OBSERVANCE
the thing
about Los Angeles
the way
the cars
pile up
when you
get close
you’d think
they had
something
really good
in there (Snowflake:
new poems)
I’m
fascinated by legendary New York City poet, critic, and novelist Eileen Myles’ new
tandem poetry collection, the combined Snowflake:new poems / different streets: newer poems (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave
Poetry, 2012). The author of “more than twenty books of poetry, fiction,
nonfiction, plays, and libretti,” this is the first of her books I’ve seen, two
collections with barely the space of two blank pages to separate them. Myles’ relatively
short lyric poems (a mere handful of the poems included are more than a page or
two in length) play off the singular thought-line through short-lined phrases,
keeping to a structure of how much that linearity is twisted, turned, broken or
adapted. Some poems emerge as small essays in a single line, and others exist
as abstracts, or even descriptive pieces, writing on the small moments of
writing and other human occurrences, rich with commentary, observations and
queries. Each poem in the two collections embrace “subject” nearly as a kind of
journal entry, all the time, the deceptively-narrative “I” held almost as a
place-holder, a means to an end. As she writes to open the poem “#7 DARK WATER”
in : “big parkways so disturbing to me,” ending with “almost like a water that
we’re on / though a dark water that / holds us.”
Many
of her poems exist as single breath-sentences with numerous turns and cognitive
twists. The subtitles “new” and “newer” suggest a distance, and the press
release references that it has been seven years since her last trade collection
of poetry appeared, Sorry, Tree (Wave
Books, 2007). There is something radiant and even exquisite happening in these
two collections, in these remarkable and remarkably subtle poems. The subtlety
is powerful, and almost to the point of being barely-there, striking so much
more powerful by being so, such as in the way she ends the three-page poem “WRITING”
in Snowflake: new poems: “I don’t
count / on what / I am / she said // and that / chandelier / is more / light //
than / anyone / else [.]”
november
11
It’s not just that
the clock
stopped or reversed
but just seemed
to change
itself
I remember
a procession
of sweet
buildings
boarded up
finding him
in a store
then kissing
in the rain
the strange pleasure
of pleasing
someone me
then my godmother
and then
someone jumping
off a building
in the rain
the surprise
and the sound
of rain
on the phone
holding it
for a while (different streets: newer poems)
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