Fred Schmalz, Action in the Orchards

AFTER ETEL ADNAN

I would like to wander

amid the heavens’ explosions

a mountainous country’s

nomadic art immaterial

if learned by heart

you move all the time

taking nothing with you

to meet the poets

from Kandahar and Kabul

replace philosophy

condensed essentially

says most at highest speed

sensed before thought

sometimes in the evening

after a party you go

into something ephemeral

the road to the city

accompanying Jew’s harp

a strange attentiveness

reprograms us

to think through the thing

and by looking

deal thought

a blow for colors

as a means to say

what I can’t

otherwise thoughts form

the core of objects

those shoes are blue

impossible to discuss

which is where

I have always been

sensitive to the weather

as such

yesterday I barely left bed

my body crumpled organ by organ

this is my deformity

interspatial comet crossing

stints as sleeper and slept

weeper and wept over

clocks can be fixed

there is no easy way to maintain

interest in the eternal

From Chicago writer and artist Fred Schmalz comes the utterly charming full-length poetry debut, Action in the Orchards (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2019), a collection of poems that very pointedly seeks to respond to the question of what artists of any kind should be doing (the answer, it would seem, is very simple: make art). Given the wealth of conversations and subjects poetry has been exploring a bit more lately, that answer might appear rather obvious, and yet, the question of what a poem can do, specifically, is one that is as old as writing itself. If, as Auden wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, perhaps the answer is entirely in emphasis: poetry makes nothing happen.

I like very much what the poems in this collection are doing. Schmalz’s halts and hesitations are composed with quiet confidence, rhythmically staggered and playful. “[T]his is the nature of invitation,” he writes, in the poem “POSTCARD FROM THE COUNTRYSIDE”: “it makes me feel / like a horse / in line for bread [.]” Or there is the poem “I AM A CAMERA,” a piece that feels entirely constructed out of singular phrases that may or may not connect, and in the end, accumulate, writing: “The look of the eyes is not love. / Nor is it a sixth sense. She remembered / my attention to conflict. I have a heart / defenseless by night. The hour came / and passed. Bravery did no good. / I supposed points of resemblance // were: pupil, curtain, light switch, / word play. An absolute dream / shocks. See you later.”