Priase for Joshua Poteat

From Campbell McGrath, judge for the 2004 Anhinga Press Poetry Prize:
“This poet knows that ruin is no excuse for despair, and even as he combs the rubble for tokens of consolation, the presence among us of these clear-eyed, large-hearted poems may serve a similarly hopeful purpose for readers of contemporary American poetry.”

From Mary Oliver, judge for the 2004 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Award:
“It is a lyricism that reminds me of James Wright, and this I mean certainly as praise, when he employed, as I called it, an intensified vernacular—throwing me off my stride, gathering me to him by the detail of some earnest and often terrible beauty, in the easy language of our country with its sweet, oiled syntax….In this way Meditations is a dramatic book, a kind of word—or mood—theater. Poteat tells me things as if I were an audience but invisible. Or as if I were the moon. Yet something real passes between us, which is to say that the book is very good, that it leaves its mark.”

From Blackbird, Spring 2003, Vol. 2, No. 1:
“With natural elegance and untiring invention, Joshua Poteat writes some of the most remarkable poetry you are ever likely to encounter. In storylines that move beyond the virtues of narrative into a region of wonder, combining violence and tenderness in an intimate voice capable of revelations as swift and sudden as the sear of lighting, his poems work themselves into the cloudy fabric of your imagination and reside there as unforgettable experiences.”

From Melanie Drane, Book Editor, ForeWord Magazine, May 2006:
“Joshua Poteat’s stunning debut has received the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, selected by Campbell McGrath. Poteat’s poems are suffused with the cognizance that ‘nothing in this world is ours.’ Each image teeters on an unsustainable, exquisite edge, as in ‘Nocturne for a River’: ‘Tell me, sad horse, with doves nesting/under your raised hoof, in this century of longing,/how can I go on loving this ruined excuse for a city...[?]’ Yet Poteat’s insistent power of witness itself constitutes a form of solace. In each meticulously observed moment, there’s the assertion of a life well loved. The morbid is tasted on the tongue in his poems, but Poteat transforms loss into a lush homage to human experience in all its complexity: ‘To live at all is to grieve/and from what life did we gain this trust,/awake each dawn/to find the bright air/full again/rustle and coo/in the widening palms?’ ”

From David Wagoner, judge for the T.S. Eliot First Book Award, 2002, on book manuscript:
“In Ornithologies, the poet, using a large cast of unusual voices, gives us a number of narratives full of surprising turns of events. With a Whitman-like desire to make anything and everything his own, with the kind of strength of James Dickey had to take on any subject or landscape or aspect of himself or of his friends, the poet goes about his work with an unshrinking, ambitious audacity.

“In this omnium gatherum, we discover a poet of bristling intelligence who knows what has already been done and has decided not to do it again. He is utterly without clichés. He is sometimes bizarre, sometimes seems to write four or five poems simultaneously in an urge to connect, to unite, to make each effort both bountiful and comprehensive, even at the risk of being excessive. But as William Blake observed in The Proverbs of Hell, “the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” One sometimes gets the sense that if this poet isn’t already a novelist, he will be soon and the results will be fascinating. Auden once said of Theodore Roethke’s first book of poems: ‘He is immediately recognizable as a good poet.’ The same is true of the author of Ornithologies.”

From Darren Morris, book reviewer for Style Weekly, 2006:
“Be careful when reading Ornithologies by Joshua Poteat. His poems are so mysterious, eloquent and downright powerful, they may ruin you with beauty. Good poetry calls attention to what would otherwise be overlooked, but the best poetry changes us. Poteat’s poems succeed in showing us ‘what it means to be/honey in a tobacco pouch, the skin of God in a firefly’s gut.’
“Because existence is uncertain, his narrators relentlessly name the knowable world, as if cataloging can protect us against our own disappearance. He brings us closer, not merely through a rich inventiveness, but through the narrative position itself, which is reverent of all it observes.

“In ‘Nocturne: For the Night Workers of the South,’ he is a night watchman at an asylum, where ‘when it rained,/spotted-moth larva would tunnel from the wet plaster ceilings/and drink the patient’s ears.’ In ‘Our Memory, the Shining Leaves (Waterford Fair Civil War Reenactment),’ while watching a faux battle, he focuses on a boy who ‘searches the field after the skirmish/looking for a trace of what he saw (gold button: hank of hair:/glass eye in a raven’s mouth).’

“This is not a poet who needs a soapbox, but one who begs a small and gentle witness to the largest questions of existence. And his world is our world — built on a type of loss that the South can ‘understand: each thing is of itself./Each thing is its end.’ The poems in Ornithologies deserve a national audience. Read them to discover why.”

From Adam Day, Editor,Washington Square/New York University “Poteat won the 2004 Poetry Society of American chapbook contest, which resulted in the publication of his wonderful chapbook, Meditations. It's interesting now to see many of the poems from Meditations, a number of his other poems previously published at Blackbird.com, all together, situated among the other poems. In the new, broader context of Ornithologies, it's like seeing all of these poems almost entirely anew. This says something important about the poetry's ability to endure, its staying power, and about the quality and import of their content.

“There is a kind of grandness and yet, a muscular fragility to the writing in Ornithologies, and it's a beautiful book, physically, and in content. The poems here are full and lush, and have certainly found their form and are comfortable in their bodies. There is a striking balance between the sonics, imagery and narrative, so that we are absorbed by the poems, leaving the waking world behind. The physical and spiritual worlds quietly collide in these poems, and what might seem far removed from the everyday life is brought to bear, which is to say that to read these poems is not simply an emotive, or reminiscent experience, but one that spurs one to thought. This may seem a statement to be applied to most poetry, but indeed it is the exception rather than the rule. Jarrell could have been speaking of Ornithologies when he said of Paterson, ‘The subject of Paterson is: How can you tell the truth about things?-that is, how can you find a language so close to the world that the world can be represented and understood in it?’

“Not to overstate it, but at a time when one cannot help but feel that poets are publishing too much, too often, and that so much of that work is tragically average and often unimportant, Poteat's Ornithologies feels significantly relevant to the reader's world, and thematically, rhetorically, imagistically, and otherwise substantial.”

From Pimone Triplet, judge for American Literary Review’s Poetry Award, 2003:
“ ‘Elegy for an Elegy Under the Broken Oaks of Maysville’ is a voiced-up and vividly imaginative conceit, in which the personification of elegy itself becomes a player in its own exile and return to the rural community at hand. There are many riches here: from the tender accuracy of landscape description to the poet’s own rhythmic adeptness of stanza and line. What I admire most are the poem’s turns and transformations, starting with the bravado of direct address, yet progressing, as the speaker grows more and more deeply implicated, toward loss and the hard recognition of solace in language and song.”

From David Lee, judge of Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award, 2001:
“I loved reading these poems. They set themselves apart by use of language and the “call back” factor: I’ve read them every morning—at least once—for a week and I’ve never stopped enjoying them. I trust these speakers—these poems aren’t a request to indulge Narcissus. The speakers are intelligent human beings who explore seminal moments, epiphanies in the human experience. And finally, they have what I call the Antaeus factor: they’re rooted in the earth.”

From Mary C. Flinn, editor of 64 and New Virginia Review:
“Joshua Poteat’s meditation on the moon ‘Just for You’ (Juliet’s “inconstant moon, that monthly changes”) takes one of poetry’s most familiar and enduring topics and gives it a fresh spin. His tools are those that make for good poems: concrete, sensual, surprising details. Watch for this new voice; Poteat’s new work is ambitious, distinctive, and full of promise.”

From Sima Rabinowitz, Literary Magazine Reviews
There is much fine work in this issue of Hunger Mountain, but for my taste the most memorable poem in the issue is the Ruth Stone Prize winner, Joshua Poteat’s "From J.G. Heck’s 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science." Poteat draws striking verbal illustrations of seven visual illustrations from the natural sciences, rendered in precise, lyrical, and authentic detail.

From Dislocate, literary journal of University of Minnesota
Ornithologies, by Joshua Poteat, is full of the beautiful, the lyric, the narrative—many times all at once. How can you not dig a six-part poem titled, "Meditations in the Margins of the Book of Irish Curses"? His writing/syntax/all-that-jazz is hypnotic. Like York's work, Poteat's is of the earth, and not necessarily a comforting one. Familiar? Yes. Sweetly sad? Check. But bucolic? I guess if you consider slaughterhouses and asylums and ghosts bucolic. The world is a textured place, even the parts that don't see much light.

From The Stone Orchard, online poetry review The poems in Joshua Poteat’s Ornithologies gently tell the truth by meshing the physical with the spiritual and leaving plenty of room for us to ponder, without despair, the corporeal inconsequentiality of all that we think ours. This collection will make a good supplement to meditation on any given day; I’m partial to saving it for a warm, blue-skied afternoon in a hammock.

From Lemon Hound, online poetry review
In particular, out of all the poets in this issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, I like Joshua Poteat, whom I've never heard of, but there is space in his work. It isn't all jammed together with the seamless, hyper-polished quality of much of the tightly spun quatrains or couplets we see in most of these journals. "Illustrating how to catch and manufacture ghosts" is a great title, and the poem itself was engaging:

"Tonight there is no wind, even the heat
is on its knees, and the moths laying eggs"

Now, I'm suspicious of these "ah, moments" in poetry. So much of what is being published seems designed to illicit such responses. Shouldn't the fact that Oprah has all but copyrighted such responses tell us something about the manufactured nature of such responses? (I have witnessed some of the nations powerhouse editors go weak at the knees at lines such as this...)

But Poteat makes fresh this desire, it seems to me, as the poem continues:

"on the side door are not being honest
with themselves. Though their enterprise

is beauty, the eggs will not last through
the rains, and so it goes."

But even as I trace the poems movement here, what seemed pleasing at first glance becomes less so: we again learn how failed hope is, and though we are not left here, on the safe confines of a front porch, chardonnay in hand, we are left with the impotence of desire, our vain delusions...perhaps a more pungent "awe moment" than many of the poems of this variety.

From Mathias Svalina, book reviewer, University of Nebraska
Have I mentioned my absolute love of Joshua Poteat’s poetry? You should check out his book Ornithologies, that hit the stands last month. I started to get interested in poetry as more than just a personal expression by hearing and reading Larry Levis and Levis is still one of my guiding lights for what a certain kind of poetry can do. I think he shredded and reformed the personal meditative narrative. Levis, however, is a terrible guy to emulate. I had this conversation with Martin Arnold some years ago, that anyone writing like Levis ends up with the most schmaltzy crap. Joshua Poteat is the only poet I’ve read who has picked up the kind of meditative riffing and personal introspection that made Levis great and has transformed it into his own aesthetic.

From Mathias Svalina, again

As I was putting together a packet of poems for my poetry students, I was struck yet again by how damn good Josh's The Angel Continues Turning the Universe Despite Their Ugly Souls. He understands the lyricism of meditation, the inherent melancholy of transition. To be reminded of another thing is not metaphor, it's the failure of experience to remain distinct. It's a poem that effectively grows desperate through its own thought process. It absolutely slays me, as it did the first time I read it in Gulf Coast. If it is late in the evening I will proclaim to you & anyone else that I think Joshua Poteat & Jake Adam York are the only two poets really progressing the work of Southern narrative right now.

From Jake Adam York, Professor, University of Colorado at Denver I would also say to you that, through the generosity of several wonderful persons in Lincoln, Nebraska, I have discovered a book I don't want to finish because I don't want it to end, Ornithologies, by Joshua Poteat. This is one of the best books I have ever read, and though I don't want it to end, I will come to its end, and I will begin it again. I wish I'd written much of what's in it and want to know the poetry there.

From Style Weekly article by Jason Coates—Passing the Torch: Similarities prevail in three generations of abstract artists.
Abstract art is a culmination of human experience, and of all human experiences, perhaps none is as valuable as that of teaching. “Pivot Points,” on exhibit at Anderson Gallery, explores the work of three generations of mentors and students while examining what painting and poetry as abstract art forms have in common. The traveling exhibition, curated by two faculty members of Virginia Commonwealth University’s painting and printmaking department, is staged on both levels of the gallery and comprises several intimate paintings on paper, intermingled with large framed printouts of individual poems. The highly regimented aspect of the show makes it easy for the viewer to witness the procession of the generations. The work of each of the six poets and painters is organized according to generation, from mentor to student. Despite the pass-the-torch implications of the exhibition, all of the artists — with one exception — are active, and most of the works are contemporary.
Though the similarities between the artists are obvious, each individual brings into his or her work a signature that is unique. “Third generation” painter Valerie Bogdan takes much from the agitated, slashing paint application of the post-World War II New York School, though she also shares a depth and slick graphic quality with her contemporary, Beth Weisgerber.
“Third generation” poet Joshua Poteat, in defining what it means to be influenced by “first generation” Larry Levis, says simply, “Larry is the poet I wish I could be.” Poteat comes close to meeting Levis’ majesty in the comic clarity of “People Who’d Kill Me (Spain, 1939).”

In Levis’ poem “Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex,” he captures the thrust of the exhibition. The poem makes reference to a Caravaggio painting in which the artist depicts his own face in both the youthful visage of David and the severed head of Goliath. The message is one of a continuum — of a blotting out of the individual. Though generations may pass, the same art and ideas will recur through the ages.