Kim Addonizio is one of the most popular contemporary poets in America, appealing to the academic poetry world and the indie/outsiders. She occasionally teaches poetry workshops, but hasn’t allowed herself to get sucked into full-time faculty position. You might find her at a posh literary gathering at AWP, or drinking shots in a dive bar sitting in with the band playing blues harmonica. This reflects in her poetry, which has always been grounded in basic Americana English while celebrating the I of lyric poetry.
The poem “My Opera”—which could be translated as “my work” while also the “what if” conceit of an imaginary opera she might write, contains maybe the best description of her writing, in this excerpt, with the sentence starting in the title: “My Opera”
takes place in a dive bar, it’s all drunken recitative,
okay maybe an aria sung by a feral kitten,
one by a skittish donkey, maybe one without words
just the sounds of lovemaking, moans, laughter, wailing,
it ends with a dramatic flourish like smashing a glass
in the fireplace, I always wanted to do that
& watch the flames flare up..,
It’s this continued love of “dive bar poetry” that elicits comparisons with Charles Bukowski, though in her book of essays Bukowski in a Sundress she claims she hasn’t read much of him. There’s a bit of early-Sharon Olds in Addonizio, though Addonizio would never cultivate a victim attitude. Exit Opera is more subdued than her previous collections but still unrepentant and funny, especially in the poem “Games People Play” where the speaker of the poem plays with a basic sentence structure of the speaker of the poem proposing various “games” to a “you,” gradually expanding out to zaniness. The first line sounds like a sexy roleplaying-in-bed fantasy, but line two immediately takes readers somewhere completely else:
You be the dissatisfied master and I’ll be the naughty maid.
You be the Roman centurion; I’ll be the sorrowful, impaled savior of humankind.
You be a plague of locusts. I’ll be sledding in the Arctic circle.
You’re the last human alive and I’m a horde of zombies lurching towards your house, run!
I’m right and you’re locked in the basement...
By the end of poem, readers get a sense of Addonizio’s personality, the speaker of the poem’s personality, and the addressed “you.” Usually I’d just accept that the speaker of the poem is the poet, and most of the poems in Exit Opera seem to be, but there’s a little playfulness—Addonizio taking on a persona in order to emphasize the weirder and funnier progression, though the poem ends up being about a relationship which didn’t work out: “You be the chandelier crashing down in the ballroom. I’ll be the legs sticking out beneath it.” This exaggeration shows how the sex games people play reflect a relationship somehow, but also that relationships have much more at stake emotionally.
Even with just these excerpts, readers can see how Addonizio doesn’t quite fit into academic poetry: Though a dean or department chair might read Addonizio on her own, she’d probably squirm at a poetry reading given to college students, with a poem starting with the first line of “According to the Buddhists”: “that giant bottle of Patrón Silver on top of my fridge is already broken, even though it’s still up there.”
There’s a lot to unravel just in that one line, about time (or Time) and causality, if you could get past the snickers from some students about mentioning a brand of tequila. But that’s the unrepentant part of Addonizio—she could choose to use some other object to approach the topic, but a tequila bottle if funnier, and more grounding: that philosophy can come from the working class world, from common things.
The phrase “exit opera” could be translated from Latin as “she/it leaves from the work.” If it were “it exits the work” the it would perhaps be the meaning or essence message of the poem leaving the poem and entering the reader, though Addonizio seems to be thinking of the “she exits the work.” She dabbles in some frustration with whether poetry/writing is worth anything or just an ego-trip, dabbles with leaving her work, in maybe the best poem of the collection, “20.5 Light Years From Earth.” It starts off on this meditation:
Sometimes writing feels so stupid I think I should get out into the world & do something
like repairing fountain pens, milking snakes, something useful—...
...if only I would slide off my couch & stop reading & writing so much.
Some days it feels like everything is stupid, like when I’m feeling existentially nihilistic
She then riffs off of Tolstoy, who “saw four answers to the basic question of What’s the point:”
- Just be ignorant
- Be an Epicurean, “disregarding the dragon and the mice, & licking the honey in the best way”
- Go ahead & kill yourself (the strong way)
- (the weak Tolstoy way) “knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living, washing oneself, dressing dining, talking, & even writing books”
The parentheses are Addonizio’s. She obviously rejects one and three, and though she calls it “weak,’ she seems to find comfort in four—maybe all of Addonizio’s poetry is an answer to the fact that “life is a stupid joke” but her answer to that idea is found in two: Addonizio is an Epicurean. She enjoys life, mostly, even when it’s stupid, and thankfully she writes about it along the way.