Why Why Not

Why/Why Not presents a speaker caught in quandaries created by changing perspectives, fervors, and locales. Why do we act one way here and another there; why can't a mind stay made up; why do we hate and love at the same time; why does memory fade or insist; why does the ordinary seem so uncanny? These questions are captured in lines that collide and merge, in irreverent and offhand jibes, and in plaintive repetitions. Why/Why Not moves across a vivid terrain--the stage of Hamlet, Phillip Marlowe's Los Angeles, Prague, paintings and gardens--to push through a tangle of ways to make sense of the world. Martha Ronk's poetic language is that of the everyday slightly skewed, as if pieces of an ordinary sentence were missing. Ronk's poems use the repetitive and the banal to explore ways in which language is intertwined with thought and experience.

In the perplexities	p. 3
Each had been reading the night before	p. 4
In consequence	p. 5
Causality	p. 6
A rational explanation	p. 7
The placement of things	p. 8
After the dark came	p. 9
Odi et amo 1	p. 10
Odi et amo 2	p. 11
Odi et amo 3	p. 12
Odi et amo 4	p. 13
Why knowing is / (& Matisse's Woman with a Hat)	p. 19
How often, meaning what sort of quandariness	p. 20
The decisions are already past	p. 21
And so geography	p. 22
Hopelessly lost / (& a beach painting by Renoir)	p. 23
It seems the energy	p. 24
If it is someone else's rent / (& van Gogh's The Bedroom)	p. 25
Unable to keep the spill from spilling	p. 26
Trying to move out	p. 27
The cause for wandering	p. 28
In the church with angel heads / (& a portrait of Mary and child)	p. 29
Waking from exhaustion	p. 30
And yet	p. 31
The very insignificance was what	p. 32
Considering the waywardness	p. 33
Avoidance proper is a verb	p. 34
Act3	p. 37
The scene of the crime	p. 38
Anticipation	p. 39
The missing person	p. 40
The missing memory	p. 41
That subject again	p. 42
The remains	p. 43
Bounded in a nutshell	p. 44
A dream itself is but a shadow	p. 45
Mysterious rooms	p. 46
Acting	p. 47
The mother	p. 48
The logic of alphabets	p. 49
Words, words, words	p. 50
The reason for seduction on a maroon couch	p. 51
The point of no return	p. 52
A memory of the pond	p. 53
Photographic proof	p. 54
Ophelia over the pond	p. 55
Explanations beside the point	p. 61
By what means saying I know this or see that	p. 62
I'm told you can't be in the quandary	p. 63
Does it matter why the bell lacks a clapper	p. 64
If I want it to be what was even though I could hardly wait	p. 65
If I say I don't believe you is this impatience	p. 66
The paragraph she gives me to live in is I don't know how	p. 67
Shoes are why every moment is a fact I wish I could	p. 68
Where we'll walk to and why and having learned	p. 69
How forward looking can we be in the midst of the future	p. 70
As a motto go slow ought to work out wondering or not	p. 71
Why in the middle of a perfectly good season	p. 72
Ok it's over she	p. 75
Almost immediately a chance at another	p. 75
When it's an obvious ploy	p. 76
I don't want to know you anymore	p. 76
Moss eats recollection	p. 77
Recall the sea then	p. 77
I'm always in the way	p. 78
Thistles in a sock for the birds	p. 78
It's a covet	p. 79
If love goes on and always does	p. 79
The object is now greener	p. 80
OK so you're creeping along	p. 80
The decision in absentia	p. 81
There's many a slip	p. 81
They all loved nature	p. 82
She's gotten too too	p. 82
No endings or beginnings or anything	p. 83
How can a lemon be a subject of anything	p. 83
Acknowledgments	p. 85
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