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REVIEW: John Amen's Christening the Dancer Reviewed by Editor-in-Chief kris t kahn _________________________________ CHRISTENING THE
DANCER Christening
the Dancer, John Amen’s first
collection of poems, is an amazingly vivid book and one that revitalizes
poetic language in astounding ways. Amen, the founder and editor of the prestigious online Pedestal
Magazine, fuses classical elements and motifs with very contemporary
themes and situations in a truly unique way. His concerns here are
quite universal: the poet exploring his own world and trying to make
sense of it through means of poetic perception and observation.
The Rimbaudian notion of the poet as a ‘new god’ is taken up
by Amen and revised with an almost postmodernist-visionary slant toward
recording the mundane while struggling with the divine constraints laid
upon the role of poet in century’s past. While the divine is
very much present (even if only in its absence, like Beckett’s Godot)
in Christening the Dancer,
Amen also acknowledges in “After the War” that heaven “is burning,
and everyone knows / God is the one who started the fire.”
In such a world, the daily struggles are therefore seen in a
mythical-religious light, as man realizes his life is an allegory, an
echo of all those who came before. In the haunting title poem, Amen describes this fusion:
“I am becoming the dancer, / the dancer is becoming me. / I am
becoming nothing…” The exhaustive journey
of the poet is juxtaposed against the mundane journey of the man.
The numerous references to genitals and loins link the poet to
Christ, but also link the male to a form of creation he has hitherto
(lacking the gift of reproduction) been denied.
The poet must make art from what he has experienced, be it an
almost Oedipal fascination with his mother, or else—to return to a
Rimbaudian idea of poetic suffering—bouts with madness:
I carry welts on my hands
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