Fredericton NB: It is good to see new chapbook presses popping up in various corners of the country, recently seeing a copy of new Fredericton, New Brunswick chapbook publisher Gridlock Lit’s POEMS FOR BURNING (2024), the debut chapbook by Fredericton poet Spencer Folkins. I wonder if Folkins was aware of the late bpNichol’s small item, Cold Mountain (1992), a poem set for assembling and dropping a lit match into? Folkins’ poems are slightly wider, which prompted the publisher to set the title lengthways (instead of using legal-sized paper), which does make for a slightly trickier reading experience, admittedly. Across some thirty pages, Folkins has composed a suite of narrative first-person poems that offer declaratives and descriptions amid meditative wandering. “We came to convince ourselves / and others / we are still alive,” Folkins writes, as part of “POEM FOR BURNING II,” ‘still here, / hearts / beating.” These are poems of observation, seeking to articulate what is already there, reaching for insight and wisdom through uncertain paths. Seeking out, as the original “POEM FOR BURNING” ends: “a desire innate / for the end is in everything / we touch [.]”
Brooklyn NY: I only saw a copy recently, but I’ve been going through Brooklyn poet Katherine Duckworth’s chapbook Slow Violence (Beautiful Days Press, 2023), numbered third in their chapbook series. Slow Violence is a stunning and expansive fifty page suite constructed via lyric and prose fragments held together in a beautiful coherence around sports, survival, social justice and resistance, pinging from the intimate to the immediate to the political. “This fracture, or / a small breach on screen or // stadium,” she writes, early on in the collection. The lyric moves from UAW workers on strike in the 1980s to the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series, collision and exhaustion, metaphor and purpose, Hank Williams Jr. and Bubba Helms, providing a lyric of work and working class ethos, comparable to works by Philadelphia poet ryan eckes [see my review of his latest here] or some of those Kootenay School of Writers poets such as the late Peter Culley [see my review of his Parkway here]. This really is a remarkable collection, and clearly from a poet that we should all be paying attention to. “Severed hands gather. Relocate. Consider / the concrete suspended, shipwrecked. About / Bubba, he’s working at the Nike employee store. / He becomes again. Contains. Rises and falls in / the mind, like a market.”
A moment of catharsis, my brothers collide
over a handful of laundry quarters
Weaving syllabics in sleep, scrims that burn off in the sun
The imagination hovers, untethered. Revision, too. But it is
constructed through the life, the I confined to material, to
a specificity. I use a filter to identify the value of
Whitman’s Live Oak with Moss in the NYC parks database.
I choose one in Queens. Number 4141699 has a total
annual benefits value of $82.07. Its diameter is 5 inches
Across the street a green panel says POST NO BILLS
Philadelphia PA: One of the first quartet of titles from the “Cul-de-sac of Blood Series #1” is Grand Rapids, Michigan poet Michael Sikkema’s watch for deer (2024). Obviously, I’ve been attempting to attend the work of Sikkema for years, and have even produced a couple of chapbooks by him through above/ground press. This recent chapbook, watch for deer, is constructed as a sequence of untitled fragments, centred around a particular warning, which he turns in on itself, expanding a clarification into unexpected directions. “watch for deer,” he writes, “their fangs shine / for profit and once // you haggle in / that palace you’ll // yell at the dotted / yellow line while // a pool of ungulates / swamps your / best BBQ plans [.]” The poems are searching, reaching, stretching out into the absurd from that reasonable opening, leaning into similar absurdities as do Canadian poets Stuart Ross or Gary Barwin. From this slow accumulation of pages, Sikkema manages to simultaneously return from that central moment of thought, “watch for deer,” swirling out into an array of impossibilities (akin to Robert Kroetsch, perhaps, the notion of the long poem as one of perpetual beginning). Or perhaps there is something about Michigan deer entirely different from those we see up this way:
they kick out of their
eggs
sniff out soft targets
lean into the blur
watch for deer
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