Why/Why Not

Product Description

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.

From Publishers Weekly
The fifth verse outing from this L.A.-based poet and editor (Eyetrouble; State of Mind) tracks shock, enticement, frustration, disgust and wonder as emotions in super-slow motion, providing an almost synapse-by- synapse account: "Why is it the only question why really and why now and/ why didn't you come with me why did you put off as I thought/ all that had already gathered," she asks in "act 3." Ronk can produce precise images ("gasfumes rising in rainbows off the pavement"), but the poems' estranging voices remain in motion, complaining of "no interpretive data," or seeking "The cause for wandering through the fading light/ as occluded as one voice hidden from another." One speaker defends vertiginously lengthy lines-each a long phrase, many avoiding grammatical sentence forms-with the non-question "Did anyone say I didn't understand/ the way you talk... I talk the way I talk." The series that ends the book organizes such sonnet-sized meditations first into a set of 12 ("why") and then into nine short-lined diptychs ("why not"), landing somewhere between a wiretap transcript and a deconstructed lyric sequence. Admirers will compare Ronk to Beckett or Stein, while detractors will ask how (and whether) her many fragments fit together.
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Review
"Answers questions that rise with enigmatic urgency -- why? why not? -- and the stranger in each of us... is courted passionately."--
Los Angeles Times Book Review --
Review
From the Inside Flap

"In Ronk's book, language is in the mood for mischief, while still being acutely attentive to its own unreliability. We're pulled into this sparklingly original work where ordinariness veers coolly and equivocation beguiles. These gorgeously agile poems reveal us as our never-ready and always-ready selves."—Molly Bendall, author of
Ariadne's Island

"Ronk, in her 'looking for/ the conjunction of the past and the present,' produces a poetry that questions the context of living, its arrangements, its decisions. Her sure-footed investigation is equaled by its prosody of progression/recursion in a particular lexicon of grace and elegance. Reader, find surprises in this lovely packet of poems."—Norma Cole, author of
Spinoza in Her Youth

About the Author

Martha Ronk is Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College. Among her books are
Eyetrouble (1998),
State of Mind (1995), and
Displeasures of the Table (2001).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Why Knowing Is (& Matisse's
Woman with a Hat):

Why knowing is a quality out of fashion and no one can decide to
but slips into it or ends up with a painting one has never
seen that quality of light before even before having seen it
in between pages of another book and not remembering who knows
or recognizing the questionable quality of light on her face
as she sits for a portrait and isn't allowed to move an inch
you recognize the red silk flower on her hat
and can almost place where you have seen that gray descending
th