"Exactly Full"

The upstairs room of Prairie Lights was nearly full on Friday, February 27th, when Craig Arnold stepped up to the podium. As soon as his mouth neared the microphone he jumped right into the reading, catching the listeners’ attention from the first page. Arnold had an urgency and intensity in his frame when reading his work, but when the piece was over he was relaxed and all smiles. He expressed his happiness to be invited back to Prairie Lights, and it seemed that he had established a small following of his work in the vicinity of Iowa City. He made a few comfortable jokes with the crowd, but didn’t keep them waiting for his next poem.

The poems from his book Made Flesh were full of sensory experiences- those of being “exactly full” or seeing that “students are turning to face you like sunflowers,” which evoked feelings of recognition, a kind of epiphany of familiarity with a new perspective. As he read his poetry, I knew the experiences he was describing, but the words he used framed them in a new way. The poems were also rich with consonance and assonance, making the aural experience alone pleasurable. The audience was silent, but with a look of deep interest holding their expressions. Arnold’s poems had a captivating rhythm driving them forward always, and simple yet powerful lines revealing life’s strange quirks: “…one thing is lost and it taught you nothing,” and the familiar yet disconcerting image of a man possessively “yoking” his arm around his wife’s neck to show she belongs to him, while she sits dejectedly, her makeup seeming too heavy, weighing her down.

After his last poem, the one which the book is titled after, the room had an air of quiet contemplation as the audience considered the experience of hearing Craig read his poetry. After a long pause, Craig joked, “Now we get to stare at each other awkwardly.” When he asked if anyone had a question, only one listener seemed to have the courage. “Why and how do you think poetic form liberates narrative from memory?” Arnold repeated the question and paused, giving it much consideration, and then said that with poetry, one can invent such details as to get the effect he or she wants to capture in the piece. He went on to say that one of the most enticing reasons for him to write in poetic form is because of “the groove,” or the rhythms of poetry and the resulting effect. He has experimented with many styles of meter and rhythm, to name a few; blues, jazz, and a meter in which every line has a different number of beats. When I spoke with him after the reading, he said that he usually works with the meter of his poetry from the beginning. He finds that he has an idea that sets the rhythm for the poem, then works with different lines and makes a sort of map in which he plays around with the order of lines.

Laura Jackson