LIGHTNING RODS
Look: they
came with the place,
roof’s
half-assed shot at Gothic,
bent spikes
riding the arch of it,
wires
spidered on eave and gable
to ground
volts til the maple
roots jerk in
their soil. Suspect
if ever they
caught sky’s lit wick,
charmed cloud
to mossy shingle.
Before the
walls get bulldozed
and the beams
fall in, my uncles
and I might
straddle the ridge,
grab lengths
of rebar and hope
for storms—the
copper funnels
of our spines
fine-tuned conduits.
In Riverview, New Brunswick poet Danny Jacobs’s first trade poetry collection, Songs That Remind Us of Factories
(Nightwood Editions, 2013), he displays a clear ear for sound, composing lines
with a crackle-pop sensibility that holds both music and the attention of a
descriptive narrative lyric. Given the book’s title, as well as in poems such as
“Pipeline,” “Lawn Boy,” “Weeding,” “A Fifth Factory” and “A History of the
Billiard Ball,” Jacobs’ work can be seen, in part, as a product of the work
poetry that emerged out of Vancouver in the 1980s – poets such as Tom Wayman,
Kate Braid, Erin Moure and Phil Hall. Their writing (as well as Wayman specifically
in a number of essays) argued that poetry should and/or could be about working
class considerations, such as physical and low-income labour. Wayman, one of
the co-creators of The Kootenay School of Writing, argued vehemently for more
of a straight poetic line than any play with the language (which caused
eventual conflict and even a break between various of the KSW camps), and it
would seem as though Jacobs is still negotiating between two traditions that he
is still working to bring together, in his own way. In Jacobs’ collection, as
capable as it is, sometimes his narratives aren’t enough to hold my attention,
and sometimes the language isn’t enough to properly propel the story, leaving
me feeling adrift in two directions. There are elements of both that are
strong, but they don’t always manage to connect. In the poem “BARGAIN BIN,” for
example, the use of the word “ridden” twice in the last two lines just feels
clunky.
BARGAIN BIN
The whitewashed
drywall woke as BiWay
and I, nigh
on eight, decried the toy display’s
lack of good
Lego, all knockoffs and Duplo.
By grade five
she was re-signed and sold to
Woolco, this
before a brief stint as SAAN –
weak real
estate’s circadian rhythm,
same shit
different aisle, bins of Bugle
Boy and
bungee-roped rubber balls, back stock
unboxed and
marked for blowouts. While frugal
ladies lollygagged
and haggled, made slapdash
muzak in the
key of jangled hanger,
in walked the
new century to sweet talk
the walls
into fishnets of fibre-op,
row the floor
with chain gangs of chopped desktop
Dells. Before
long we’re in for the long haul,
twitchy phone
pitch wizards picking foam
from levered
ergo-thrones. A banner snaps
epileptic in
the parking lot squall,
screams Join the Team; they’re roping in
hopefuls with
a flair for the upsell. We’ll
bid on hours
and carpool to the nightshift,
parse new
mall smell from dying small smell.
The food
court’s robot, once ridden for
a quarter, is
just not ridden anymore.
When I think
of poets who have negotiated a successful blend and interplay between formal
language and language and/or sound play in their own work, I tend to think of
David McGimpsey, Lisa Jarnot, Phil Hall, Lee Ann Brown, Karen Solie, Lisa Robertson, Ken Babstock (there seems quite a heavy Babstock influence here) and
Elizabeth Bachinsky. This interplay seems very much what Jacobs is working to
achieve. Where Jacobs does shine is in those poems where he allows description to
move beyond itself, allowing description as a means to an end, as opposed to an
end unto itself. And it’s a fine line he plays – how do you elevate a poem on “subject”
beyond subject matter without excluding or completely abstracting it? Poems such
as “BETTY GOODWIN SOUND INSTALLATION” or “THREE FRAGMENTS TO HER HAND” are
quite striking in part because they aren’t there to describe, but sparkle,
spark and simply be. I admit that I am intrigued by, but uncertain of the poems
of Danny Jacobs; I am curious to see where he might go next.
TOME
Hantsport,
Nova Scotia
Giddy with
the Carboniferous, I huff up
the bluff’s
pitch with a ten-pound slab
just pinched
from Blue Beach: sheaves
of
pressure-stamped era
collated from
the Book of Lith,
straight-cut
rhombus sheared off
from nature’s
packed-
down less.
Rock’s biopsy sample,
deep-time
casserole, inch-thick glued-shut
hardback from
some bygone zoic.
Plumb enough
to upright on bookshelves,
each waterlogged
page is a thousand years
of coal
swamp, river dreg; one black-rimmed
hair’s width
the pressed leaf
of a
generation’s bad weather. Tucked somewhere
between
sandstone and shale, a love letter
to the Law of
Superposition:
a single
footprint from a flathead tetrapod
scouting the
Late Devonian, tube sock of axons
taunting
gravity with a new backbone,
calling us
back to mornings
when we half
wake, still slaves to
hindbrain, to
stretch our spines, sniff the air.
o the sound of--
ReplyDeleteo the feel of--
those lines broken,
like that.
Thank you.