Improvisation Without Accompaniment
In the field, the tractor
spins its giant wheels.
How fierce defiance is,
or seems. Mechanical
in a sense: our pistons
firing to set aflame
some teepee of longed-for
brush, this being
hope’s kindling. Just once,
I’d like to witness
beavers constructing a
dam out of fallen
timber, dead limbs crooked
and bent. I’d like
a roan horse, a wide-open
pasture to ride across.
Laughter. A bottle of
cheap wine. These acres
of heartland filling up
with snow and snow and—
for our next trick, what
will be expected of us?
The chromosomes divide
with such precision.
This is the part where
the origin myths diverge.
Give me something gold to
grapple with: three
apples to juggle, a scrap
of paper to fold
into a dove. I have seen
pigeons nesting atop
the steel beams in the
station, as the trains arrive
and depart, come and go. All
I want to do is sit
on the porch at evening,
in a pinewood rocking
chair, and watch the
desert sun melt over the hills.
But it is this notion of now
that gives me
trouble. There is no
parachute, and that is sad.
Winner
of the 18th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, as judged by Patricia Smith, is Dallas, Texas poet and editor Matt Morton’s full-length poetry debut,
Improvisation Without Accompaniment (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2020). Published
with a foreword by Smith, what really propels these poems, deceptively composed
as first-person narrative poems, is the discrete layering he manages to
achieve, one step overlapping one step, composed in a slowness that feels as
deliberate as it is meticulous. There is something of the way the narratives of
Morton’s poems move, held together neither by action or language (although utilizing
both of those), but by something almost wistful, thoughts gathering up against
each other as they move forward. As Patricia Smith describes in her
introduction, Morton’s poems are chock-full of lines that will stop you dead in
your tracks, lines that hold an incredible amount of power both as stand-alone,
and for how they exist within the larger body of each individual poem. “A clock
is a long time / and it is also a short time.” he writes, in the poem “Vardaman,”
a poem that also includes:
My brother’s head is full
of flames.
I can’t see them. I can
see two blue
circles like holes of sky
punched through
a fence and why is there
no smoke.
His
poems are less constructed out of stories he tells but poems that weave stories
into them, included for larger purposes. To illustrate, perhaps, a larger, more
elusive point on life and living, being and thinking. Are these poems magical? They
might just be magical. In a 2016 interview over at The Collagist, Morton spoke to how he composed his poems via collage, which I found quite interesting.
He responds:
When I attempt to write
poems like “What’s That You Said?,” I start by listing disparate images and
statements that are organized under a general umbrella heading or thesis of
sorts—in this case, the problem of communicating or connecting with other
people in a world oversaturated with sounds and stimuli. With these poems, my
hope is that my mind during the process of writing will eventually take the
poem in a direction I wasn’t expecting, moving beyond a mere list or collage
toward something of greater psychological or emotional importance. Whether or
not this happens during a first draft usually determines whether the poem ends
up being interesting to me, and whether or not I spend any more time working on
it.
No comments:
Post a Comment