Kevin Davies, Transfer Portal

 

53

IF, AS I’VE DONE HERE, YOU STRING TOGETHER
all the tiny roles I’ve played on the various versions
of Law & Order over years, a masterpiece
emerges from the rubble of erased plot
and theologized desert, a stunning
or stunned study in deep facets, as unbegun
subject treading the boards of late and
early century in search of the antidote
that will cure him of these pestilent data.
you can continue to the wedding in a moment. 

                                                            66

I’VE BEEN BEFORE IN THIS LATRINE.
Its broken locks subtend a trauma.
If punctuation could limn this scene:
Five hyphens and a giant comma.

The latest from Jackson Heights, New York-based Canadian poet Kevin Davies, following Pause Button (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1992), Comp. (Washington DC: Edge Books, 2000), Lateral Argument (Barretta Books, 2003), The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Edge Books, 2008) and FPO (Edge Books, 2020) (as well as a recent chapbook through above/ground, a further Edge title next year, and a forthcoming Talonbook title in 2028), is Transfer Portal (Edge Books, 2026). It has been suggested to me that Davies’ work is difficult to discuss as his work is increasingly self-referential, so perhaps even to speak of such is to reveal my own ignorance [although there’s a remarkably good recent interview up at Jacket2 with Davies, conducted by Scott Inniss, that is worth reading for a larger context to Davies’ ongoing work]. Perhaps so. The accumulated and numbered fragments that make up Transfer Portal exist in proper sequence, but for the opening two (above), set in order prior to the beginning. To what end is such information important for narrative comprehension, moved out of linear order?

Across the language of Davies’ impossibly-long threaded lines, a mélange of words pushed in against each other to splatter, purposefully disrupt and undermine, and eventually rebuild, meaning. All of this, also, while including what seem a uniquely scattered list of references, such as the American Revolution, playing catch in the dark, ancient Rome, paradise and old debt, Shakespeare’s Caliban and discipline, snowfall and swaths of crossed-out text. Davies’ language swirls gymnastically around and through critiques of capitalism and culture, an evolving poetics that evolved out of early engagement with and through The Kootenay School of Writing into something more expansive and even evasive, engaging beyond, and yet still connecting to, poets such as the late Peter Culley [see my review of his latest here], Dorothy Trujillo Lusk [see my review of her latest here], Jeff Derksen [see my review of his latest here], Rob Manery [see my review of his latest here], Colin Smith [see my review of his latest here] and Louis Cabri [see my review of his latest here], as well as more recent poets who have taken up similar threads, such as ryan fitzpatrick [see my review of their most recent here] as well as Inniss himself [see my review of his latest here].

As part of that same Jacket2 interview, Inniss references [… Philadelphia poet Ron] Silliman’s review of [Davies’] The Golden Age of Paraphernalia from his blog, where he writes, ‘Davies appears to have found a spot exactly halfway between language poetry and flarf.’” Nearly a decade earlier, Joshua Clover offered this about Davies’ work in Boston Review: “This is how I think about Kevin Davies’s poems, for which few if any of the possible metaphors seem even close: weather, the fractured encyclopedia, disobedience. His poetry is not especially metaphorical in the first place; it is more a kind of realism, for a real world that seems all too often not just too awful, but too incalculable and messy to look at in its full unfolding.”

When two words are placed side by side, of course, they can’t help but sit in relation, and thus, a narrative sense of meaning, from left to right (or up to down, or however words are placed against each other). And yet, there’s almost a similar kind of overarcing floating narrative created across these short bursts to the prose work of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, how the present and the surreal offer steps across a complex grid, and composed of sections that may or may not connect to the larger narrative. “Anyway that’s my tale and now it’s done. / The young woman took my chair when I stood / briefly to wash my beak. / And then would not move her legs to // allow me to retrieve my bundle / from beneath the chair,” he writes, near the end of the collection, as part of the rather lengthy section sixty-eight, “and that is when I felt myself / turning into pressed wool and about to go haywire.”

                                                            61

THE POPPINJAY, SHRILL, HAS NONE
of the absolute quantum blackness of the bird of paradise
nut is nonetheless an end it itself
in this valley or alley. 

 

                                                            62

CAPACIOUSLY CONSTRUED, THE ENDED FENDER
can seem to catch hold of the tree’s inner funk.
You’ve got nerve to kneel under the bandstand and glow.
We had wanted to be apprehended serially
in a way that made our monkey aunts and uncles proud.
Look, Horace, you haven’t got it in you
anymore if you ever did. If you did, you’d do it
or it would do it for you, or you would stand up to it
and it would do as you told it, it and its parcelling division.
We buy companies, sell off the assets, fold up the shells,
and fuck off to our personal car elevators.

Amish Trivedi, FuturePanic

 

Went into the river clean and came out with
one eye damaged. Was told there was time now

but heard it differently. I cannot hear
any of you:

            the screamings of the mind I have made ears
of new ghosts. It’s not the words that are hollow,

just the voice behind it. Ready to be something
other than deceived.

The third full-length poetry title by American poet Amish Trivedi, following a handful of chapbooks and the full-length collections Sound/Chest (Coven Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], is FuturePanic (Normal IL: co·im·press, 2021). “The future is a kind of capital—,” he writes, “the desire for more is, too.” FuturePanic is a book length suite broken into a quintet of suites—“Automata,” “Constructor,” “Unreality,” “Spree” and “FuturePanic”—each of which is constructed out of accumulated bursts of lyric fragments. Trivedi’s poems speak of anxiety, patterns, time and the future, whether or not we are able to have such. “To save a dying world // by walking across it,” he writes, as part of the opening section, “by letting the pavement / cut & burn your bare feet.” Writing slant in a sequence of quick sketch-notes, he writes of an anxiety directly fueled by humanity’s ultimate self-directed ruin. “The invention of a way to measure time / is of immediate suspicion: a sense // that the turn in our lyric / is every new scab left // to be picked.” He writes a potential fraying, eroding and dismantling of climate, culture, humanity and language. “How the water // remains settles the only mystery / in a scene dedicated to the waxing / epistasis of language.” In a note to accompany poems from the then work-in-progress at Jacket2 (via Jerome Rothenberg) in July, 2018, Trivedi wrote:

FuturePanic encompasses macro and micro concerns to transform the reader’s sense of space and time and force them to engage with the present era’s perceptions of death, politics, and the border at which they meet. The opening (presented here and separately titled “Automata”) considers the Von Neumann Machine, an as-yet impossible organic machine designed to replicate itself across the galaxy over the next four hundred thousand years. Conceptual, expensive, and perplexing, the Von Neumann Machine raises questions present throughout FuturePanic — who benefits from the long reach of technology? How do the earth-bound conceive of transformation light years away? And how do mortals deign to simultaneously explore the potential for never-ending life at the cost of killing death for machines, while grappling with their own limitations — corporeal death, political conceit, and economic destruction of the world around them? Is the quest for knowledge that may outlast us all worth stargazing above the screams of others in the here and now and the cries of our own limited bodies and minds?

There are some big ideas running throughout FuturePanic, first and foremost asking what the actual and ongoing cost of the future might be (and, in Trivedi’s view, at least, it doesn’t look good). In their own way, the quintet of suites that provide the narrative of FuturePanic coincide with the five stages of grief, offering not a way out or through but a way into. “What happens / when two words // are put in opposition / to one another: speech continues / as comprehension // stops.”

Sandra Ridley, Silvija

After the diminishing / dirt body kicked against kitchen wall /

Kept alive / what mercy has lessened / quietened as we speak

Of light / spoiled / cry-babying / a bunkum transubstantiated

Our cunning remains within. (“FARTHER / FATHER”)

Ottawa poet (by way of Saskatchewan) Sandra Ridley’s fourth trade poetry title is Silvija (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016). Following her collections Fallout (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2009), Post-Apothecary (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2011) [see my review of such here] and The Counting House (BookThug, 2013) [see my review of such here], Silvija is a book-length suite broken into “five feverish elegies,” composed as a “linguistic embodiment of the traumas of psychological suffering, physical abuse, and terminal illness.” Ridley’s poetry has long managed to be remarkably precise in detail while concurrently evasive, and yet, the poems that make up Silvija can be seen as incredibly revealing, writing:

You are no less dangerous than you were as you drag

Your bones / field stones / we never once wept upon

The firmament / eight children left with the lone wife

Who would not carry the quiet / the final cardiac pall

Paled thirty years / crescent moons / scars strapped

Below the heart. (“FARTHER / FATHER”)

The poems in Silvija still manage to maintain her particular flavour of evasiveness. Ridley’s Silvija takes its title from the name of her dedicatee, a “Silvija Barons,” coupled with dictionary definitions of “Silva” and “Silvan, Silvana, Silvanæ” that open the collection, suggesting a compounded definition involving a wooded area, a creature from a wooded area and the writing produced about a wooded area. Still, Silvija includes elements that are possibly more revealing than her previous collections, exploring and attempting meaning out of a poetry of violence, trauma and healing, and furthering her capacity for the book-length exploration. And, as much as her elegies hold together as a single, extended unit, two sections were actually composed as part of other projects, such as the section “CLASP,” composed as a response to Gatineau artist Michèle Provost’s multiform art installation, “Playlist,” or an early version of “VIGIL / VESTIGE” commissioned as “an engagement with Petro Isztin’s photo installation, ‘Study of Structure and Form.’”

While the effect of Ridley’s short phrases staccato and accumulate into a complex tapestry that refuses anything straightforward, the emotional content is raw, savage and brutally stark. There are epistolary elements to Silvija, writing a narrator speaking intimately and directly to an unnamed and shifting “you,” and the poems reveal a furious content of trauma and grief, pushing to comprehend and, ultimately, heal as best as possible. As she described, quickly, her first three collections in an interview at Jacket2: “[…] the downwind effects of nuclear radiation in Fallout, medical incarceration, and the archaic and experimental treatments for tuberculosis and mental illness in Post-Apothecary, the trauma(s) of a relationship gone wrong in The Counting House[…],”Silvija writes out the trauma of loss, whether through physical and emotional abuse or death, composing four sequences – “FARTHER / FATHER,” “CLASP,” “VIGIL / VESTIGE” and “DIRGE” – that are surrounded by fragments of the fifth and final section, “IN PRAISE OF THE HEALER.” Via this simple thread, she holds the book together through a kind of mantra, or Greek Chorus, allowing that for whatever elese has occurred, healing, and even resolution, is possible (and the “healer” requires acknowledgment): “You give my hands the weight of your body. // Rest in me. // What I mean is this is where I choose to die.” What becomes so compelling is the understanding that it is through the very act of writing that allows the entire healing process, as she writes: “If you can’t speak / write in a fissured / alter-language / Of nerve-matter[.]” Indeed.

You and I—confined to our scrying room. Every falter of the limbs and every muscle of the face exposed to view. You are what I am. You cause as much sorrow. In what worse way could we vent this rage than by beating this head against these walls?

Sing for me. You seized the words out of my mouth—who suffers the most? You keep it all in. Noise—no noise. You upset me, baby. And you can’t do that.

We’re never left alone. Consider what the means are—we can’t lose what we haven’t ever had. You asked for it. You won’t get mercy. You are no more a whisper. (“CLASP”)