The Missing Museum by Amy King

The Missing Museum Reviews

• 
  John

  "My, how her reach has grown.
  Like gunpowder aches in the calyx’ eardrum."
• 
  Sherry Chandler

  Back in the late sixties, early seventies, certain heroes of the electric guitar, e.g. Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, learned to control and exploit the distortion and feedback of an overdriven amp. They used the sizzling electricity to make music that reflected the violent energy of the time, culminating in Hendrix’s Woodstock “Star-Spangled Banner,” in which he drove the anthem to the extreme of its battle imagery, realized the modern version of “bombs bursting on air,” took us aurally into the thick of Viet Nam combat. Its inhuman sound of explosions and deafening volume were a musical “Guernica.”
  
  I hear an echo of those tortured sounds, those torturing sounds, when I read Amy King’s The Missing Museum. Consider the imagery of “Violent Blossoming Cities Ask How to Hear the Song:”
  
  

  . . . white tulips growl to hold
  our crisp momentous maker
  fully cocked and loaded,

  
  
  Now we are engaged in a never-ending Orwellian war, one that most days we forget about, too hypnotized by the atrocities perpetrated by our duly-elected protest president whose razzle-dazzle of constant lies and venality tell us he has no intention of actually governing, being more interested in establishing that he is fully cocked and as loaded as Daddy Warbucks, so can grab any pussy he wants to with impunity.
  
  “[T]here is no legitimate innocent event” writes the poet
  
  

  . . . The architecture of how
  things come to be proves mostly unable
  to escape the marketplace,

  
  
  “And why should they?” asks the man who sees no reason why he should not exploit this President gig to buy more golden flush handles. “A cape of laughter howls at character culture.” So says the voice of the poem and we who are fully immersed, baptized, and reborn into pop culture where, in “The Wind is the Wandering Moon”
  
  

  Predator dances with a half-naked
  Schwarzenegger in a life and death eroticism
  . . . impenetrable and intimate.
  
  and in “Pussy Pussy Sochi Pussy Putin Sochi Queer Queer Pussy”
  
  

  WHERE A PUTIN PISSED BY THE SITE OF PUSSIES PRAYING
  GOES TO THE GRASS WHERE A PUTIN RIDES
  SHIRTLESS ON HIS STEED.
  MY BONES ARE STEEDS,

  
  
  Schwarzenegger, a showman who became a governor, and Putin, a dictator who already was a showman, that being part of how one keeps power, and power is seductive.
  
  This all-caps pussy-riot poem opens the collection
  
  

  I CALL PUTIN PISSED ON WITH ONE BONE ALONE,
  HELD HIGH IN HARD HAND.

  
  
  and a sister poem, “The Stars You Are Looking At Don’t Tell You What To Write,” closes it
  
  

  IS “DUENDE OVERLOAD” AN OXYMORON?
  . . . PEOPLE ALSO ARE AS OLD AS THEY TEND TO BE,
  AND THAT MAKES FOR A VERY GOOD STORY INDEED

  
  
  I tend to be a 72-year-old farmer’s daughter, and Amy King a 40-something urbanite. I am flyover states, colored bright red and without texture on journalists’ maps. She is East Coast solid blue, though we both have roots in the South. We share a certain sardonic sense of humor and a love of language for its own sake; nevertheless, I make no pretense of “understanding” these poems that partake of surrealism, L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E, and New York. In the words of John Berryman, "These songs are not to be understood, you understand?" Besides, I live in the set of those who do not live in New York City, and by the poet’s own statement in “Understanding the Poem,” “Only people who live in New York City will understand this poem.” “To poet is to process,” says the poem, “is to Amy King, the poet is still one who longs for another /viewpoint not her own to see her own through . . .”
  
  

  I mean I have to ask myself with honesty, Amy King,
  What would Amy King the reader do with this poem?
  because we all need a starting point and right now it is this, Amy King

  
  
  Five pages long, “Understanding the Poem” is perhaps the key to The Missing Museum. One key. The poet herself seems to struggle for understanding. It covers a lot of ground including these three lines that throw us right back into pop culture
  
  

  Those also who don’t get that Stephen King rewrote Ed Dorn’s
  book of poems, Gunslinger, into his best selling novel, Gunslinger,
  will experience a difference in understanding that this poem inspires.

  
  
  The presence of Stephen King in this book gives me an opportunity to point out that, like that pop-culture super star, Amy King seems to have reached a point in her career where her name on the cover is bigger and brighter than the title. No graphics but letters on the blood red cover, only the poet's name and the title, The Missing Museum, which seems to be slowly fading away behind that bright white of the poet’s name. Fading or slowly filling with the red blood. I look at it and think of the Iraqi culture museum that was sacked in the first bloody days of Shock and Awe.
  
  Out of the masculine guitar-as-erection sound of rock hard hard rock there emerged two women whose voices are iconic: the cool purety of Grace Slick that soared on the updrafts generated by all that electricity to sing a drug-enhanced surreality and the hot distorted whiskey voice of Janis Joplin that, when she sang the blues of blighted love, wailed for a generation. I know I’m pushing it here, but in the music of Amy King’s voice I hear an heir to those two women.
  
  I will give Amy the last word, from the poem entitled “I Go Gunslinger,” “I absolve you of everything now, which is what I meant in the beginning.”
  
  If you hear an echo of Genesis in that line, I won’t take responsibility for it.
• 
  J. Woods

  If I had to sum up The Missing Museum in one word it would be powerful.
  
  “If I give you my depression, will you excise the bruise and the veins that feed it?”
  
  I read the entire book of poetry in one sitting, unable to put it down. King’s poetic mind is brilliant and vivid and absolutely stunning. There is purpose, a realness to The Missing Museum and its works of poetry like this that keep me craving more.
  
  “I still have no answer for anything, except there is beauty I know that no one has spoken into existence yet.”
  
  King’s work does exactly what it is supposed to do – it resonates.
  
• 
  Angela WordsMeRight

  “Your cost was laid out by what is taken away.
  I, on the other hand, have always been the better half of yes.
  Before we begin though, understand: everything deserves a life,
  including the stone, inducing the scene, encoding death.
  Absence is not present in the debit column now…”
  
  I inhale true poetries as if they are drugs. Go, test it. See how placid your days become if you should read a well-written poem like it’s a Bible verse each morning as the sun creeps its blazing face above the horizon. Read a stanza while you sip your tea. You’ll see. It’s magical.
  
  Sadly, poetries that awe and inspires aren’t as easy to find. You weed through so many mediocre attempts before you find a poet that slits your wrists and steals your blood.
  Amy King is one of those poets. One that inspires and awe. One with true talent and sheer brilliance.
  
  “THE PAST IS AWAKE” dug into me like the claws of a raven. And by the time I got to “THE LITTLE ENGINE’S DEATH”, I was a goner.
  
  “If I give you my depression, will you excise
  the bruise and the veins that feed it?”
  
  Gosh!
  
  Amy King has found herself a lifetime fan.
  I will cherish this book of magic and stalk her for what else she has to come.
  
• 
  Kinga Fabo

  Ancient Sunlight
  
  Amy King
  
  Shame on you for dating a museum:
  Everything is dead there and nothing is alive.
  Not everyone who lives to be old embraces
  the publicity of it all. I mean, you get up and folks
  want to know, How did you get here? What makes you
  go? What is the secret? And there is no secret except
  there are many things that build the years out.
  They are not vegetables every day and working out
  but a faith that all of these things add up
  and lead us to some sum total happiness
  we can cash in for forever love in the face
  of never lasting. That people along the way
  keep disappearing in a variety show of deathbed ways
  is also the sheer terror that it may not hold for us too.
  That we may outlast everything and be left
  alone to keep going, never Icarus with wax melting,
  never the one whose smoke & drink undid
  the lungs that pull our wings in then out and the liver
  that keeps chugging the heft of Elizabeth Cotten’s
  “Freight Train” with her upside down left hand guitar still
  playing in videos past her presence. I have become a person since
  I reorganized my face in the mirror and the world is my inflation.
  But this testament offers no sound or silence since
  nothing is proven yet and you are still here,
  the dead stars’ light landing on your rods and cones
  in a vitrine of cameos building—blink.
  
  
  
  I'd prefer reviewing one and only one brilliant poem by Amy King "Ancient Sunlight". It is also on museums and in such a special way! I appreciate it, because I'm also obsessed with museums as a theme...It is so complex, so full of ambiguities. Strong themes handled in a contemporary manner, in a matter-of-fact detachment, tale-telling style interrupted by cuts unexpectedly in the end of some lines...It leaves me with an unusual yet a strangely familiar, slightly disturbing feeling...As if some kind of unnameable danger was snooping...The first line "Shame on you for dating a museum:" involves us, readers immediately in the poem. Not only because it is imperative, but because it's such a strong, such a strange proposition. If I date a museum, I date both my personal and our collective past and history... Do I have to feel ashamed? The completeness of our past is contained, is alive in each and every moment of our present. The fact that I'm just dating a museum follows from, rooted in the wholeness of my past. If anything had happened otherwise, my full life story would be different. .. I hope I might mention a personal memory here concerning the themes. I was a small child when I happened to see a film. In the last shots an ex-Nazi grandfather and his grandchild are visiting a museum that is full of Nazi mementos.
  -- Why do we need museums? -- asks the boy.
  -- So that we should never forget...
• 
  Kimberly Westrope

  This is a bold collection that covers many topics, social issues, and more. Though some of the writing was a bit rough for my tastes, the poet does a very good job of expressing her thoughts and emotions on a wide variety of topics. For the most part, I really enjoyed it.