{"id":358,"date":"2015-09-22T08:44:41","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T12:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=358"},"modified":"2015-09-22T08:44:41","modified_gmt":"2015-09-22T12:44:41","slug":"review-of-plunk-by-tom-c-hunley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=358","title":{"rendered":"Review of Plunk by Tom C. Hunley"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hunley<\/a>Tom C. Hunley. Plunk. <\/em>WSC Press, 2015. 67 pgs. $16.00.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lynn Domina<\/p>\n

Plunk <\/em>is one of those refreshing books that delivers on its promises. Its title is certainly colloquial, its \u201cblurbs\u201d are entertaining ironic anti-blurbs, and its table of contents lists such entries as \u201cWhat If There Lives, Within You, a Man Who Loves Random Consolations?\u201d \u201cSelf-Portrait as a Child\u2019s Stick Figure Drawing on a Refrigerator,\u201d and \u201cWhile We Were on Fire, Our Shadows Glided on Water.\u201d The whole collection\u2014and Tom C. Hunley has written several\u2014is ironic and loquacious and wily. Although many of the poems are written in free verse, several pay homage to received forms\u2014though those forms aren\u2019t always received from poetic tradition. They include, for example, not only villanelles and an ode but also multiple choice questions and questionnaires. The poems in Plunk <\/em>are energetic and energizing, and, basically, fun to read and to read aloud.<\/p>\n

Several of the poems illustrate an \u201cultra-talk\u201d style\u2014manic, associative, expansive, yet somehow consolidating the multifarious references by the conclusion. \u201cPermanent,\u201d for instance, discusses tattoos, marriage, gangs, coffee shops, cable tv networks, and other topics. It opens with an odd piece of dialogue: \u201cHey, your tattoo fell off,\u201d <\/em>odd because even temporary tattoos don\u2019t \u201cfall off.\u201d Immediately, therefore, readers begin to question the idea of permanence. Eventually, the speaker himself rambles toward an acknowledgment of his strategy:<\/p>\n

Hey, your tattoo fell off, <\/em>I said, and picked it up,
\nbut she thought I was trying to pick her up,
\nso she rushed away, her legs long and tan except
\nfor a balloon-shaped vacancy on her ankle where
\nthe tattoo had rented space. She was beautiful with
\ncurly hair and probably men had been hitting on her
\nfor as long as she could remember, and maybe she
\nassumed that fending off their attentions would be
\na permanent part of her life. Listen, my parents died
\nlast year. They were always there, hovering,
\nwhen I was small. First the air went out
\nof their marriage, and then Pop was gone, and after that,
\nMom was gone, and a little while after that, I made up
\nthat preposterous story about the woman whose tattoo
\nfell off, I guess to illustrate something about impermanence.<\/p>\n

It may seem as if we\u2019re merely encountering a speaker who can neither stop speaking\u2014for this quoted section comprises about one-third of the poem\u2014nor very easily get to the point. It may seem as if whatever the writer thought of made its way arbitrarily into the poem. If we follow the leaps more closely, however, we can notice a pattern in the language. The woman\u2019s tattoo isn\u2019t just any inked image; it\u2019s a \u201cballoon-shaped vacancy.\u201d Then the marriage of the speaker\u2019s parents didn\u2019t simply fail\u2014\u201cthe air went out of\u201d it, as if it too were some sort of balloon. And the speaker doesn\u2019t refer to his father with the more common \u201cDad\u201d but as \u201cPop,\u201d evoking the sound most closely associated with a balloon. By the time the speaker draws overt attention to the poem\u2019s conceit, we\u2019re beginning to understand his concern for permanence, a concern that has very little to do with tattoos.<\/p>\n

After a short discussion of gangs and coffee and Mt. Rainier, he returns to family and marriage, those institutions we most identify with permanence, despite all of our evidence that ought to undermine such assumptions:<\/p>\n

I shouldn\u2019t have made that up about my parents dying
\nor about the gangs trafficking in coffee. I wanted,
\nI guess, to show you something about impermanence.
\nI wanted, ironically, to make a lasting impression
\non the subject. I should have just led with the fact
\nthat the old Rainier Brewery is now the headquarters
\nfor Tully\u2019s Coffee. If a landmark like that can\u2019t last,
\nmaybe no one\u2019s marriage has a chance; maybe all of us
\nshould tattoo tears beneath our eyes or fill our hearts
\nwith helium and reckless love and let them fly
\nuntethered and brightly-colored across the sky.<\/p>\n

Most of us have experienced that peculiar shock when a restaurant or department store we\u2019ve known all our lives closes. We feel a little destabilized, a little, yes, untethered. Maybe nothing is permanent, including those things we hold most dear. Maybe that means we ought to insist on a different permanence, the grief symbolized by a tattooed tear\u2014until we recall that the poem opens with a suggestion that even tattoos fall off. Here, the speaker returns again to that image we\u2019d likely forgotten, the balloon shape of the first tattoo, but the image is transformed in these last lines, into an image of spontaneity and joy. The point of life isn\u2019t permanence after all, it seems, but release. That\u2019s not a new idea, but Hunley has created a new way of saying it.<\/p>\n

The chatty style prominent in these poems, together with their pop culture references, can mislead us into assuming they are simply slight observations of mundane details, that they have little significant to say. Such an assumption would be a mistake and would do not only the poem but also the reader a disservice.<\/p>\n

Most of my favorite poems in Plunk, <\/em>including \u201cElegy \/ Litany,\u201d \u201cEight Bits Usually Equals One Byte,\u201d and \u201cPrelude to Pillow Talk,\u201d adopt the style and strategies of \u201cPermanence.\u201d Toward the end of the collection, a few poems combine Hunley\u2019s colloquial language with received forms; this juxtaposition of elevated form with idiomatic diction works particularly well in the two villanelles. On occasion Hunley\u2019s ironic commentary on form reads more like an exercise than an actual poem, in \u201cA Little Less Beauty\u201d for instance, which gestures toward the blues poem but doesn\u2019t quite pull it off, primarily because of the too-predictable rhyme. So, do I wish Hunley had omitted one or two of the poems here? Yes. Do I think their inclusion is a fatal flaw? Not at all. For just as the truest poems are always risking sentimentality, to paraphrase Hugo, the most inventive poems perhaps also always risk falling flat. This caveat aside, Plunk <\/em>is an enjoyable collection, of its time without being limited to its time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom C. Hunley. Plunk. WSC Press, 2015. 67 pgs. $16.00. Reviewed by Lynn Domina Plunk is one of those refreshing books that delivers on its promises. Its title is certainly colloquial, its \u201cblurbs\u201d are entertaining ironic anti-blurbs, and its table of contents lists such entries as \u201cWhat If There Lives, Within You, a Man Who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":360,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions\/360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}