Seth Lemmons, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Early on in Opera Fever, her newest collection of poetry, Chelsey Minnis asks: “Is this a poem or the back of a shovel?”—something that can literally take off the back of your head. This January, I read a dozen or so noir novels from the thirties and forties. People were smothered with towels, bludgeoned in bathtubs, beaten to death with glass decanters, and killed by stray bullets at dance marathons. Some weeks, I watched a noir film every night. I watched YouTube videos about noir. Noir, one video explained, was a reaction to the Depression and the war: it gave form to a cynical vision of American life, depicting an amoral and violent world that many had come to think of as the dark reality underlying ordinary experience. The darkness feels revelatory and “real,” yet this effect was achieved through surreal German Expressionist-influenced artifice. Noir is highly stylized—chiaroscuro lighting, rain-slicked streets, hard-boiled speech—and yet it is one of the twentieth century’s great visual languages for representing “reality.”

When I first became interested in literature at fourteen, I was obsessed with realism in the form of “authenticity.” Writing, I thought, was self-expression. The more “honest” it was—and the more devoid of “unnecessary” flourish—the better. I liked Kmart realism and so-called alt-lit, in which authors expressed their bleak worldviews simply, in a seemingly unmediated manner. I listened to rap music, where being “real” was the archvirtue. But the older I got, the more “realness” as an aesthetic value felt pale and inadequate, if not deluded and impossible. Art that had once seemed to me, naively, to express real life, increasingly felt like an elaborate construction that used “authenticity” as a kind of crutch. Every so-called realism implicitly made claims about what counted as real, and what didn’t. But more obviously artificial modes know what noir’s aestheticized “realism” inadvertently shows: that the world isn’t simply there, but stylized into visibility.

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My youthful view might be forgiven, considering that many foremost practitioners of literature seem to agree that poetry is rooted, more or less, in “authentic” feeling.

“Poetry,” Wordsworth wrote, “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Rilke counseled Franz Xaver Kappus, a young poet, to “Write about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts … with fervent, quiet, and humble sincerity.”

“Poetry,” Robert Frost later offered, “is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

But for Chelsey Minnis, poetry is “a frying pan full of diamonds” and “humorous like a crotch sparkle.” It is “like lickable mink”; “like crying while trying on different outfits”; “meat colored candy”; “a black letter in a black envelope,” “like getting your cage pushed from room to room”; “a fresh sheep’s heart in a mirrored box.”

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What is poetry? Chelsey Minnis has been asking and answering this question since 2001. For the past twenty-five years, she has waged a sustained assault on the ideology of poetic sincerity—the belief that poetry becomes more truthful as it becomes more emotionally direct. Hers is one of the most exciting and ambitious contemporary literary projects that I know of. Her poems are blackly comic and hypnotically dense, filled with jarring juxtapositions and metaphors; they pressurize language until it becomes shiny and sharp, like the synthetic diamond from which her first collection, Zirconia, takes its title. With relatively few key words—fur, poem, baby, love, among others—her poetry achieves what all great poetry achieves: the creation of a world, with its own internal energy and logic, that permits nothing outside it, and feels new again upon rereading. Self-aware and playful, many of her poems describe themselves. They are “like waking up drunk in a lemon yellow room” or “like being slapped with a fish.” Feelings appear most authentically when dressed up in diamonds and fur. Minnis exposes poetic sincerity as a genre convention, then replaces it with a more honest fakery.

Zirconia (2001) establishes the linguistic and thematic tropes that still occupy her: sex, violence, glamour. The speaker in one poem opines:

someone should knock me down…and press me against blue tile……………. ………….……………………………………and shuck……………………..a gold sheath off me………………………………………………………….…..……….and push………….……………………… …………………………………………………… ………………………………………………..a shiny buzzer…………………………………………………….to make me slide down a glistening chute…………………

In her second collection, Bad Bad (2007), the conventions of the genre are foregrounded only to be perverted. The book includes no less than sixty-eight prefaces, many of which emphasize poetry’s status as an activity of leisure and object of luxury: “Poetry careers are a bad business…” (#2); “I would rather have a Gucci bag than a poem…” (#6); “If poetry is dead…then good.” (#9). As in Zirconia, pages at a time are made up primarily of ellipses. These poems never let one forget that one is reading a poem.

Poemland (2009) extends this metapoetic conceit, repeatedly redescribing poetry with imagistic metaphors: “This is a cut-down chandelier…”; “This is a seeping crystal…”; “This is soft baby clumsiness… / And the balls roll loudly across the floor…” The “This” that repeats across each page slips between the poem, writing the poem, and poetry itself. The cover of Poemland doesn’t display the author’s name, only a barcode against a backdrop of bright pink fur. Baby, I Don’t Care (2018) shifts Minnis’s focus to the conventions of romance. Like poetry, love, in Minnis’s work, is not deep feeling but inherited, theatrical speech. The collection repurposes Turner Classic Movie lines, film noir, and other Old Hollywood tropes. “Darling, pull yourself together.” “You’re a tigerskin rug of a man.” “I am a thing. A thing to be loved!”

Her most recent collection, Opera Fever, published in April by Wave Books, achieves a total synthesis of all her work so far. It gathers her major materials and sharpens them: the damaged glamour of Zirconia, the antipoetic self-awareness of Bad Bad, the recursive ars poetica of Poemland, and the cinematic address of Baby, I Don’t Care. Everything returns with a kind of late-style grandeur. Her speaker loves “with a vileness. . . / And all the nuance of uranium. .” Death is a “mirrored headboard”; “a man with doll’s eyes. .  / And everyone topless in diamond necklaces. . .” Luxury objects, gendered violence, fake-old-movie-sounding dialogue, commentary on poetry itself—all are raised to the level of opera: more melodramatic, more death-haunted, more musical, more artificial.

In all her poems, language has an immediate effect that is perhaps even more important than its literal meaning. It’s vital and surprising. Every poem has an electric, I-want-to-share-this-right-now quality. “Minnis is endlessly quotable,” Dwight Garner writes in his New York Times review of Baby, I Don’t Care, “so one has to work hard not to quote her endlessly.” But then: “Sometimes the only way to talk about this poet is to let her talk.” I’d like to let her talk here, too. Here is an excerpt from Opera Fever:

I don’t go around popping balloons with my cigarette. . .
I like to look at you through my drink. . .
I never wrote anything on a mirror with lipstick. . .
I sat at my abandoned poetry booth. .
While autumn burned down like scenery

Do you think poetry is mud on your pillow?
For someone very deserving of flavored syrup. . .
What do you want with a lot of filthy roses?
I loved you like a floating explosive. . .
So I wrote a letter with a broken clasp. .

Because each collection works as a whole, her work is difficult to render well out of context, and difficult to write about. Another Wordsworth quote comes to mind: “Every great and original writer … must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.”

Minnis stages a world in which feeling is manufactured through inherited aesthetic forms. Through a kind of alchemy of artifice, she illuminates the depth and the transcendence of the surface, and creates a fugue in which images glitter, collide, and collapse: love is violence, and poetry is artifice, and love is artifice, and violence is poetry, everything’s ironic, and … what emerges is an esoteric system of near symbols in which image and impression, simile and sensation merge into a dazzling, demented, often hilarious performance. Her poems are not “emotion recollected in tranquility.” They are “like a clear vinyl raincoat over you.” The thing is, “you can still be stabbed through the raincoat.”