Christian Schlegel, The Blackbird

 

in this procedure of mine         you have a topic and get into it in public

            and it responds to the group of people            and to the place    and the

presence of danniel                  and the art on the walls            so i’m going to do one of

those now        because i’ve read from my book a couple of times                and it’s 

almost impossible to read from it                    why is it impossible?                              well

it’s very hard to capture my own way again                              not that my way is so great 

the first time                but it’s hard to find it in the book                    and you’ll see how

  it’s lineated it’s somewhat idiosyncratic                      harder to do that aloud again (“delhi”)

I’m fascinated by the myriad readability and expansive, conversational thinking of Somerville, MA poet Christian Schlegel through his third full-length title (and the first of his I’ve seen, I think), The Blackbird (Brooklyn NY: Beautiful Days Press, 2025), produced as “Beautiful Days Press #16.” Following his poetry titles honest james (The Song Cave, 2015) and ryman (Ricochet, 2022), the five extended poems that make up The Blackbird follow a structure developed by the late American poet David Antin (1932-2016), a name specifically referenced as part of the second page of the text, as Schlegel’s text appear adapted from informal talks, whether composed as texts read aloud or, as the text itself suggests, lectures informally presented off-the-cuff and transcribed (and shaped, at least visually) as individual, extended pieces. The performative element is fundamental to these works, and these poem-talks, poem-essays, seem the product of a writer/critic thoroughly aware and prepared through years of research, thinking and writing, presented in the moment, responding to the space and audience of each particular lecture. One might compare these pieces, also, to those infamous lectures the late American poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) presented in Vancouver during the early 1980s, collected by Peter Gizzi in the house that jack built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 1998; 2025).

While Antin is referenced early in the first piece, it is where Schlegel begins to speak of American singer-songwriter Jason Molina (1973-2013) that provides a further, separate insight into his approach through these pieces: “two things i want to round off // on molina the first is that   his insistence i would argue                      on capturing the // artwork in the moment of its unfolding or including within it the possibilities of its falling // apart                 had something i think to do with his negotiation of openness and closure //                     he wanted things                or intuitively understood                that // his art worked best when it operated in that resonating chamber [.]” In a way, this might be one of the central structures of these talks, allowing for both openness and failure, negotiating all the possibilities of what might fail and what might land. These pieces are expansive and deeply intimate, managing a conversational and intellectual liveliness across the page in real time, the notation of words presumably transcribed and mapped across each page a rhythm, a syntax, that feels entirely natural.