by Matt McBride
Though the work we receive here at Cincinnati Review is always eclectic, we do occasionally notice odd trends in what comes over the transom. Here are two that have cropped up lately.
Poems, including a sestina, about Lady Gaga: This is, we suppose, not surprising. It’s just the way the world is headed. In fact, there’s a proposal in Congress right now to do away with the outdated practice of putting the stern, gnarled faces of dead presidents on our currency and replace them with covers from Lady Gaga albums. “Could I get four The Fame’s for a The Fame Monster?” we’ll ask shopkeepers. A new epoch will be born. 1986, the year of Gaga’s birth, will become year 0, and every subsequent year will be followed by AG, or “After Gaga.” Soon we’ll have an inability to read anything BUT stories and poems about Lady Gaga. “This character isn’t very believable,” we’ll say in workshops. “Instead of being an elderly Cuban fisherman pulled out to sea by a large marlin, could he be, say, a twenty-something pop star wearing a dress made out of Kermit the Frog dolls?”
Ekphrastic poems: Now this trend is a bit harder to understand. Don’t get us wrong, an ekphrastic poem, when pulled off, can make both the referenced artwork and the poem resonate, like in a Lady Gaga/ Elton 
John duo. However, the writer also runs the risk of the two being awkwardly juxtaposed, merely existing in the same space without really illuminating each other, like in an Elton John/ Shania Twain duo. Ekphrasic poetry “works” when art is the lens as opposed to what’s observed. Keat’s “Ode on Grecian Urn” excels not because it gives us a lifeless description of an urn but because the urn leads to a description of life.
Of course, all this isn’t to discourage you from sending us your “Ode on Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’”; it’s just a reminder to writers that for all the expensive stages and iambic baselines, it’s what Gaga sees through those rhinestone sunglasses that’s poetry.
