Buck Downs, Unintended Empire: 1989-2012

In 1995, Washington Review published a germinal interview (“You Can’t Stop Us; Three Independent DC Publishers”) of Buck, Rod Smith and Mark Wallace, featuring Mary Swift’s iconic photograph of the three. In the interview, Buck stated, “It’s hard for me to understand why people wouldn’t be interested in poetry with language that isn’t like everyday language.”

This sort of defense of “language” poetry probably also describes why Buck’s work settles so soundly into the orbit of the avant-garde. Buck’s poetry is like everyday language and not like everyday language. It is conceivable speech, devoid of pretext, but wrapped in complex, syncopated lyric invention and no small portion of mystery. It surprises as much as it allows readers or listeners to identify. (Heather Fuller, “Introduction: this was preserved by someone / who thought it would be of use…”)

After being aware of his work for a couple of years now (and producing two chapbooks of his work through above/ground press), I’m pleased to have the opportunity to get a wider overview of Washington, D.C. poet Buck Downs’ writing through the volume Unintended Empire: 1989-2012 (Baltimore MD: Furniture Press, 2018). Unintended Empire collects from a period of intense activity, including work produced in small books and postcards, most of which, if not all, being self-produced, and distributed in part or in whole via an extensive mailing list. As he mentions in an interview at Touch the Donkey: “I started using Lulu in 2005, because printing out 150pp docs on my inkjet printer & punching them for a three-ring binder is tedious.” Further on in the same interview, he discusses how manuscripts are organized, offering:

I’ve more or less abandoned the idea of organizing a manuscript; one more place where I get to trust the material, and the readers. Poems now are simply stacked in chronological order, and if something seems like it’s out of place, it gets removed.

The author of full-length books such as Marijuana Soft Drink (Edge Books, 1999), Ladies Love Outlaws (Edge Books, 2006), and Tachycardia: Poems 2010-2012 (Edge Books, 2015), Downs’ selected/collected pulls from a wide range of material, or at least as the table of contents would suggest, with thirteen titles under the second section, “ASSORTED BOOKS OF BUCK DOWNS.” While a bibliography of titles from whence the poems here are collected aren’t essential to engage with the work, it certainly would be helpful, at least in terms of certain kinds of context. While some pieces make for guesswork, the most obvious and overt comes from the title of the fourth and final section, a section that shares a title with his 2015 title from Edge Books.

massive passages

all dissolved her

spots and furze

we got here curious, & tired

newblown radical

river through everybody

pissed off

king’s english

isle of texas-

in-a-teacup

      it was informative later

hiding on your way

out the door

the uncertainty

was a helpmate

and it left

her pleasure is all mine

my god is a steady supply —

One thing that I have appreciated from and enjoyed of what I’ve been aware of Downs’ work, being far more recent than much of this, has been in its casual looseness, able to ride the cadence and language, if not to any kind of conclusion, to at least a place where the poem can end. The ways in which his poems connect to each other, also, is intriguing, given his preference for putting manuscripts, and therefore books, together in the order in which they were composed, and one could even see Downs’ work as a kind of open-ended, singular project, one that will only end when he does, akin to that of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert. These are poems of connection and connectivity, composed, intentionally or otherwise, as a singular, life-long poem that, if not directly writing a life, writes through, around and directly with the essential elements of that same life.

sex partner

they are managing the division

of the empire now, almost

without knowing it since it

will never make the news, cupping

each other in their hands, like the list

of phone numbers their neither

ever called as a last resort, things

did not seem to get that desperate;

aging gracefully, everything

vibrating with grace amidst the

currents and the surge that is filled

with shells and broken stones and grit,

it is a little like the ocean in that

way, the shimmer of it as it pulls

us apart, pulls us apart, pulls us apart.

There is also something reminiscent in Downs’ poems, the language and the casual, confident movements of words across the page, of the work of Ottawa-area poet Pearl Pirie: both share that exploration of movement and texture, talking sideways about something as a way to approach it head on; although Pirie engages a more overt language play over Downs’ noted comfort in utilizing familiar words to describe what might otherwise be unfamiliar (akin to Robert Creeley, perhaps, or even Richard Brautigan). There is something timeless in Downs’ work as well, meaning that a volume of work bridging such a temporal stretch still reads as incredibly immediate, as much as an important part of writing during an entirely different era. As DC-area poet and critic Heather Fuller, highlighting Downs’ 1998 poem “terry thought he’d been struck blind, but it was just a hallucination,” writes in her informative and charming introduction:

For those of us who do not demur from embracing poetry as a locus of meaning, the effect is intimate, heartbreaking, epiphanic. The punctuation and enjambment are deliberately precise. We pause; we take stock. We read on, with a sureness inspired by the lyric’s conviction.

Nicole Steinberg, Glass Actress

TEEN CULTURE IS THE CULTURE OF OPPRESSION

AND IT IS THE BEST

At weekend soirees I’m introduced

as the sole heiress to the endless,

malicious conclusion of my youth.

As my surrounding inner circle of

beards turn grey, I’ll still search

for anything I can paint hot pink,

for any boy or man I can laugh at

who still thinks seriously & often

about virginity as virtue. I can’t be

stopped & that’s what scares them.

My hair is thick & swingy like a pony’s

& yet I am always subtle. I eat up

their dreams like candy cigarettes,

only chewing long enough to suck

out all the flavor. I stuff their gangly

bodies into their own gym lockers.

They see me spill out into the school

hallways, frantic & laughing & think

they know me. I’m made of sapphire

from the waist down. My body surfs

a wave of oppression that tore down

the most resilient cities. The world

mutes me, I mute it back. No matter

where I go, I’m at the prom, sporting

a wrist corsage & quietly shattering.

Philadelphia poet Nicole Steinberg’s latest is the full-length collection Glass Actress (Philadelphia PA: Furniture Press Books, 2017), and it was her poem, above, “TEEN CULTURE IS THE CULTURE OF OPPRESSION / AND IT IS THE BEST” that convinced me that her work is worth paying attention to. Steinberg’s collection of first-person lyric narratives emerges after a small handful of chapbooks with presses such as dancing girl and Furniture Press, as well as a prior full-length poetry collection with Spooky Girlfriend. Glass Actress is whip-smart, jarring and occasionally hilarious, even if somewhat uneven, which is frustrating, given some of the strength of the poems included. As the poem above demonstrates, her poems exist with a lovely blend of vulnerability and swagger, inquiry, accuracy and a bit of flailing, writing out a narrator attempting to navigate through uncertainty entirely on her own terms, and being open to the limitations of her own experience. There is a lot going on in this collection, and I am intrigued; I would like to see more.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ryan Eckes

Ryan Eckes is a poet who lives in South Philadelphia. His books include Valu-Plus and Old News (Furniture Press 2014, 2011). You can read some of his poems in Tripwire, The Brooklyn Rail, Slow Poetry in America Newsletter, Supplement, Public Pool, Whirlwind and on his blog. He is the recipient of a 2016 Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Writing Old News, my first book, was my first experience working on a book as a single work—that is, as a project rather than a collection of discrete poems. The book wound up as a record of thinking through a place and time, and it changed the way I think about poetry. The practice of pushing questions raised by one poem into the next, and then further and further, letting myself get lost, so that I really get somewhere, in my mind and in the story, was a new thing. The writing of each book changes me in some way. I also feel myself age through each one—this is certainly true of the manuscript I just finished, General Motors, which took three and a half years.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I came to fiction first, in college. I took a course my freshman year called “Existentialism in Literature”, then started taking creative writing workshops, fiction and nonfiction. In my last year, out of curiosity, I took a few poetry classes, lit and writing, and was converted to the dark side. I owe a lot to these teachers: Jeffrey Nealon, Ken Rumble, and CS Giscombe.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

In general, I am slow. A teacher once pointed out to me that I “like to ruminate.”

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Since writing Old News, I’ve worked book by book. I begin with some framework, though the restraints are usually fluid and I don’t always know where I’m going. I let the act of composition determine the shape of the thing.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Yes. I love doing readings. Really that’s the whole point. As I’m working on a poem, I read it out loud to myself over and over until it hits.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

How do you write something that someone will feel? What words, in what arrangement, will connect the people sitting together in a room? What will let us think together?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Writers whose work matters to me question the way things are and make me think or feel something deeply. There are many roles but one obvious one is to write the truth. Right now, truth feels like a snare drum synced with a fist to a nazi’s face.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I’ve never had an official editor, but feedback in whatever form is useful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

If you’re lost in a forest and have no idea which way to go, go for it straight ahead because it’s not likely to be any worse than anything else. That’s Descartes, via David Antin. Also: live variously.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I’m currently on a Pew fellowship, so it looks like this: coffee first, then the news, then emails. Then some pacing. Then I sit down, look at what I wrote yesterday and continue or re-write or veer in another direction. Generally I split the day between writing and reading (mostly poetry and history) in my apartment, and sitting there thinking why I feel the way I do, how strange it is to be a living thing in the world. I try to take one long walk a day to air the brain out, let things in, meet a friend for coffee or beer.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Books.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Haha! I don’t know.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Conversations with friends and strangers. And music and art. I’m very lucky to have a brilliant musician for a brother who keeps me in the loop on new music. I try to get out to see as much art as possible.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Too many to name, but a few important non-poetry books over the last year: The Traffic Power Structure by Planka.nu; The Death & Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement by Stanley Aronowitz; The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney & Fred Moten; Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution by Dan Georgakas & Marvin Surkin; The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to fall in love inside socialism. I would like to start a newspaper with likeminded people. I would like to become fluent in Spanish and translate poems. I would like to write an ongoing poem that answers this question.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

This question reminds me of a poem from The Book of Frank by CAConrad in which the host of a party asks everyone where they’d prefer to have cancer if they had to have cancer . . . I think all of the millionaires and billionaires should work for the rest of us. I just worked as a union organizer for a couple of years and I could’ve continued down that path; maybe I’ll return. I was committed to it but the lack of time to write was eating my soul. I’ve also enjoyed teaching but again, same problem.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Something I don’t yet understand.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last great book I read was Certain Magical Acts by Alice Notley. The last great film I watched was Harlan County, USA by Barbara Kopple.

19 - What are you currently working on?

The manuscript I just finished is called General Motors. It’s about labor and public and private transportation and love. It’s too early to say what’s next.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;