Why/Why Not: Volume 8

By Martha Ronk

Book Overview

Why/Why Not presents a speaker caught in quandaries created by changing perspectives, fervors, and locales. Why do we act one way here and another there; why can't a mind stay made up; why do we hate and love at the same time; why does memory fade or insist; why does the ordinary seem so uncanny? These questions are captured in lines that collide and merge, in irreverent and offhand jibes, and in plaintive repetitions.

Why/Why Not moves across a vivid terrain-the stage of Hamlet, Phillip Marlowe's Los Angeles, Prague, paintings and gardens-to push through a tangle of ways to make sense of the world. Martha Ronk's poetic language is that of the everyday slightly skewed, as if pieces of an ordinary sentence were missing. Ronk's poems use the repetitive and the banal to explore ways in which language is intertwined with thought and experience.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520238117
• ISBN13: 9780520238114
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 104 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

The Swirling Beauty of Ronk's "Why/Why Not"

Martha Ronk dazzles us with the swirling beauty of her poetry in "Why/Why Not." In Hamlet-like questioning, her lines blend, break and turn on themselves in ways that startle, surprise and shock. In "Anticipation," she begins: "Anticipation stood at attention through the entire scene/what else was there to do but lean/as a dancer before lift." And then the sock between the eyes: "Something was bound to occur." But no, because "whatever he did/to hold time at bay or move it backwards/was what she also said about whether or not/she could stay the same if she didn't lift a finger/and if he'd keep on speaking there'd be no finale/and he'd hold still the April of his prime." In "That subject again," she complains of how death (that subject) intrudes with companions, a "three-headed dog/chain smoking barflies/and all that whirled-about smoke." You will want to read and re-read these poems; Ronk's language will get under your skin leaving you with desperate, simple, yet unanswerable questions.