Bling & Fringe (The L.A. Poems)
By Molly Bendall & Gail Wronsky
(Los Angeles, CA: What BooksPress, 2009).
48 pages. Paperback: $10, ISBN # 98-0-9823542-1-6.
Reviewed by Brent Fisk & Tom C. Hunley
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How to critique a collection of collaborative poems that aren’t meant to make sense, at least not in the strictest meaning of the word? “Cowgirl Poets” Bendall & Wronsky play with words, ply words open. How will the collection play in the flyover states? Will Idahoan’s be torn from their potatoes? They put the “tone” back in “tombstone.” Will Nebraskans set aside their Lincoln logs long enough to look through this book? They put the “no” back in “porno.” Will the hausfraus of Darmstadt, Indiana use them to serenade their schladen kinder? They put the “edge” back in “ledger.”
Gone are the standard narratives, and even the more lyrical sense of sense. This is closer to nodding off at the wheel than it is to dreaming. “Which end(‘)s up” they say or ask, depending on how you read it.
Bling and Fringe has fashion sense. It has its fun with the lingo, the name dropping of the arcane Dadaist and the dead rapper. So much depends upon how you read it, a red wheelbarrow’s worth at l(e)ast. Even my grandmother enjoys seek-a- word puzzles. She found several in the poets’ names: Molly (Bend)(all) and G(ail) Wron(sky). She perked up and had another glass of tea.
This poetry is playful and highfalutin the way French literary theory is playful and highfalutin. Shall I complain about the margins and the font, the word choices, the symbolism, the clipped diction of the Urban West? Shall I compare thee to a summer dais? Should I shoo the scary words away?
To say whether what is here is good (or not) is beside the point. Bendall and Wronsky have created a space where Biggie Smalls and James Dean are alive and well and rubbing shoulders with Paul de Man and Julia Kristeva. If you are not fond of naked mimes swimming in canals or tall, thin men singing Viking odes while beating the skins of bongos attached to stolen Grandma-walkers, there’s nothing I can say that will make you seek this volume out.
Is it an experiment, an exercise, or art? Will you be saying, “My child could write that” as you close the book? And if your child wrote that, would you enroll her in boarding school or ask the doctor to up his dose of Ritalin? Would you shave the paper off her crayons or give him scissors and tell him, Run!? Bendall and Wronsky put the “harm” back in “charm,” and both “me” and “moi” back in “memoir.”
I doubt that this book will leave a lasting impression on anyone, but it does a/muse. It’s short and spare. Like a good neighbor it will hold your mail. Read a line or two. Gawk. Give it the close read of a first love letter. You’ll be better for it. It builds (char) acter. It spikes the nerves and sews the veins closed with a thready pulse. Slip it in your child’s lunchbox. Walk him to the bus. When he waves to you through the dusty window, turn and walk away. These poems are contagious, like a common cold, not like mononucleosis, nothing too serious, I mean.
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Tom C. Hunley is Poemeleon's Book Review Editor. Read his full bio here.
Brent Fisk is a graduate student in English at Western Kentucky University, where he works as a librarian. He has published over 200 poems in literary journals such as Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, and The Southeast Review.