Have you seen what’s been posting lately over at periodicities? Some pretty cool stuff, I must say, including interviews with this year’s entire bpNichol Chapbook Award shortlist!
Montreal QC: Perhaps as a teaser to a forthcoming new volume is Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s RETOOLING FOR A FIGURATIVE LIFE / reequipando para unha vida figurative (Montreal QC: Vallum chapbooks, 2021), a sketchbook of first-person inquiry. There is something really fascinating in the way in which Moure’s writing shifts foundations, writing from the point at which the physical and the linguistic meet through a remarkable clarity. “I can just lie here and / the world is like that.” she writes, as part of the poem “Girl.” Moure writes on the physical aspect of our mammalian selves and of rivers, valleys, shadows and names, and the baseline of earth. There is something foundational to the focus of her inquiry: something deeper and more universal than human; something deeper than landscape or nature. “If only / living beside a tree / would make a difference.” she writes, to open the poem “Beside.” As the short lyric closes: “Artifice / won’t do.”
Fireflies
I am trying to remember
where things come from
and I think they come out
of the ground.
This smoke-colored glass
bowl came out of
the ground.
This resin of coffee came out of the ground.
The flour and egg I mix
came out of the ground.
All pigeons come out of
the ground.
My mother, when I remember
her, comes
out of the ground.
Sunlight comes from the
ground
out of the ground.
A poem I read this A.M. came directly out of the ground.
I wash my face in ground
and drink its light
and its taste
hello hello of smoke and absence.
Brooklyn NY: I’m fascinated by the dos-à-dos chapbook When I Ask My Friend, by Jennifer Soong/Points of Amperture, by Daniel Owen (Brooklyn NY: DoubleCross Press, 2021), although one might offer that it isn’t immediately apparent as to why these two poets were paired. Soong is the author of the full-length debut Near, At (Futurepoem, 2019) [see my review of such here] and, apparently, forthcoming titles from Spam Press (London/Glasgow) and Black Sun Lit (New York). There is an expansiveness to Soong’s lyrics in When I Ask My Friend, an enormous amount of stretch to her sentences; a text of monologues, offering meditation-as-monologue. “Running out of things to say,” she writes, as part of her seven-page opening poem “When I ask my friend what it means to love the world I find the / answer is a little funny, a little sad,” “one is left with time. / Then time runs out of our words, waiting to be kept again. / A boy stands mesmerized by the microwave, / his face in swirling poultry. Meanwhile / things divvy up the glare.” One can nearly be overwhelmed by her sentences, and the speed at which they travel. As the second part of Soong’s seven-part sequence “Razor Song” reads:
Knowledge of “who” belongs
to the more fundamental
facts of “where”
and “when” we are. You
begin by saying
How do I explain?
SORRY
WHAT DID YOU SAY? I am trying
to see more than one
thing at a time.
The light is turning.
Lying down facing you
my tummy drops like a dumpling.
Women who diet destroy
me.
They want to disappear and right now
my poetry fucks negation.
Today just so happens to
be the coldest
Thanksgiving
in years. I’ve said Jennifer
be in a decent mood. Don’t trust anyone.
for this reason I’m always ready
for groups to be over, hoarding
my words in the dark
like dwarves, mushrooms
or giant tube worms
Hovering at
the sea’s bottom.
Daniel Owen, a name I’m aware of through his being a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse collective, is a Brooklyn-based poet and translator. The author of the collections Toot Sweet (United Artists Books), RESTAURANT SAMSARA (Furniture Press Books), and the chapbook Authentic Other Landscape (Diez), this is the first title of his I’ve seen. The poems in Points of Amperture are shorter, but contain an equal expansiveness to Soong’s. It is an expansiveness that is far more contained, with both poets composing a lyric of the line and breath and lyric sentence, propelled by meaning, collage and collision. As his note at the end of his chapbook reads:
I thought amperture is how you spell embouchure, but turns out that’s not right. I was listening a lot to Andrew Hill’s album, Point of Departure, at the time, which had a real hold on me, did something in so many directions, something amperture’s many points have to do with. So the move from pun to mistake to maybe something else became a point of departure for these poems together. Amperture: between embouchure, amplitude, aperture, armature, departure. A mistaken lighting out, an exhalation. Chords where multitudes of voices ring before an open door through which all these presences of the past and future rub each other on their out and in ways. And you’re there and I’m there somewhere. Some kind of opening, I hope, where edges come close and something moves between them, mourning or preserving or relating or undoing. Getting louder. Ampersand posture, amp of tattered verdure. Amplified aperture perched on torque.
Owen’s poems are intricately structured, containing a lyric that bounces casually through and across play, meaning and sound; I would suggest that even to look at each poet’s cover image would be to at least be introduced to the ways in which their works are structured, both poets utilizing very different forms for lyrics that are each propelled by logic, meaning and collage.
A COFFEE OF MY MIND
where in the names of
history would
useless trees be written?
useless
birds, pied pipers, pomelo
rinds.
a shopping list is both
its negative and
positive minds. an instinctive
film on which
amoebas fuck. be serious
with
your steaks, says ghost
of speaking to
ghost of the edifice that
burns lands
now called Americas. those
ghosts will sing and
singe the rotten
core to the earth! will
paste and shout.
don’t use my story in
your
permissions like that.
mystery of
curtains, veils, the
burning plains beyond
listlesses in other
states of ant-bit,
other clouds touched into
the mouths of
accepting child death,
poison donuts,
no ozone. As if any bean
could be
planted, as if oceans
heard you.
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