Buck Downs, OPEN CONTAINER

thrive all night

funny dealing in the ace

a forward drift

      from stable to stable

I tapped out a mind map

of my career

   in a history

      of old phone numbers

failed educator

       entertainer

failed entertainer

      guess how much

I want to know

      as much as I get lit

making repairs

and doing maintenance

on the light

I should be ashes

      I must be almost

      invisible by now

On the heels of his selected poems, Unintended Empire: 1989-2012 (Baltimore MD: Furniture Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], comes Washington, D.C. poet Buck Downs’ self-published OPEN CONTAINER (Washington DC: privately printed, 2019). There is something about the poems in OPEN CONTAINER—continuing the work of his publishing writing to date—akin to the format of the “day book,” sketching out short diary entries of a life lived in poetry. Somehow more along the lines of Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days” sequence than, say, the life-long work of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, Downs’ OPEN CONTAINER articulates moments and scenes as a continuous roll of days, thinking and experiences. While he might not mark the dates, these poems do seem to follow the progress of a life related to the “I did this, I did that” of New York School poet Frank O’Hara, but more abstract; again, not poems composed from a life, but a life in poetry, entirely shaping a life out of language and thinking.