Zachary Schomburg, Fjords vol. II

REAL NICE ELKS

The people I know know some real nice elks. The nice elks they know know no pain. They are the kind of elks that have hands that only close to open. All day they hold. All day they rub. When you’re a real nice elk, you’re a real nice elk forever. Then your long neck floats down to the mud just because, because at the end, there’s only one way of going away, a long way, along a long darkness too nice not to love.

Portland, Oregon poet and fiction writer Zachary Schomburg’s latest poetry title is Fjords vol. II (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2021), described as the “second volume of Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords series of evocative prose poetry,” following the prior volume, Fjords vol. I (Black Ocean, 2012). I’m curious at the extension of his prose poetry project and how far it might continue, and if it sits within or alongside the trajectory of his other published poetry collections, all of which have appeared with Black Ocean: The Man Suit (2007), Scary, No Scary (2009), The Book of Joshua (2014) and Pulver Maar: Poems 2014-2018 (2019) [see my review of such here]. The pieces in Fjords vol. II are each short bursts of individually titled, single-paragraph prose poems collected together as a book-length suite. The narratives of Schomburg’s poems are fond of establishing a simultaneous light and dark tone, and writing poems with odd turns, and endings that sit, not as endings, but as a place for the mind to pause. In many ways, Schomburg’s poems haven’t beginnings or endings, but points at which the narratives start, with another point where the narrative stops. The effect is occasionally jarring, often turning bits of the logic of each piece back in on itself, as though it is for the reader to discern each poem’s actual shape: far bigger on the inside, perhaps. These are poems that reveal themselves in layers, and reward repeated readings.

GIVE A KITE TAKE A KITE

I started a Give-a-Kite-Take-a-Kite program at work. Everyone was stressed about the big project, so it was the least I could do. I thought about all the different box kites dancing against the sky over the tree tops. But no one ever used it. It was just a waste paper basket in the corner. One day, I saw a frog in it.

There is such a lovely ease and density to these pieces, providing an ease in which he unfolds certain difficulties. There are structural echoes in the work of Canadian poets Stuart Ross and Gary Barwin, providing elements of surreal shape and logic in dense, poetic form, although there isn’t any reason why one might think Schomburg might have heard of either of these poets, let alone read their work. One might even see Schomburg’s influence in the work of poet Benjamin Niespodziany, as well, for the dense prose lyric and assembled narratives.

These are incredibly powerful, almost wistfully, sixty-one prose poems of simultaneous delight and loss, of simultaneous miracles and sadness, fully aware that the latter of each pairing wouldn’t even be possible without the former. Writing of laundry rooms, fjords and fathers, Schomburg explores the magic of daily possibility, in poems that understand how joyous it is to live, and how far the heart might fall. Writing on dunes and fjords in the second poem of the collection, “SUNA NO ONNA,” Schomburg ends the piece with: “I / am a true dune, I am a true fjord, and how I long only to / be a dune, and how I long only to be a fjord. You think / it’s easy to be sealed up inside yourself, like a person / inside a person, holding onto your secret name like your / last glass of water? Look at you go, how you go to your / own funeral forever.”

THE CRUSHING PAIN OF EXISTENCE

My dad had a favorite spoon. Before each meal, he’d shuffle the little stack and pick it out from the drawer. He’d push his thumb into it and rub it around. It was smaller than the other spoons, and a different shape. It fit into his mouth better, he’d say. I lived only to see how long I could outlive him, how long I could carry it for. Then one day I lost it. Morning came again, and again, and again. I love you is a wish.

 

Zachary Schomburg, Pulver Maar: Poems 2014-2018

A MOUNTAIN’S JOB IS

TO JUT

It’s true, I did get fired

from the globe factory.

I put a beach in N.D.

and us on it but then

I put us in the waves

in a bed on the waviness.

It’s best to just put things

where you think you

want them. When I think

of mountains I think

of beer, and how clean

everything can be.

When I think of buoys

I think of the darkness.

but also I think of seals.

An island is the wrong

symbol for loneliness.

I never wanted two cats.

Now I have nothing

in cats.

I’ve been hearing Zachary Schomburg’s name for a while now, reading a poem here and there in a journal or an anthology, but his latest, Pulver Maar: Poems 2014-2018 (Black Ocean, 2019) is the first full-length collection I’ve had the opportunity to go through. The author of the poetry collections The Man Suit (2007), Scary, No Scary (2009), Fjords Vol. 1 (2012) and The Book of Joshua (2014)—all published by Black Ocean—as well as the novel Mammother (Featherproof Books, 2017), Portland, Oregon writer Schomburg’s Pulver Maar: Poems 2014-2018 is an assemblage of multiple sequences, sections and suites of lyrics, accumulated phrases, lyric fragments and prose poems, sitting at more than two hundred pages in total length. Alternating, sometimes at strobe-light quickness, between darkness and light, the press release informs that these are poems that “are playful but not all play; they carry a humanity and an acute awareness of what it is to try to make a life, whether you’re a mountain or dust or just a human.” And then, in the author’s own description of the collection: “[This] is a collection of poems written between 2014 and 2018. Some of the poems are long, and some of them are short.” There is something utterly fascinating in the way Schomburg builds his poems, composed as first-person narratives with layers of surrealism, absurdism, narrative storytelling and theory. These are poems that evoke, twist and loop into and around expectation until there is nothing left but where the poem has set you, there, down. As the fourth poem in the fifty numbered poem sequence “OARS” reads:

I don’t know where I am.

Maybe on the ground in Australia.

Something’s poison tongue licks my eyelash.

I stare back at it with one eye.

It grows even.

I touch a beating in a throat.

A nod hello?

There is heft to this collection, and there are times I’m reminded of the surrealism of Canadian poet Stuart Ross through these poems, and at other times, especially through the section “THE FUTURE / THE BABY”—a suite of poems that hold either the title “THE FUTURE” or “THE BABY”—Boulder, Colorado poet Noah Eli Gordon (both for structure, and for the fact that he often employs this kind of multiple-poem sharing a title format [see my review of his most recent book here]). Each poem in the suite exists almost as a portrait of the moment where something turns, and in the last direction you might have expected. And sometimes the unexpected turn is in the realization we were going in an altogether different direction all along. His collisions, putting one thought or idea against another, are casual, calm and incredibly striking, and often illuminating through just how unsettling and unexpected they are. As he writes in one of the poems titled “THE FUTURE”: “I say I have something / I’m about to say.” As partof a 2018 interview posted at Neon Pajamas, Schomburg speaks to poetry, and the process of putting a manuscript, and then a final book, together:

Part of poem writing for me is to know, upon returning to poems after a while, which need water, which need trimming, which need polish, which need to be buried, and which need to be left alone. Most just need to be buried or left alone. But a books of poems isn't just made of poems—it's made of paper, and design, and artwork. Thinking about how the book is born from the poems into a thing is a really fun part of the process, and something that I get to do with other people. Writing the poems is solo work, but the rest of it comes alive in collaboration. For each Black Ocean book, with Janaka Stucky's blessing, I've been able to collaborate with my long time friend, Dennis Schmickle. Dennis has designed all of my Black Ocean books, and a few Octopus Books too. That process is a rewarding one, and one that takes on nearly as much importance for me as the poems. Often, through design, the poems will change to fit some concept within the design. The poetry can bend to the intention of the book as an object too. I'll change them to fit the page, so to speak, or to fit within the tone of the book that D is creating. The poetry may feel dated to me personally, eventually, but the book never feels dated. The book will bury us.