Adrian Lürssen, Human Is to Wander

 

Between I and you comes
a sounding out against

picture frames, chanting in exchange
for landscape. She spoke

as if underwater: Here
is a map. Here, a spoonful

of honey. Lying in wait,
the curious air of a genie

unhindered by voice,
she was indifferent

as smoke and driftwood. (“NO LONGER A MOTHER TONGUE”)

Born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa and then Washington D.C., San Francisco Bay Area-based poet Adrian Lürssen’s full-length debut is the poetry collection Human Is to Wander (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2022), as selected by Gillian Conoley for the 2022 Colorado Poetry Prize. As I wrote of his chapbook earlier this year, NEOWISE (Victoria BC: Trainwreck Press, 2022), a title that existed as an excerpt of this eventual full-length collection, Lürssen’s poems and poem-fragments float through and across images, linking and collaging boundaries, scraps and seemingly-found materials. Composed via the fractal and fragment, the structure of Human Is to Wander sits, as did the chapbook-excerpt, as a swirling of a fractured lyric around a central core. “in which on / their heads,” he writes, to open the sequence “THE LIGHT IS NOT THE USUAL LIGHT,” “women carried water / and mountains // brought the sky / full circle [.]”

The book is structured as an extended, book-length line on migration and geopolitics, of shifting geographies and global awareness and globalization. He writes of war and its effects, child soldiers and the dangers and downside of establishing boundaries, from nations to the idea of home; offering the tragedies of which to exclude, and to separate. “The accidental response of any movement,” he writes, to open the poem “ARMY,” “using yelling instead of creases as a / means to exit. Or the outskirts of an enemy camp.” Set in three lyric sections, Lürssen’s mapmaking examines how language, through moving in and beyond specifics, allows for a greater specificity; his language forms akin to Celan, able to alight onto and illuminate dark paths without having to describe each moment. “A system of killing that is irrational or rational,” he writes, to open the poem “SKIRT,” “depending on the training.” As the same poem concludes, later on: “It is a game of answers, this type of love.” Lürssen’s lyrics move in and out of childhood play and war zones, child soldiers and conflations of song and singer, terror and territory, irrational moves and multiple levels of how one employs survival. This is a powerful collection, and there are complexities swirling through these poems that reward multiple readings, and an essential music enough to carry any heart across an unbearable distance. “The enemy becomes a song,” the poem “UNIT” ends, “held by time.”

Ongoing notes: mid-August, 2022: Adrian Lürssen + Ryan Stearne,

So there’s only two weeks left in the great above/ground 29^th anniversary BIG SUMMER SALE, but you probably already know that. It also means that we’re leaning back up into fall, and most likely an announcement in a few weeks further for the 30^th anniversary subscriptions. Can you believe the press turns thirty years old next year? Honestly, it seems strange, even to me.

San Francisco CA: I was curious to see a chapbook from Bay Area poet Adrian Lürssen, his NEOWISE (Victoria BC: Trainwreck Press, 2022). As the acknowledgment offers: “HUMAN IS TO WANDER, the full-length manuscript from which this chapbook is excerpted, was selected by Gillian Conoley for the 2022 Colorado Poetry Prize and will be published by The Center for Literary Publishing in November, 2022.” Lürssen’s poems and poem-fragments float through and across images, linking and collaging boundaries, scraps and seemingly-found materials. “She would say bees or blood,” he writes, as part of “Landscape No Longer In a Mother Tongue,” “he said. / Out of earshot is a river, she said.” There is something of the fragment and fractal to the assemblage of his poems, writing a map around the narrative “I,” through the way they fit together; and I’m curious to see how the larger book-length structure presents itself. And yet, in certain ways, the structure here is less of collage or fragment than the swirling of a fractured lyric around a central core. There is something going on here worth very much paying attention to.

[*force

 

The feather at the opening is also a ring around a cause: to enter means to empty pockets of insects and arms. Noon is the action against the enemy – night, a way to say “Uncle” or argue the difference between troop and troupe. The name and the rifle: a system, like a river leading away from home.

“Expect the yam and you’ll get the rhyme.”]

Calgary AB: I’m really taken with Calgary writer Ryan Stearne’s reworking on Ernest Hemingway through OLD SEA (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2022), produced in an edition of sixty copies (complete with metal hook embedded in the cover). In an “Author Statement” nearly as long as the short story (okay, not really, but close enough), Stearne offers:

            Is it possible to recreate style based on computational analysis. That’s what “Old Sea” is at its core, an attempt to use data to rewrite Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea as a short story. Hemingway’s immediately recognizable and brusque style made him an immediate candidate to test my stylometry-based hypothesis. When you read Hemingway, you know you are reading Hemingway. Yet, his simplicity is also an exercise in literary slight of hand, resonating emotionally in a style that seems effortless. What I mean is that Hemingway’s deliberations encompass an exercise in both inclusion and excision. The omitted words are equally as important as those set in the final type.

Procedural work, for the most part, can be seen as a way of either stripping bare or altering altogether, allowing the source material to purely feed the possibility for something entirely different to emerge, but Stearne’s project suggests, instead, a way of retaining the flavour of a particular work through its stripping down. As the opening of Stearne’s short story begins:

            The old man sat with the boy on the terrace where they could smell the faint odour of the distant shark factory on the wind, talked about baseball and fishing, and had beers. He hadn’t caught a fish in eighty-four days and was salao, the worst kind of unlucky.
            “You will be successful tomorrow,” the boy said.
            “Maybe,” the old man said.