AT
SUNRISE
Instead of meditating, I
mop
the floors and
hallways.
To prevent downloading
free
music, Dutch cable
companies
obtain a court order to
block
access to the pirate
bay.
In fancy gyms across
the city,
people steal from each
other,
yuppie-on-yuppie crime
while musicians and
night
workers seek the quiet
dim
of dark apartments. At
sunset,
I switch on the parking
lights
and run upstairs to
pee,
hoping the police won’t
notice. Then I circle
around
block after block,
finally
finding a tiny spot
between
B and C, in front of
the yuppie
building with a
doorman,
a doorman’s sole
purpose,
so they say, to provide
security.
In
the acknowledgments of New York poet Barbara Henning’s newest collection, A Day Like Today (Mobile AL: Negative Capability Press, 2015), the first real experience I’ve had with her writing, she
writes that “These poems were composed from daily one page journal entries
written in 2012. Many thanks to the New
York Times writers (2012) for words and phrases collaged into the poems.” Henning’s
compositional method has created a collection of densely-packed daybook-collage
lyric capsules, managing to contain an incredible amount of information down
the length of each page, as well as a great deal of breathable space between
each line (which allow her poems not to collapse beneath their own weight). Bouncing
from point to point to point, the shape and the tenor of her poems is
reminiscent of the cadence of a number of poems by Cobourg, Ontario poet Stuart Ross, sans his trademark surrealism, as she allows the poems to end up far from
the beginning, but still managing a somehow-coherent thread despite the
tangents and leaps. Constructed in five sections—“Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer,” “Fall”
and back to “Winter”—Henning’s poetic diary reads, in parts, as arbitrary as
Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days” sequence; less interested in temporally
placing the poems per se than allowing the random elements of her source
material during those periods direct a certain degree of each poem’s movements.
One might ask, are the section-headers meant to add or distract, or have they
no purpose at all but as reportage itself, letting the reader know in which
season each poem began? And yet, other poems do read as reports on specific
activity, whether writing that “In the graveled garden / behind Unnameable
Books / Patricia Spears Jones / is reading her poems.” (“UNNAMEABLE”), or that “I
met Lewis for lunch / at Angelica’s. We eat wee / dragon bowls with mu tea. /
Then I bike over to Santo’s / in the rain to make copies / of my poetic prose
book.” (“I MEET LEWIS / FOR LUNCH”).
NEW
YEAR’S EVE
Mr. Zlobin writes a
book
about Americans and how
we
interrogate complete
strangers.
Two men interrogate a
woman,
one in gentle, soothing
tones,
while the other fires
staccato
bursts of accusatory
questions.
Her husband is reading
a magazine
called Wired when she repeats
her question. He snarls
and
commands that she be
still.
To issue spoken
commands
on most Androids, you
must
tap the microphone
gently.
In Russia, children are
raised
by their grandmothers.
An average mother would
never
dream of leaving her
child
with a teenager. She
says
it seems as if he doesn’t
care
about her. He stands up
in a wild sea storm in
the Gulf
of Alaska, where a
Shell Oil
drilling rig runs
aground
with 139,000 gallons
of diesel fuel. The unified
command will be
monitoring
the situation. It’s
midnight
with fireworks when he
walks
out while his wife is
pleading
with him to stay. Frankenstein’s
monster on occasion
turns
out to be rather sweet.
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