Kevin Davies, Transfer Portal

 

53

IF, AS I’VE DONE HERE, YOU STRING TOGETHER
all the tiny roles I’ve played on the various versions
of Law & Order over years, a masterpiece
emerges from the rubble of erased plot
and theologized desert, a stunning
or stunned study in deep facets, as unbegun
subject treading the boards of late and
early century in search of the antidote
that will cure him of these pestilent data.
you can continue to the wedding in a moment. 

                                                            66

I’VE BEEN BEFORE IN THIS LATRINE.
Its broken locks subtend a trauma.
If punctuation could limn this scene:
Five hyphens and a giant comma.

The latest from Jackson Heights, New York-based Canadian poet Kevin Davies, following Pause Button (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1992), Comp. (Washington DC: Edge Books, 2000), Lateral Argument (Barretta Books, 2003), The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Edge Books, 2008) and FPO (Edge Books, 2020) (as well as a recent chapbook through above/ground, a further Edge title next year, and a forthcoming Talonbook title in 2028), is Transfer Portal (Edge Books, 2026). It has been suggested to me that Davies’ work is difficult to discuss as his work is increasingly self-referential, so perhaps even to speak of such is to reveal my own ignorance [although there’s a remarkably good recent interview up at Jacket2 with Davies, conducted by Scott Inniss, that is worth reading for a larger context to Davies’ ongoing work]. Perhaps so. The accumulated and numbered fragments that make up Transfer Portal exist in proper sequence, but for the opening two (above), set in order prior to the beginning. To what end is such information important for narrative comprehension, moved out of linear order?

Across the language of Davies’ impossibly-long threaded lines, a mélange of words pushed in against each other to splatter, purposefully disrupt and undermine, and eventually rebuild, meaning. All of this, also, while including what seem a uniquely scattered list of references, such as the American Revolution, playing catch in the dark, ancient Rome, paradise and old debt, Shakespeare’s Caliban and discipline, snowfall and swaths of crossed-out text. Davies’ language swirls gymnastically around and through critiques of capitalism and culture, an evolving poetics that evolved out of early engagement with and through The Kootenay School of Writing into something more expansive and even evasive, engaging beyond, and yet still connecting to, poets such as the late Peter Culley [see my review of his latest here], Dorothy Trujillo Lusk [see my review of her latest here], Jeff Derksen [see my review of his latest here], Rob Manery [see my review of his latest here], Colin Smith [see my review of his latest here] and Louis Cabri [see my review of his latest here], as well as more recent poets who have taken up similar threads, such as ryan fitzpatrick [see my review of their most recent here] as well as Inniss himself [see my review of his latest here].

As part of that same Jacket2 interview, Inniss references [… Philadelphia poet Ron] Silliman’s review of [Davies’] The Golden Age of Paraphernalia from his blog, where he writes, ‘Davies appears to have found a spot exactly halfway between language poetry and flarf.’” Nearly a decade earlier, Joshua Clover offered this about Davies’ work in Boston Review: “This is how I think about Kevin Davies’s poems, for which few if any of the possible metaphors seem even close: weather, the fractured encyclopedia, disobedience. His poetry is not especially metaphorical in the first place; it is more a kind of realism, for a real world that seems all too often not just too awful, but too incalculable and messy to look at in its full unfolding.”

When two words are placed side by side, of course, they can’t help but sit in relation, and thus, a narrative sense of meaning, from left to right (or up to down, or however words are placed against each other). And yet, there’s almost a similar kind of overarcing floating narrative created across these short bursts to the prose work of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, how the present and the surreal offer steps across a complex grid, and composed of sections that may or may not connect to the larger narrative. “Anyway that’s my tale and now it’s done. / The young woman took my chair when I stood / briefly to wash my beak. / And then would not move her legs to // allow me to retrieve my bundle / from beneath the chair,” he writes, near the end of the collection, as part of the rather lengthy section sixty-eight, “and that is when I felt myself / turning into pressed wool and about to go haywire.”

                                                            61

THE POPPINJAY, SHRILL, HAS NONE
of the absolute quantum blackness of the bird of paradise
nut is nonetheless an end it itself
in this valley or alley. 

 

                                                            62

CAPACIOUSLY CONSTRUED, THE ENDED FENDER
can seem to catch hold of the tree’s inner funk.
You’ve got nerve to kneel under the bandstand and glow.
We had wanted to be apprehended serially
in a way that made our monkey aunts and uncles proud.
Look, Horace, you haven’t got it in you
anymore if you ever did. If you did, you’d do it
or it would do it for you, or you would stand up to it
and it would do as you told it, it and its parcelling division.
We buy companies, sell off the assets, fold up the shells,
and fuck off to our personal car elevators.