Review: I IS TO VORTICISM by Ben Mirov (New Michigan Press, 2010)

The poems of Ben Mirov come at you from odd angles. They seem about to tell you something – eat a hamburger, learn to juggle, go to the movies – but surprise you instead. One feeling is ‘[a]nger at the cucumber’ and ‘beer is also a feeling.’ Literary and artistic allusions abound – Max Jacob, Robert Walser, James Tate, Moondog, Tu Fu, Haruki Murakami – yet these poems aren’t freighted like you might expect. They’re light, they move quickly, short efficient lines, spare images in simple language that ask the reader to leap from one line to the next. Though Mirov nowhere mentions him, Tomaz Salamun -- the Slovenian poet who will one year in the near future receive the Nobel Prize -- is a looming influence. Just as Salamun proceeds recklessly through a poem, so too Mirov. In an age when workshops distribute their polished fakery everywhere there is something incontestably courageous in writing a poem that aspires to be nothing less than a sincere and final dishevelment. “No feeling is also a feeling,/a powerful one surrounded by all feelings.” The poem concludes with a wonderful fragment that ‘[f]lows together at 4:17 in the afternoon.’ This seems an allusion to that other wonderful poem about Time’s passing: Frank O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died’. Whereas O’Hara chooses to move his banal catalog of time-ridden duties to that moment where the narrator experiences a grief-filled alertness – and experiences being thrown out of time -- Mirov uses a catalog of timeless instances – narcotic, artistic, poetic, sensual – to remind us suddenly that this flowing outside of Time is nevertheless surrounded by Time: all things flowing together at a specific time in the afternoon. I wish I had Mirov’s facility for producing poems with such grand aristocratic ease – at least this is the way his poems appear to me. I wish I had his material disregard for what a poem should be or sound like. And I wish I had his ability to leap from line to line, to segregate revelation and issue the results sequentially in a way that yet makes a sense. Of his parents Mirov writes: ‘They are so dear to me/like two wolves who raised me/to be nothing like them.’ [6] A group of people playing ultimate Frisbee gives each other high-fives and this is an occasion to wonder about high-fives, what they mean and what happens to them as the occasion for their display recedes: ‘The high-fives continue well into the night, at the bar, thought the intensity of the exchange grows less and less. For some of us the high-fives continue even longer, as we lie alone in bed.’ [23] Loneliness kept at bay is what high-fives are really about. The image is poignant, innocent. It suggests. The prose poem ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ is a collage piece based upon an English textbook for Nepalese students: ‘How many years did the house stand after it was built? […] Did the various automatic machines in the house realize that there was no one home in the house that day? What do you think caused the sickness and death of the dog? What happened to its dead body?’ [20] The original writer was some kind of genius that Mirov discovered and worked on as Lish worked on Carver. And the odd title? It’s given an explanation, of sorts. This collection comes highly recommended.

Another Item From Greying Ghost

An elegancy done

on my behalf by the

great Greying Ghost

of Salem, Mass.

REVIEW OF THE DRUNK SONNETS BY DANIEL BAILEY

---


THE DRUNK SONNETS by Daniel Bailey (Magic Helicopter Press, 2009)

http://http//www.magichelicopterpress.com/drunk.htm

To be drunk is to swing between the poles of malice and beneficence; it is a state wherein the fist is as likely as the feather to make a statement, and subtlety becomes an impossible language no one attends to nor cares anything about. The drunk is dangerous precisely because emotion is tempered only by intemperate recklessness. For the drunk 'a considered opinion' is nothing more than weightless melodrama. At its most extreme, the condition of being drunk renders everything intolerable. And joyfully so. And monstrously so. It is the morning after, as the headache pounds the brain pan to black tissue, and the stomach roils at merest sense of shifting breeze, in which drunkenness leaves an invisible mark in memory: what actually transpired the prior evening is anyone’s guess. We refrain from trying too hard. I said what? I did what? One’s shit eating friends possess the testimony that defines our experience: Dude, you were fucked!

Daniel Bailey has written drunk sonnets, though I do not believe he wrote them while drunk yet even so these wonderful poems suggest much about an inebriated sea, waves moving like mountains above shifting plates. These sonnets, upper case throughout, are direct in their stumbling directness. One reads them and feels a finger jabbing at one’s chest:

I’M A LITTLE HUNGRY BUT DRUNK
I WANT FORGIVENESSS IN A BEEHIVE
LIKE A DOG WITH THE BENDS IN THE ARCTIC
AND COVERED IN ICE FURS

‘Drunk Sonnet 1’

Right from the start these poems establish themselves, uncluttered by any looming vocabulary, they nevertheless draw us in, simple language thick with a kind of bereftness. Which does not want to be anything other than what it is: poetry clothed in love and all of love’s varying confusions. The tone is shifting, we all know why because being in love is being drunk, and being drunk is to be ridiculous even as one proves the measure for what is sublime, lit-up, brilliant, an inward glowing matched by an outward.

There's conscious craft here. These sonnets (there are fifty-three) pay attention to an idea of the sonnet as a formal lyric construction. The first forty-three adhere to a strict form: two stanzas of four lines each, followed by two more stanzas of three lines each, for a total of fourteen lines. From sonnet forty-four on there is a breakdown, of sorts. It’s been a long night, we’re winding down, try as we might everything gets a little shaky.

The drunk imagination might very well be inclusive but it is frequently uninteresting. If you want to hear cornball, really pay attention the next time your friends are wasted and in a confessional mood. I love you, man. Really? I’m not even sure you know who I am? Bailey doesn’t ever resort to imitating the deep banality most of us fall into, or he does indeed resort to imitating this banality but he shores up this tendency with an invigorating high hilarity. Maudlin is dashed in these poems upon the rocks of its own parataxical awareness:

I’M GLAD THAT YOU’RE ALIVE AND DOING WELL
I’D HATE TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE YOU DON’T EXIST
I CAN SAY THAT HONESTLY AND I AM GLAD I DON’T
[HAVE TO LIE
IF YOU KNOW ME, AND I THINK YOU DO, YOU KNOW I’M NOT
[A LIAR

‘Drunk Sonnet 9’

This is special pleading, obvious sentiment, touching if overdramatic but the drunk seldom stays put – alcohol serving as steroid for attention deficit disorder – and Bailey moves him along (‘him’ because I imagine myself in this poem):

EXCEPT WHEN EVERYTHING GOES WRONG IN LIFE
AND I HAVE TO BACK AWAY FOR A LITTLE WHILE
INTO ANOTHER CORNER OF LIFE WHERE I’LL SAY ANYTHING
TO MAKE YOU BELIEVE IN ME RIGHT NOW

SOMETIMES THE ONLY THINGS THAT WORK OUT ARE MUSCLES
AND I GOT A VERY FEW OF THOSE AND IT HURTS
TO SEE YOU DOING WELL AT ALL

OR TO IMAGINE YOU DOING WELL, BUT YOU ARE
BUT I MAKE IT THROUGH THE DAYS
AND THAT’S OK, I THINK, AT LEAST I CAN DO PUSH UPS


Dulled physicality, dulled control over the body, these are aspects of a literal drunkenness. It is a perfect touch that in the midst of confession there occurs an assurance that one is able to perform up to a minimal standard of physical competence. Hand out the Presidential ribbons now. Which is very funny.

The pretty young woman sitting at the next table is reading from Samuel Beckett’s Three Novels and The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. We’re all clichés, even in the matter of things we love.

I don’t want to be someone for whom excess becomes a burden, a noise. I want to be that person for whom love is a matter of importance to living, whatever else I might say or not say about its presence in the small grim skies I often sit under. In the distance I see the thunderhead. I see people hurrying to and fro. They aren’t drunk, aren’t jabbing me in the chest with a finger. They aren't all: LISTEN, BUDDY, YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME! The music isn’t loud SO THAT I MUST SHOUT ABOUT WHAT IT'S LIKE TO WRESTLE WITH LOVE, because there is no music, for once. Perhaps these poems aren’t intended to be my pleasure, yet they are. I have no difficulty placing them beside Ted Berrigan’s SONNETS. (Another love besotted sequence.) In the distance is Petrarch and closer but still at some remove is Shakespeare and his monumental sonnets, that cathedral in words, but I can see it from where I sit, I really can. And this makes perfect sense to me. The compass of the heart aligns itself no matter what, sort of: “I FEEL LIKE A SMALL TRIBE OF HALLELUJAHS/ GETTING SENT UP TONIGHT, STUCK IN THE RAFTERS, ECHOING”.



‘Drunk Sonnet 53’

GATE LEFT OPEN & FOUR GONE ASTRAY

...

LESSER HABITS
I went outside today and looked at the sky for oh about ten minutes. It was clear and high, you could look at it for hours if you had the time. I had to get ready for work. Back inside I got ready to go. Then I did.


THIS IS NOT ANY KIND OF

Vanishing rare that day was. Today is pleasant. Not really. What does it matter what I feel? What you feel? One of those stupid senseless arguments took place today. In my house. The kind of argument you have with someone you love that is full of such animosity. Why are humans like that? Why do we do the things we do? Not learning is what humans do best.

DECIDING TO BE SOMETHING I AM A LAMPOST
I must confess to feeling a great deal more contempt for literature than at any time in my life. Poems seems utterly idiotic to me. Contrived, overwrought, a scaffold made from lies. But I like the imagination going where I will never go in life.


MY HANDS HURT
You reach a certain age and your hands hurt. I’ve worked at manual jobs a lot in my life, the kind of jobs that leave your hands a mess at the end of the work day. It is getting harder for me to type. My fingers are often sore. At times I find myself unable to pick change up from flat surfaces. This is depressing to think about. Growing old isn’t a great pleasure. There is not one thing associated with growing old that is to be looked forward to. Perhaps death. But death isn’t a part of life. We live through other people’s deaths. We don’t live through our own. Perhaps there is a god after all. Have mercy on me, O Inept Maker.

O You Red Wagon Naked In A Geo-political Context

***

My severed!

Lonely, apart!

Rough-edged, bloody!

I bought the milk and eggs like you told me to.

Then I climbed from the river.