7. Mary Jo Bang, "The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity"

I saw Mary Jo read at the City Museum last year, but was too shy to introduce myself. I can't praise this poem in any way that would sound convincing. I can't say that it's bad--it's an ekphrastic exercise after a charcoal drawing by Odilon Redon, and is full of concrete imagery and the like. My problem with it is that it doesn't give me any reason to care. It has no communicative urgency, no reason for having been written. It sounds like "academic" poetry to me in that sense. That is, it has no obvious flaw that can be pointed out in the workshop, but nothing that compells either. Maybe I am missing something, and have simply not gotten the poem yet. 6.5.