Friends and strangers,
Thank you for subscribing to my TinyLetter–this is the first of hopefully many
emails I’ll write about texts I’m consuming; mostly poetry, but possibly other
media as well (music? video games?). I’m currently in the process of writing
the prospectus for my dissertation, which is tentatively titled Countermapping Arcadian Geographies: Rural
Poetry Community in the Contemporary U.S. That’s due in the fall, and then
I’ll be spending the following academic year doing nothing but working on the
dissertation. This means that I’m spending a good deal of time writing prose
that is academically precise, and while I might do some of that in here, I’m
more interested in writing about poetry in ways that feel loose, improvised,
extemporaneous, etc.
***
So, the first thing I want to talk about is Knar Gavin’s recent chapbook from
the Operating System, Vela. Knar is a
friend I adore, and a thinker/poet I admire, but other than individual pieces
I’ve read in journals, this is the first sustained thing I’ve read by her. It’s
a chapbook about media, animalism, and ecologies, and especially the body – and
the poem – as a kind of archive of divergent temporalities and subjectivities. Formally,
it’s doing a lot of different things, all of which I find exciting; it treats
language as a sonically dense, messy material, but it also feels very invested in
poetic language as a device that can convey images. I find myself thinking of
the work of Joyelle McSweeney, Cathy Wagner, Ariana Reines’ The Cow. My favorite moments in this
chapbook are those where the post-structural mess collides with the imagistic
impulse – the really short poems are especially exceptional in this respect.
Here’s one:
EGGPLANT
What is aubergine
in me seeds
verdant. A ready
multitude I
unmanner and enter
the slopyard
where I lap
and am lapped,
shell and unshell.
Like sulfur so
cannon, detritus
heaving inexhaustible yolk.
This chapbook really hit me at the right time; a lot of it deals with food, animals, and gardening. I’ve been spending the month of June sitting in my yard, working on the garden, stirring the compost, feeding dried mealworms to my chickens. I’ve been working on a book titled The Prelude that, in part, is interested in language as compost; it’s attempting to think about how material can collapse, break down, and shift forms in ways that are sustainable. Knar’s text also asks a question I’ve been thinking about (and I’d imagine that many other folks are thinking about, too): how do we produce creative work in the face of global catastrophe? Do we replicate the crisis in our art? Do we imagine a new world? Are these desires mutually exclusive, and are aesthetic utopias necessarily escapist? Knar writes, “there’s no helping the mouth, so / harden these hands with speech made strange.” Elsewhere: “How can you stay in that other room? / How can you dwell so far outside song?” Good fucking question. I love poems that do this kind of thinking and theorizing. The chapbook includes a Q&A in the back (a feature I really adore about books from the Operating System), and Knar writes, “I want things (words included) to be themselves, yet I know this might mean that they must be(come) other things, too! This is probably why I’m big on soups and stews – I privilege recovery (whether of vegetables or scraps of text over discard, the blurring mélange over the clean ending of the parcel.” I feel this. It’s why I love cooking stews, too (tho I’m not a huge soup guy). I’d add, too, that stew – like Knar’s poetry – resists closure; you can keep adding things to it, and you can stand by it for hours, throwing new things in to see how the tastes and smells change.
**
Related: they just did a vinyl re-press of Mort Garson’s Mother’s Earth Plantasia, an amazing, transcendentally weird and beautiful moog record from 1976 that you’re supposed to play for your plants. I just got my copy in the mail, and it’s spectacular music for gardening, drinking coffee, writing to, etc. Talk about art that attempts to envision other worlds. The vinyl is a gorgeous forest green, and it comes with a really cool booklet, from which I learned that Mort Garson also composed the music for the first Legend of Zelda. The more you know!!! Also, the download card has seeds in it, and is plantable; if anyone wants the download code before I plant it, lemme know. (It’s also on Spotify.)
**
I want to write next about my good friend Liz Bowen’s new chapbook, Compassion Fountain (Hyacinth Girl, 2019). (I promise that this newsletter won’t just me be writing about my friends’ books.) I had the gift of hearing Liz read from this chapbook at a sticky dive bar in Ithaca, where we both held a joint launch party for Compassion Fountain and my recent one, Four Essays. We both read poems that happened to quote the same Carrie Lorig line – a totally unplanned, magical moment. Liz’s chapbook is a gorgeously messy, overflowing evocation of trauma and uncompensated labor, a book whose formal excess makes me think of Lucas de Lima’s Wet Land and, yes, the work of Carrie Lorig. (Btw, if you haven’t read her new one The Blood Barn yet, I highly recommend it.) Anyway, Liz’s chapbook has been sitting in my office for a few weeks now, and I’m so happy to finally have a chance to really dive into it. Liz writes from a discernibly stable poetic “I,” elliptically shifting and morphing across a variety of emotional landscapes – for example, the space of the classroom, as an underpaid graduate instructor; the space of protest, as a person with a disability – but this subject position feels expansive, incomplete, and continually spilling over. Its poetics arises from and is shaped by the impure, in-flux body, rather than trying to transcend it (in this respect, the first poem ends with a delightful fuck-you to Deleuze and Guattari: “the body is with organs and I do believe that / the body is also with labor and rarely paid”). Compassion Fountain is a great title, and it’s also a pretty on-the-nose description of the kind of gendered labor (emotional and otherwise) that Liz’s chapbook describes; that which is taxing, effusive, and above all, often invisible:
the unfortunate truth is i have been kind
to men who have automatic weapons
i have been kind to men who grab their granddaughter’s ass
oh but they do not think i’ve been
kind
Liz’s chapbook is one of my favorite kinds of chapbooks: you can easily read it in one sitting, but you come out of the other side feeling totally emotionally drained. (In a good way.) What I find most startling about this chapbook how it superimposes the dynamic it describes – the forms of labor that are invisible (but essential) to patriarchy and capitalism – onto to the formal mode of address itself. These poems are obsessed with address: Liz frequently includes decontextualized screenshots from text messages; she references specific conversations; she dialogs with Gertrude Stein and Carrie Lorig. The poems themselves often turn towards a powerfully ambiguous “you”:
no you didn’t get that job from your daddy
why would i think that
no it goes without saying
i wanna hear you critique your ex-gf’s blowjobs
why would i not see you are having a Rough Time
i am a compassion fountain
why would you hesitate before my labor
The “you” here feels invocative of actual experiences and conversations, perhaps, but it also feels addressed towards the reader; in either case, the “you” is not a closed-off entity, but rather, a broader ambient force that stands on the margin of the poems (that all poems, perhaps, gesture towards?) as well as broader fucked-up, invisibly embedded social structures. The “I,” again, spills over into the “you.” In one of my favorite part in the text, which I think does an especially good job of showcasing this tendency, there’s a long list poem of various discordant entities, each ending with the word “demon.” Some of them reference specific people: celebrities (“kim and kanye demon”); literary characters (“caddy compson demon”) abusive assholes in the poetry world (“janey smith demon”). Other lines address seemingly specific instances, or personal tendencies (“tabs you can’t bear to look at yet demon”… “weeping on the treadmill demon”). Others even, feel like empathetic addresses directly to the reader: “i’m sorry demon / you’re okay demon / hold yourself demon / blankets and blankets demon / live in the capsule you build for yourself demon.” The list ends like this:
they don’t deserve you demon
don’t love them demon
don’t let them demon
O DEMON
O DEMON
NO
I had to catch my breath after this. It intersects with questions I find myself asking all the time: what ambient demons are outside (and inside) my poems? How does my own subjectivity intersect and shape around them? Am I writing to them, or against them? The act of address is a scary, provocative thing in the context of poetry, which often feels like screaming into nothingness, and which is often – certainly in Liz’s case – a powerful form of emotional labor that’s illegitimate and invisible to mainstream society. But I love poetry that doesn’t want to be legitimate, and instead says Fuck You. That’s one reason I love this book.
**
Okay, this all went on longer than I intended, but I think I’m going to keep
doing this. Plz buy Knar’s and Liz’s chapbooks, they’re great. I’ve also been
re-reading MC Hyland’s fantastic book THE
END (Sidebrow, 2019); I wrote a formal review of this book, so I won’t
describe it at length here, other than to say that it’s really wonderful and
you should read it. Until next time–
xoxo
Mart
Mossy Reviews 
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