As with Sandra Simonds, I came to know of Jen Tynes by publishing her work at The Cultural Society website. Following her through her myriad publications, collaborations, & work with her own imprint, horse less press, has shed a good deal of light on what makes her poems unique.
In the course of the last several years I’ve wearied of a trend in poetry that presupposes not only familiarity with Surrealism but also affinity & advocacy, positions I’m fairly certain the authors of these works do not maintain, in spite of sophisticated senses of finish & craft. What they do possess, however, is a seemingly ahistorical preference for disparate images, anticipating that the oddness of associating one image with its counterpart will generate new meaning. In my experience, this mode usually fails, precisely for its lack of connection to anything outside itself & the scenes that revolve around it. It is essentially a hip mode: those in the know can’t explain how it works; those not in the know are left out. Hipness is, of course, relative & if the preceding remarks appear senseless, I make them nevertheless because it is characteristic of Tynes’ poetry in Heron/Girlfriend to rise above such hip vagueness by relying less on images, I think, than impressions.
The distinction I draw between images and impressions is that the latter, in Tynes’ hands, create their energy by accretion, not simply by stringing together moments of staged intensity. Tynes’ poems pull their images together like Rauschenberg prints: although anything is ultimately available for inclusion, the materials tend to function in sets, similarly arranged, similarly colored, until the next work calls for change. In any case, the poems are best viewed as whole works, not merely as the sum of their parts. Images are discrete; impressions are unified.
A large part of Heron/Girlfriend’s success lies in its structure. The book is divided into three sections, more, I suspect, to regulate its flow than to enforce thematic separations, though the divisions carry some formal variations (for example, there are three “Church of …” poems in the first section, one in the second, & none in the third; the first section sticks closely to contemporary lyrical arrangements, the second & third less so). Rather than isolate one section of poems from another, Tynes maps a form for her book in which the reader is welcome to move freely from poem to poem, gathering energy which flows in all directions to create a dense, powerful, passionate collection of poems from one of our most thoughful poets.
