Barbara Henning, A Day Like Today

AT SUNRISE

Instead of meditating, I mop

the floors and hallways.

To prevent downloading free

music, Dutch cable companies

obtain a court order to block

access to the pirate bay.

In fancy gyms across the city,

people steal from each other,

yuppie-on-yuppie crime

while musicians and night

workers seek the quiet dim

of dark apartments. At sunset,

I switch on the parking lights

and run upstairs to pee,

hoping the police won’t

notice. Then I circle around

block after block, finally

finding a tiny spot between

B and C, in front of the yuppie

building with a doorman,

a doorman’s sole purpose,

so they say, to provide security.

In the acknowledgments of New York poet Barbara Henning’s newest collection, A Day Like Today (Mobile AL: Negative Capability Press, 2015), the first real experience I’ve had with her writing, she writes that “These poems were composed from daily one page journal entries written in 2012. Many thanks to the New York Times writers (2012) for words and phrases collaged into the poems.” Henning’s compositional method has created a collection of densely-packed daybook-collage lyric capsules, managing to contain an incredible amount of information down the length of each page, as well as a great deal of breathable space between each line (which allow her poems not to collapse beneath their own weight). Bouncing from point to point to point, the shape and the tenor of her poems is reminiscent of the cadence of a number of poems by Cobourg, Ontario poet Stuart Ross, sans his trademark surrealism, as she allows the poems to end up far from the beginning, but still managing a somehow-coherent thread despite the tangents and leaps. Constructed in five sections—“Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer,” “Fall” and back to “Winter”—Henning’s poetic diary reads, in parts, as arbitrary as Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days” sequence; less interested in temporally placing the poems per se than allowing the random elements of her source material during those periods direct a certain degree of each poem’s movements. One might ask, are the section-headers meant to add or distract, or have they no purpose at all but as reportage itself, letting the reader know in which season each poem began? And yet, other poems do read as reports on specific activity, whether writing that “In the graveled garden / behind Unnameable Books / Patricia Spears Jones / is reading her poems.” (“UNNAMEABLE”), or that “I met Lewis for lunch / at Angelica’s. We eat wee / dragon bowls with mu tea. / Then I bike over to Santo’s / in the rain to make copies / of my poetic prose book.” (“I MEET LEWIS / FOR LUNCH”).

NEW YEAR’S EVE

Mr. Zlobin writes a book

about Americans and how we

interrogate complete strangers.

Two men interrogate a woman,

one in gentle, soothing tones,

while the other fires staccato

bursts of accusatory questions.

Her husband is reading a magazine

called Wired when she repeats

her question. He snarls and

commands that she be still.

To issue spoken commands

on most Androids, you must

tap the microphone gently.

In Russia, children are raised

by their grandmothers.

An average mother would never

dream of leaving her child

with a teenager. She says

it seems as if he doesn’t care

about her. He stands up

in a wild sea storm in the Gulf

of Alaska, where a Shell Oil

drilling rig runs aground

with 139,000 gallons

of diesel fuel. The unified

command will be monitoring

the situation. It’s midnight

with fireworks when he walks

out while his wife is pleading

with him to stay. Frankenstein’s

monster on occasion turns

out to be rather sweet.