Universal Concerns by Carlene Gadapee

Tiny Extravaganzas
By Diane Mehta
Arrowsmith Press 2023
113 pages

Art is love modeled in experience
from Diane Mehta’s “Pot-Pourri À Vaisseau, from Sèvres”

Diane Mehta’s overall approach to her subject matter in Tiny Extravaganzas compels the reader to engage with her unique focus on language. Of particular interest is Mehta’s employment of invention and diction; she invites the reader to consider language and image in new ways. Mehta’s use of the long, flexible line recalls the work of Whitman; this is an interesting juxtaposition/connection/ “conversation” within the poetic tradition. Her dialogue with poets of tradition, and the many ekphrastic poems in this collection, bring us all into the conversation with works of art, music, and language.

In “Plum-Cake,” the poet’s language and diction choices push the reader ever-so-gently into new experiences. Nouns become verbs, and sounds manifest images in surprising ways. The subject matter is grief and mourning-practices, and the poem opens with the speaker stating that she’d make a plum-cake upon the death of a loved one, a “lamentation grief-bake, kaddish though blood-recipe, / all of its colors shrieking at me….” What an image! Working out grief through a labor of love, a practice familiar and also reinvested with meaning. The speaker says she is “not to be purple-plum-decided in any still life of grief,” but yet, the poem becomes a painting, but one that has a musicality as well: “plum cake wake” brings us to the end of the poem, where the reader learns that the speaker did not make the cake after all; the poem is enough.

The poem “There Was a Place” is a lovely lyric/pastoral poem, one that reads as both elegiac and contemplative, with rich language and images throughout. The setting is both specific and elemental: it is a lake with hemlocks, but it is also an interior landscape as well. In the latter third of the poem, the speaker says,

All I want is exactly what I’ll never be.
When I am gone, in the thistle and fern-grass by the road,
some afternoon on a shady trail, you will remember
how we climbed down by the hemlock strand to the rock
of the steady world I left.

 Immediately, one can hear Whitman in verse 52 of “Song of Myself,” from Leaves of Grass: 

 I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

 When poems talk to one another, intentionally or not, within the poetic tradition, one does well to sit up and take note. There are universal concerns at work.

Another poem that recollects and gives a nod to Whitman is “Ode to Patrick Kearns, Funeral Director of the Leo F. Kearns Funeral Home in Queens.” Not only is the form of the poem built with long, flexible, muscular lines, but the subject matter also seems Whitmanesque—overwhelming carnage and a national, politically-divisive crisis. Mehta’s poem honors the grueling and ghastly task faced by so many during the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic. The speaker invokes the spirit of Whitman, saying,

We move from cell to fingers, toes,
our footprint handprint fingerprint alone identifies us as one
person in this widening morgue; you men and women of generations,
ever upward, we say now; if Whitman could, he’d hold us dear,
our arms, our feet, our hands, our fingerprinted fingers wrapped in his--

 The language is almost transcendent, in that the images created transcend the grim reality that is the subject matter. The speaker describes “yellow oaks deliriously blooming / despite the trill of siren after siren to the east” and “cardinals flying / straight up into that vanishing we are all doing now, / minding our eternities….” The poem concludes with this sobering thought:

When we are all accounted for, someone will surely say:
Unevenly I conclude we count facts because we cannot lose our minds
in facts; we lose them in the vivid air, thousands elsewhere.

As a poetry collection, Tiny Extravaganzas is also replete with ekphrastic poetry; this is of particular interest because of the beautiful internal/external consideration of the relationships among art, music, and language. These poems, at least in part, grew out of Mehta’s artistic residency in Italy, which she speaks about at length in her interview with M.P. Carver. There are so many lovely poems in this collection; some contemplate works of art or music that are familiar, and others do what good poems often do—they send the reader on a journey of discovery. The poem recounts the poet-speaker’s experience of seeing Fra Angelico’s Annunciation for the first time as a young woman of nineteen. The speaker brings us into the internal contemplation as well, first by describing the composition and artistic choices made in the creation of the painting, but then, by finding personal insights derived from the experience as well, that “being / inside what you are seeing is as immediate as truth gets. / This was the story of my body, and all women’s bodies, to give, / life and liveliness to thoughts.” The internalization of the experience of seeing the painting is transformative. By turning immediately thereafter to the discussion of the painting from a technical point of view, we are also shifted from the interiority of the experience. This is a deft choice on Mehta’s part, as it creates a volta in the poem without being jarring. But then, we return to the external, then internal, experiences when the speaker says, “In the act of viewing, you enter the orbit of the composition.” Again, this creates a careful shift in perspective for the reader, reminding us that this poem is operating on more than one plane. The speaker focuses on the images of Mary and the angel Gabriel, and Mary’s fear and expectation—which the speaker connects with her own contemplations: “the conclusion I was left with then / and now is how awesome and preposterous it is, the workings of the body….” The poem ends with a universal observation that is drawn from the art, the speaker’s interiorizing of the experience, and women’s history, that we who are not in the picture are “waiting / …to discover that truth is the story of our lives, and it exists on a grid; lines hold our compositions together, / …and the imagined futures constructed inside the lines / trace the actions of our mothers, their sturdiness of heart.”

Another ekphrastic poem that speaks to a poet of tradition is “The Mad Pursuit,” which draws upon John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats’ poem is well-known and often quoted; that said, Mehta’s poem focuses on the personal questions that arrive in connection with the original poem. Mehta is a master-craftsperson as well; this short poem borrows Keats’ language, but also depends largely on external and internal rhyme, unlike most of the other poems in this collection. She uses such phrases from the “Ode” as “still unravished,” the titular phrase, “mad pursuit,” and “happy, happy love,” which might resonate with her readers. This intentional homage feels comfortable; we know the Keats poem, and by making the obvious connections, Mehta is able to shift with an abrupt volta that questions the original poem: “You’ll say I’m arguing that we’re nearly too far gone / but aren’t we? The evermore invaders raped so fast, / the women broke in half….” Again, Mehta is referencing the historical fate of women with her conclusion to this poem, saying, “…we litigate truth / and lose; we wait to be ravished. I sit by the shore and yell.” One could posit that this is the role of the poet, as Mehta sees it; to call into question what art has shown women’s roles to be, and why do we still call it beauty?

Mehta is also deeply involved with music, which is evident in not only her careful crafting of sonic elements in her poems, but in some of the poems themselves. In “Landscape with Double Bow,” the use of specific terminology from the world of music is the conceit used to build the poem. It is lushly beautiful in its expansive language as well: “wouldn’t it be grand…/ to drink the velvet sun/ from the arbor trellis; fruit-of-purple grapes we plucked-- / bunches of dolce to color our throats…” and there are small nods to musical terms like “grape-notes.” Mehta’s speaker says that the other in the poem used a double-bowed instrument to “choose a way to hear the world and harvest sound in it—.” This is precisely what Diane Mehta does in her poems as well.

Language that shimmers and reinvents, words that challenge and direct the reader’s attention, lush settings and private musings—these are all foundational components in Diane Mehta’s work, Tiny Extravaganzas. One must finally argue: they are not tiny, they are the world made tangible, cracked open, reimagined, dusted and shined for us to experience as well.

A poet-teacher both by vocation and by trade, Carlene M. Gadapee’s poetry and critical reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including English Journal, Waterwheel Review, Gyroscope Review, Smoky Quartz, Think, Allium, Vox Populi, and MicroLit Almanac. Carlene also received a “Best of the Net” nomination in 2023. Her chapbook, What to Keep, will be released by Finishing Line Press in early 2025. Carlene lives and works in northern New Hampshire.