Sitting On A Rock by Gary L Brinderson

Oh poetry, thou fickle siren, luring thousands of writers into your gentle-seeming embrace only to let them flounder on the sharp rocks of skill that underpin you.

So here’s the deal, dear readers. Poetry is about image and emotion. Back in the day, it also used to be about form and rhyme. For better or worse, blank verse changed the landscape irrevocably: I personally think it’s for the better, even as I fear that aspiring poets forget that meter is still just as crucial as meaning in modern verse. There’s a reason that spoken word is different from singing is different from anything written down on the page. With written poetry, it’s important that the words are capable of cohering by themselves into a rhythm that the reader can recognize.

I appreciate Gary L Brinderson’s intent in writing this collection of poetry. Only one of these poems is longer than a page, and fittingly it’s on the topic of mentoring, which seems to be the point of the book. In nearly a hundred poems, readers are exhorted to be better versions of themselves — tho there is the occasional welcome aside into the poet’s personal life, with pieces directed to people he loves. There is wisdom and humor and a whole lot of heart in this book, which I genuinely believe should have been written as a work of creative non-fiction instead of poetry.

Because writing poetry is HARD. It’s not about corralling words together into pleasing shapes on a page. It’s about extracting the right words to render vivid images into the readers’ minds, using rhythm to lull consciousness into a state of readiness and belief so that their interior music merges with the message you’re relating. Obviously, not every poem is going to resonate with every reader. But it needs to try.

One could argue that the pieces in this book are modeled after koans, the short phrases of Buddhist thought that readers are meant to meditate on. Sure, but koans were never written as poems. There is poetry in them — often when they use imagery to provoke thought, as in the famous koan regarding the moon reflected on the water — but it’s a weirdly Western thing to insist that what’s basically a proverb is actually a poem, especially in translation, while ignoring the longer form actual poems written at the same time.

Here’s the thing: Sitting On A Rock would be perfectly fine as a collection of aphorisms. Mr Brinderson has a message, and it’s on the whole positive (tho a large part of me thinks that he’s never been in a position where he’s had to staunchly enforce his boundaries against people taking his energies and interests for granted.) A book of life advice told in small vignettes a la Robert Fulghum would make for really interesting reading. But poetry is not yet Mr Brinderson’s strength, and certainly not yet the ideal vehicle for his wisdom.

Sitting On A Rock by Gary L Brinderson was published July 2 2024 by Belle Isle Books and is available from all good booksellers, including