of poems, "No Stranger Than My Own," in a few days. Henry is the director of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. The organization is involved in teaching people how to write good poetry so the director's poems are of interest to his readers on many levels, as poems should be.
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