WHAT OUR
SKY IS LIKE
This was how we spoke to the distant flicker.
Our silence hydrated a speaker. Its form came to us in pieces culled from the
canopic night. We wore diagnostic dust in a book that believed only in
ablutions. We dried slowly. Now what our sky is like is like a hospital for the
sun.
Denver, Colorado poet Eric Baus’ latest full-length poetry title is HOW I BECAME A HUM (Portland OR/Denver CO: Octopus Books, 2019).
Baus is very much a poet of sentences (a term I have utilized previously
referencing the works of Rosmarie Waldrop and Lisa Robertson), and how they
accumulate, composing prose poems that occasionally run up against the line of
what might be considered a more straightforward prose. It might sound fairly
obvious, and even a non-descriptor, but his poems very much are built upon how
one sentence follows another and then another.
The
author of four previous full-length collections—The To Sound, winner of the Verse Prize (Wave Books, 2004), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009) [see my review of such here], Scared Text,
winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) [see my review of such here] and The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights 2014) [see my review of such here]—as well
as several chapbooks, Baus remains on the side of the lyric poetic rather than
any narrative prose-line. Some have described his work as surreal, but I would also
suggest Baus composes far more on the “poem” side of the prose poem line than,
say, a writer such as the late Russell Edson; despite being considered one of the
greats of the American prose poem, much of what I’ve seen of his work actually
wrote more on the side of the postcard story than the lyric. The book is
structured in eight sections—“The Rain of the Ice,” “Bad Shadow,” “The Datura
Plains,” “Plan for a Lake on the Ceiling of a Cinema,” “Wolfram Frock,” “The
Mesmerized Moth,” “Autonomic Mica” and “How I Became a Hum”—the first of which,
in the spirit of full disclosure, appeared previously as a chapbook through above/ground press, a section he references in a 2019 interview with Ian Lockaby for NDR:
I have a section and a poem in the book called
“The Rain of the Ice,” which is a micro-erasure of the title of the essay “The
Grain of the Voice” by Roland Barthes. One of the things I like about Barthes’s
essay is how he argues that instead of further developing our critical
vocabulary around music (creating more and more descriptive language) we should
instead focus on aspects of sound that we unconsciously filter and flatten out.
He writes: “the ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it
writes, the limb as it performs.” I like that impulse a lot—to shift the
boundaries of the thing being studied as a transformative act. By erasing a few
letters in his title, I’m thinking about the fluid state embedded within the
solid state—the “rain” that is always part of “ice”—and, in some oblique way,
gesturing toward slipping outside of expected ways of talking about the world
and about experience.
In the poem “Bad Shadow,” I found a way to
graft in language from a blurb I wrote for Richard Froude’s book The Passenger: “Richard Froude was grown
from film stills. Above all he was a mirror. Much of his soil was gathered from
conversation. Nothing is outside the screen. His house was built entirely of
redirected rivers. This caused a book of between, a book of plywood and
polymers, a book we are never finished reading.” And I turned it into this
passage: “Above all we were was a mirror. Much of our soil was gathered from
conversation. Nothing is behind the screen. Our mouth was built entirely of
redirected rivers. This caused a book of between, a house of plywood and
polymers, a city we were never outside of.” I try to find as many ways as
possible of repurposing and re-framing language. I tend not to make references
in a conventional way, where I’m signaling the content or ideas of another work
directly, and instead I prefer to zero in on some granular aspect, some
tonality of the thing that I’m thinking about, and use that to build language
structures that take on a character of their own.
The
sections in the collection move through both sections as suites of untitled
poems in sequence, and sections of stand-alone, individual poems. In certain
ways, the differences between sections, structurally, could be seen as both
very wide (a section of poems against a section-as-sequence), and very minimal
(a sequence of poems with titles against a sequence of untitled poems). Is
there a difference? I suspect, and even prefer, that it might not even matter,
although the sections sans titles infer a slightly stronger connection between
poems than the other sections, but this might exist only in my imagination. Either
way, the effect of his poems are stunning, with the lyric inference sweeping up
against and away from meaning, allowing the poem to be propelled by tone and
language, words set up against further words for remarkable effect, and lines
composed with both a lightness and great density.
STROBE
EGGS
My brother’s lungs had synthesized a miniature
sun. The swollen clouds collated. The blast’s grammar washed through his
flickering cells. He bore storming twins. They wore lead.
