Amber Tamblyn vs. Beyoncé, or Who gets to call themselves a poet anyway?

Epilogue - Amber Tamblyn

I took a break from writing about the dead
and drinking from writing about the dead
to walk around my childhood neighborhood.
Everything’s for rent. Or for sale, for ten
times the amount it’s worth.

Palm trees are planted in front of a mural
of palm trees under the Ocean Park Bridge.
In the painting, the metal horses of a carousel are breaking
free and running down the beach. Why didn’t I leave

my initials in cement
in front of my parent’s apartment in the eighties?
Nikki had the right idea in ’79.

I walk by a basketball court, where men play
under the florescent butts of night’s cigarette.
I could have been any of their wives,
at home, filling different rooms in different houses
with hopeful wombs. Agreeing on paint color

samples with their mothers in mind.
I’ll bet their wives let their cats go out
hunting at night like premonitions of future sons.
They will worry, stare out the front window,
pray that privilege doesn’t bring home bad news
like some wilted head of a black girl in nascent jaws.

To say nothing of the owl who’s been here for years. I hear him

when I’m trying to write about the deaths I’ve admired.
I hear him when the clothed me no longer recognizes
the naked. I hear him while writing and shitting and sleeping
where my mother’s seven guitars sleep.
I hear him in my parent’s house,
their walls covered in my many faces,
traces of decades of complacence.

My childhood neighborhood is a shrine to my success,
and I’m a car with a bomb inside, ready
to pull up in front of it and stop
pretending.


OK, so taking shots at a celebrity actress’s poem risks being a little cheap.

For the record, I defended Kristen Stewart’s (granted, unfortunately titled) poem “My Heart Is A Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole,” which for all its Beatnik cliché posturing had a guilelessness about it that I ultimately found charming, as well as having some feel for rhythm and phrasing.  “He hit your flint face and it sparked” is a morsel of condensed narrative.

But Amber Tamblyn’s “Epilogue” has been a featured poem of the day on poets.org and is part of a collection newly published by Harper-Collins.  The collection, Dark Sparkler, boasts a foreword by Diane di Prima, back cover plaudits from Sarah Vowell and Quentin Tarantino, as well as artwork by David Lynch and Marilyn Manson.  I don’t begrudge Tamblyn making use of her opportunities.  But clearly, she’s trying to position Dark Sparkler as a serious, mature work, so it should be fair to submit it to a more stringent level of critique.

The book is structured as a series of elegies to actresses, real and fictional, who died young.  It’s an interesting enough subject for a collection of poetry.  “Epilogue,” which closes the volume, is written from Tamblyn’s own perspective, but continues the previous poems’ meditations on fame, choices, and regret.

So where do I start with this poem?

How about the way the image of “the fluorescent butts of night’s cigarette” manages to be both on-the-nose, yet also weirdly amorphous and untethered (what are these supposed to be - stars? street lamps? how are there plural “butts” and only one “cigarette”?).

Even more grating is the poem’s smugness as it sketches out, in image after condescending image, a portrait of suburban life as predictable and passionless – hardly a novel sentiment in the first place, and made even worse by lines like “filling different rooms in different houses/with hopeful wombs.”  This line, meant to convey a connection to other women, comes across instead as false, insincere - reducing the role of mother and wife to a body part, and assuming a confessional stance while also palpably gloating in the poet’s superiority for having escaped such a banal existence.

Elsewhere, the poem too often defaults to rote juxtapositions of male violence and female victimhood or passivity, as in the line, “I’ll bet their wives let their cats go out/hunting at night like premonitions of future sons.”  In the same stanza, the proximity of the word “privilege” to the image of racial and sexual violence (“wilted head of a black girl”) feels calculated rather than compassionate.

This poem may not be worse than so many other preening confessionalist lyrics cluttering up university lit mags across the country.  But it’s pretty bad.  Also, simply by being a prominent, mass market poetry publication, it contributes to the damaging impression that this is all poetry is or should be.  In spite of its pretensions, the poem ultimately has little new or interesting to say about fame.

Then consider the below poem:

Bey the Light - words by Beyoncé, remixed by Forrest Gander

It’s my daughter, she’s my biggest muse.
There’s someone, we all find out soon,
more important than ourselves to lose.

I feel a deep bond with young children –
all those photos in my dressing room –
especially those who’ve been stricken,

Children I’ve met across the years –
they uplift me like pieces of moon,
and guide me, whispering in my ear

I’m turned to spirits, the emotions of others.
And I feel her presence all the time
though I never met my grandmother.

I learned at a very young age,
when I need to tap some extra strength,
to put my persona, Sasha, on stage.

Though we’re different as blue and red,
I’m not afraid to draw from her
in performance, rifts, even in bed.

I saw a TV preacher when I was scared,
at four or five, about bad dreams,
who promised he’d say a prayer

If I put my hand to the TV.
That’s the first time I remember prayer,
an electric current humming through me.

You call me a singer, but I’m called to transform,
to suck up the grief, anxiety, and loss
of those who hear me into my song’s form.

I’m a vessel for all that isn’t right,
for break-ups and lies and double-cross.
I sing into that vessel a healing light.

To let go of pain that people can’t bear.
I don’t do that myself, I call in the light.
I summon God to take me there.

Utopias, they don’t much interest me.
I always mess things up a bit.
It’s chaos, in part, that helps us see.

But for my daughter I dream a day
when no one roots for others to fail,
when we all mean what we say.


This is a strange poem.  It’s arguably much more difficult to like than Amber Tamblyn’s effort. But I also think it’s much richer.

While it may seem structurally straightforward, there is some intricate arranging going on here.  If Amber Tamblyn’s poem somewhat vindicates Robert Frost’s assessment of free verse being like “playing tennis without a net,” “Bey the Light” makes a case for the discipline and peculiar delights of structured forms.

The poem is also tonally quite complex.  The words are Beyoncé’s, so there is a level of sincerity at play – the cultivated air of both glamour and approachability is recognizably hers.  But Forrest Gander’s participation casts the poem at a somewhat ironic remove.  The closing lines - “I dream a day…when we all mean what we say” – could be read as a subtle, ironic acknowledgement of the speaker’s doubled voice.  But even that irony contains a hint of sincerity.  Rather than simply poking fun at Beyoncé’s grandiose self-image, the poem is interested in studying the origins and effects of celebrity’s appeal.  Why do we seem to need pop stars – need them to absorb and reflect our feelings back to us, to succeed and to fail for us, to transform themselves so that we can be transformed?

Invoking the muse as an emblem of inspiration that links the present to a history of creativity going back thousands of years (Beyoncé's daughter is named as a muse in the poem, but Beyoncé herself also acts as a muse for Forrest Gander), the poem turns what could have been a glib, winking spoof into a serious meditation on art and artists.

Plus, parts of the poem are just really beautiful.  In particular, I find the stanzas about the TV preacher strangely moving, managing to hold absurdity and emotional honesty in tension at the same time.

Published last year in CR Fashion Book rather than in any poetry press, “Bey the Light” positions itself very differently than does Amber Tamblyn’s “Epilogue.”  Rather than insisting on itself as legitimate poetry, this poem happily welcomes the ambiguity of its authorship and high/low culture status.  Amusingly, the poem did indeed engender some confusion about what it was and who should be credited for writing it.

If Tamblyn's poem represents what contemporary poetry too often is - narcissistic, jumbled, and overly earnest - Gander's poem (like all good poetry) challenges us to rethink what poetry can be. We need even more poems to be as wild, weird, and out-of-place as this one is.