Rodney Koeneke, Body & Glass

the new poetics

Snake, be quick—excuse of words

to make me sharp and want to write

waits in metaphors sleepless taunt.

People, use stones! Compose things

Slow to weeds sounds boys invent

from drone’s new lows. Saxifrage

in young stands lovers meet behind

nervous to dismiss significance

Ur-names meeting Ur-things

in the flowers, bees reconciling workers

to their combs. Quiet, writing

don’t strike ideas I let be composed

but through that flow of breath that is not

my breath, split ore from rock

that’s not my ore, my rock.

The latest from Portland, Oregon poet Rodney Koeneke, an early member of the Flarf collective, is the collection Body & Glass (Wave Books, 2018), following on the heels of his Etruria (Wave Books, 2014), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX Books, 2006) and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003). There is something reminiscent of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell’s work in Koeneke’s tone and tenor in these poems, one that writes self-aware, methodically and deeply curious, seeking the poetic and the lyric through scientific method, and the scientific through the poetic and the lyric; especially one that seeks, through the tight, narrative lyric, answers to what might never be possible to know. As the poem “schottische” begins: “You are old but / if possible I’d / like to keep // Moving […]” Or this, the final stanza in the four-stanza poem “young historian’s scoring rubric,” that reads:

Analysis is solid, and done

in a historical way, but free

from all history—balloon on

a tether with girl in a picture

primary evidence let fly away.

Composed with an incredible, subtle sharpness, his is a poetics, and even a politics, that embrace both optimism and exhaustion, as he writes to open the poem “urdo made easy”: I am fed up with this world / And want to be somewhere else[.]”