{"id":173852,"date":"2026-06-11T10:00:45","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T14:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=173852"},"modified":"2026-06-11T12:19:59","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T16:19:59","slug":"what-is-poetry-chelsey-minniss-frying-pan-full-of-diamonds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/06\/11\/what-is-poetry-chelsey-minniss-frying-pan-full-of-diamonds\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Poetry? Chelsey Minnis\u2019s Frying Pan Full of Diamonds"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Seth Lemmons, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY 2.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Early on in Opera Fever<\/em>, her newest collection of poetry, Chelsey Minnis asks: \u201cIs this a poem or the back of a shovel?\u201d\u2014something 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 \u201creal,\u201d yet this effect was achieved through surreal German Expressionist-influenced artifice. Noir is highly stylized\u2014chiaroscuro lighting, rain-slicked streets, hard-boiled speech\u2014and yet it is one of the twentieth century\u2019s great visual languages for representing \u201creality.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I first became interested in literature at fourteen, I was obsessed with realism in the form of \u201cauthenticity.\u201d Writing, I thought, was self-expression. The more \u201chonest\u201d it was\u2014and the more devoid of \u201cunnecessary\u201d flourish\u2014the 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 \u201creal\u201d was the archvirtue. But the older I got, the more \u201crealness\u201d 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<\/em>, increasingly felt like an elaborate construction that used \u201cauthenticity\u201d as a kind of crutch. Every so-called realism implicitly made claims about what counted as real, and what didn\u2019t. But more obviously artificial modes know what noir\u2019s aestheticized \u201crealism\u201d inadvertently shows: that the world isn\u2019t simply there,<\/em> but stylized into visibility.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u22c6\u02d9\u27e1\u02d9\u22c6\u02d9\u27e1 \u02d9\u22c6<\/p>\n

My youthful view might be forgiven, considering that many foremost practitioners of literature seem to agree that poetry is rooted, more or less, in \u201cauthentic\u201d feeling.<\/p>\n

\u201cPoetry,\u201d Wordsworth wrote, \u201cis the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rilke counseled Franz Xaver Kappus, a young poet, to \u201cWrite about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts \u2026 with fervent, quiet, and humble sincerity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPoetry,\u201d Robert Frost later offered, \u201cis when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.\u201d<\/p>\n

But for Chelsey Minnis, poetry is \u201ca frying pan full of diamonds\u201d and \u201chumorous like a crotch sparkle.\u201d It is \u201clike lickable mink\u201d; \u201clike crying while trying on different outfits\u201d; \u201cmeat colored candy\u201d; \u201ca black letter in a black envelope,\u201d \u201clike getting your cage pushed from room to room\u201d; \u201ca fresh sheep\u2019s heart in a mirrored box.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u22c6\u02d9\u27e1\u02d9\u22c6\u02d9\u27e1 \u02d9\u22c6<\/p>\n

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\u2014the 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<\/em>, takes its title. With relatively few key words\u2014fur<\/em>, poem<\/em>, baby<\/em>, love<\/em>, among others\u2014her 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 \u201clike waking up drunk in a lemon yellow room\u201d or \u201clike being slapped with a fish.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Zirconia <\/em>(2001) establishes the linguistic and thematic tropes that still occupy her: sex, violence, glamour. The speaker in one poem opines:<\/p>\n

someone should knock me down\u2026and press me against blue tile\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026. \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026and shuck\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026..a gold sheath off me\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.\u2026..\u2026\u2026\u2026.and push\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026 \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026 \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026..a shiny buzzer\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.to make me slide down a glistening chute\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In her second collection, Bad Bad <\/em>(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\u2019s status as an activity of leisure and object of luxury: \u201cPoetry careers are a bad business\u2026\u201d (#2); \u201cI would rather have a Gucci bag than a poem\u2026\u201d (#6); \u201cIf poetry is dead\u2026then good.\u201d (#9). As in Zirconia<\/em>, pages at a time are made up primarily of ellipses. These poems never let one forget that one is reading a poem<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Poemland <\/em>(2009) extends this metapoetic conceit, repeatedly redescribing poetry with imagistic metaphors: \u201cThis is a cut-down chandelier\u2026\u201d; \u201cThis is a seeping crystal\u2026\u201d; \u201cThis is soft baby clumsiness\u2026 \/ And the balls roll loudly across the floor\u2026\u201d The \u201cThis\u201d that repeats across each page slips between the poem, writing the poem, and poetry itself. The cover of Poemland <\/em>doesn\u2019t display the author\u2019s name, only a barcode against a backdrop of bright pink fur. Baby, I Don\u2019t Care <\/em>(2018) shifts Minnis\u2019s focus to the conventions of romance. Like poetry, love, in Minnis\u2019s work, is not deep feeling but inherited, theatrical speech. The collection repurposes Turner Classic Movie lines, film noir, and other Old Hollywood tropes. \u201cDarling, pull yourself together.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re a tigerskin rug of a man.\u201d \u201cI am a thing. A thing to be loved!\u201d<\/p>\n

Her most recent collection, Opera Fever<\/em>, 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<\/em>, the antipoetic self-awareness of Bad Bad<\/em>, the recursive ars poetica of Poemland<\/em>, and the cinematic address of Baby, I Don\u2019t Care<\/em>. Everything returns with a kind of late-style grandeur. Her speaker loves \u201cwith a vileness. . . \/ And all the nuance of uranium. .\u201d Death is a \u201cmirrored headboard\u201d; \u201ca man with doll\u2019s eyes. .\u00a0 \/ And everyone topless in diamond necklaces. . .\u201d Luxury objects, gendered violence, fake-old-movie-sounding dialogue, commentary on poetry itself\u2014all are raised to the level of opera: more melodramatic, more death-haunted, more musical, more artificial.<\/p>\n

In all her poems, language has an immediate effect that is perhaps even more important than its literal meaning. It\u2019s vital and surprising. Every poem has an electric, I-want-to-share-this-right-now quality. \u201cMinnis is endlessly quotable,\u201d Dwight Garner writes in his New York Times<\/em> review of Baby, I Don\u2019t Care<\/em>, \u201cso one has to work hard not to quote her endlessly.\u201d But then: \u201cSometimes the only way to talk about this poet is to let her talk.\u201d I\u2019d like to let her talk here, too. Here is an excerpt from Opera Fever<\/em>:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t go around popping balloons with my cigarette. . .
\nI like to look at you through my drink. . .
\nI never wrote anything on a mirror with lipstick. . .
\nI sat at my abandoned poetry booth. .
\nWhile autumn burned down like scenery<\/p>\n

Do you think poetry is mud on your pillow?
\nFor someone very deserving of flavored syrup. . .
\nWhat do you want with a lot of filthy roses?
\nI loved you like a floating explosive. . .
\nSo I wrote a letter with a broken clasp. .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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: \u201cEvery great and original writer \u2026 must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s ironic, and \u2026 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 \u201cemotion recollected in tranquility.\u201d They are \u201clike a clear vinyl raincoat over you.\u201d The thing is, \u201cyou can still be stabbed through the raincoat.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Jordan Castro is the author of the novels<\/em>\u00a0Muscle Man\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0The Novelist. He is the deputy director of the Cluny Institute<\/em>\u00a0and is on the board of the DiTrapano Foundation of Literature and the Arts.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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