Monroe Lawrence, About to Be Young

 

A wish to die, forever
          like Orpheus

Flaking the truth of my
young mouth.

What are the things I—

Nothing, not
family or romantic friends, only

The golden hold of poetry

Golden like a fad
of caring. A bowl of pottery.

I’m very taken with this full-length debut, this book length poem, by Vancouver Island-born Rhode Island-based poet Monroe Lawrence, About to Be Young (The Elephants, 2021), a book that only recently landed on my doorstep. Going back through my files, it is curious to realize that I’ve mentioned Lawrence once before, as one of the winners of The Capilano Review’s sixth annual Robin Blaser Poetry Award [see my note on such here], although there doesn’t seem to be an acknowledgments of poems published elsewhere in the collection, so I’m unable to tell if that winning poem included here. About to Be Young is composed as a small, compact, fragmented and expansive book-length poem, set as more accumulation than narrative, offering a fresh way of approach both the lyric and the line through which the long poem is held. “Please, I felt broken / away, / Resisting to write out / in the other room,” they write, a third of the way through the collection, “I could / held my book at my side, leaned / Back / and cried [.]” There’s something of the larger structure, the syntax, of this book-length lyric that leans closer to the French long poem tradition; American poet and translator Cole Swensen is thanked in the acknowledgments, which makes me suspect that the influence on Lawrence is a conscious one. The lyric of About to Be Young seems far closer to the work of Emmanuel Hocquard than to, say, the work of Robin Blaser, Robert Kroetsch or Jack Spicer. “I cannot fit          inexpressiveness / Snowing my mouth,” Lawrence writes, offering moment upon moment of sparkling grace. There’s a blend of abstract, large canvas and lyric declaration he offers through these poems, one more focused on tone and accumulation than straightforward thought. Each moment, stands; and accumulates, into the sum of something greater, other. Or, as one page offers, singularly:

            the curled elegance        of a receipt

The collection sets itself in a frame of experience, of listening, of seeing, and being seen; the poem frames itself through familial love, including a repeated fragment used to close the collection, set after the acknowledgments, the author biography:

Oh I love my mom
And dad so much upon waking:
& my best friend Lee       upon waking