Jen Currin's works

 I'm going to say it outright, I have a hard time reading poetry.
After having written several full-length novels, I think it's safe to say I have a very narrative mind.  I like hearing stories, and I like telling stories.  There's a structure involved that poetry pretty much completely disregards.  Class discussions help open my mind open up to the experience poetry has to offer, but reading it by myself, I feel as though poems are just words on a page, and I'm missing some secret that other people can see.  I'm sure as this class continues, I'll learn more properly how to read a poem, or look for the abstract meanings behind the words, but right now I'd say I look at things more at a face value.
So it is with Jen Currin's poetry in the chapbook, The Ends.  I can't say I drew anything from any of the poems in specific.  I search more for an emotional feeling rather than determining what the author means by combing certain words or phrases  The first few poems for me had a very heavy, high-impact feeling to them. I enjoyed the poem "To Steal Your Bells and Red Animals" especially for this reason.
The fourth stanza in particular is noteworthy,
"Grief has never been so generous. / It lifts its fingers from my mouth / and I am alone."  It seems to summon an image as grief as a physical object, something close.  A lover almost, lying beside the narrator, but even that too leaves them alone. Then, there's nothing but emptiness.  Oh, I don't know.
The last stanza too, summons an emotional experience, but what exactly the poet wishes to convey is lost on me.  All I feel is somber significance.  And I love it.
Something else I do appreciate with poetry is the unique combinations or words and phrases that I as a fiction author would never otherwise see.  Things that would simply not make sense otherwise, even in a dream.  My favorite example of this in the poem "Black Purple," in the last stanza.
"The road is a scarf you wrap around them."
Whoa.  Wow!  It's concrete, it's physical.  A road is something that certainly and painfully exists, and scarves too, but here it's being used in such an impossible sense.  It's crazy!  It's wild!  I don't get it, but I love it!  Is there something to get?  Anyway, there are several examples of similar unique combinations, but that one is my favorite.  It causes me to stutter, almost, as my narrative mind tries to picture what exactly that might look like.
My favorite poem by far was "The Story of the Rifle."  This one is arguably the most narrative out of the entire book, opening with the lines, "They went deeper into their shared delusion / by marrying and having a child."  Right away, in two short lines, lies the plot and background for two complicated, abstract characters.  I want to know more about them, and what exactly makes them delusional, and what brought them together.  The rest of the poem reads somewhat like a short story, ending with the woman telling the child to run away into the forest while she "dreamed of polished rifles."  Even rereading it, and the line before, I wonder if she has already killed the husband, or shortly plans to.  It's an amazing way to convey such a message, and through the way it is written, I think the message is more powerfully delivered in these few short, punctual lines than an three-to-four page short story could have done.
I'd like to see if I can produce something similar...

Maybe I'll figure this poetry thing out after all.