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Why are my problems / always the worst? // And why / because I wrote that / do you think I don’t believe it?
White Lily is John Emil Vincent’s love note to Louise Glück and Laurie Anderson, two artists inspired and bedevilled by white lilies.
Under their spell the poet dives into parable, fable, received wisdom, compact discs, and ruined utopias like a gleeful truant child. The white lily is ever present - its meanings, messages, and seductive scent. The collection begins with a meditation on Anderson’s song “White Lily” and its treatment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fourteen-hour film Berlin Alexanderplatz. It goes on to ponder whether, if we take them in earnest, our mistakes come to serve as the surest sign of seriousness.
Throughout, Vincent’s poems trouble what’s exact and exacting, always with the white lily as companion, a promise of rebirth delivered in funeral tones.
“John Emil Vincent is a man with three first names: one each for erudition, pique, and hilarity. In these pages – which proceed from homage, from love – you will find many versions of his ardent regard for his friend and teacher Louise Glück. Sometimes he conveys that regard in the form of direct expression (poems about her), sometimes in conversation with or imitation (or mock imitation) of her poems; always he twines together scorching reverence and the internal tussle between breaking away from and accepting, appreciating, a lineage that is both circumstantial and spiritual, intellectual, devotional. Like Glück, Vincent knows the ancients. His Sisyphus’s hands never get free, though: up up up he pushes that rock. Meanwhile, we consider Syphilis (an actual shepherd) and Vicarius (a made-up Roman poet), denizens of White Lily’s irreverent panache. To fully mourn – or, rather, cherish – one must not apotheosize but conjure and reinhabit the congenial, kindred climate of mind. And as Vincent might say, This turns out is fun.” Sally Ball, author of Hold Sway
"White Lily's ironic, minimalistic stanzas sear like incisions across the page. [The book] explores difficult mental states with a frankness that makes Vincent's voice distinct. The poet's strongest collection yet, these poems ask how to make peace with a self one can neither entirely disclose nor entirely escape." Montreal Review of Books