Nice
that folk have started sending me chapbooks again; why do so few publisher send
along chapbooks? I’m looking at you, various (other) publishers I’ve already reviewed titles
by.
Toronto ON: Kirby’s knife|fork|book really does produce some
elegant-looking titles, and one of their latest is a chapbook by Toronto-based poet and essayist Maureen Scott Harris, her More Than One Homage (2022).
This small collection is halved through a handful of poems assembled from
elements of her great-uncle Will’s diaries alongside a handful of poems
composed in homage to other writers and/or their works. As she offers in her
notes: “My great-uncle Will was born in 1891. I remember he had large hands,
calloused and dirt-stained, and a large laugh. He was a farmer, and my
favourite person in the world when I was eight or nine. He wore big boots,
denim overalls, long-sleeved workshirts, and a train engineer’s cap. He laughed
a lot, sitting at the kitchen table, or leaning, foot up on the running board
of a neighbour’s truck. […] ‘Will’s Diaries’ arose as an interaction between
the diaries themselves and Robert Kroetch’s essays and poems. The italicized
lines in ‘How to begin’ and ‘Wood (Winter)’ are Kroetsch’s own words, lifted
mostly from his essays.” Her poems from the diaries do have the feel of some of
those early Kroetsch long poems, whether The Ledger (1975) or Seed Catalogue
(1977) (both of which are reprinted in full in Completed Field Notes: The
Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch, published by The University of Alberta Press
in 2000), offering a kind of collage of archive and sketched-out notes through
accumulated fragment. Writing out her own kind of ledger, she offers a clear
cadence of moments and movements through this lyric assemblage. As part of her
poem “Will’s Diaries: Wood (Winter)” writes:
each morning a
blank page
a white page
see him swaddled in coat
& steam
from his own breath
the days keep going on
conversations
chores
chores
chores
chores
fix stable fetch hay
milk cows fetch ice
chop oats fetch flour
kill pigs fix hen house
feed & water the
stock
(where did the water come
from
in frozen winter? that pump
in the yard, its wooden
handle
the well, surely frozen
too)
There’s
such a concrete scene articulated through those short bursts, and I’m intrigued
by these homages, these experiments, offering poems for and through her late
great-uncle, and similarly, for and through and from poets including Philip Whalen, Sei Shonagon and Lyn Hejinian. The homages, as much as her poems from
her great-uncle’s diaries, are wonderfully responsive, allowing the influence
and rhythms of her sources to infuse themselves across her lines in a really
lovely way. Her poems respond as much as they echo; and echo, as much as they
provide homage. As the third of the three-stanza poem “One day before the
equinox, or, Walking to work I see,” subtitled “After Lyn Hejinian,” writes:
The trees firmly leaning
are not waiting for spring but absorbed busy in manufacturing what will
seasonably occur. Reasonably occur. When the goose crossed my field of vision I
was musing rabbit with nose twitching, Rabbit stood upright in a field (the
grass was dry, beige, bent at the tips) front paws hanging limp, listening and
comic peering round one ear flopped over (bent at the tip). I raised my eyes
from the field of grass to the field of bare tree branches and beyond that the
field of clouded sky. My glance fell upon the long-necked bird at first unknown.
The goose seized my eye and carried it along the curve of its slow flight till
it was obscured by the field of rooftops or lost in the field of bare
tree branches. Even a squint did not clarify the blurred disappearing. I smiled
through and kept walking. The cardinals wheeted. As they had for some time.
Brooklyn NY/Washington DC: Given my familiarity
with Washington D.C. poet Buck Down’s work over the years, having produced his
chapbooks Shiftless [Harvester] (2016), The Hack of Heaven (2017)
and Another Tricky Day (2020) through above/ground press, as well as
working through a couple of his collections—Unintended Empire: 1989-2012
(Baltimore MD: Furniture Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] and OPEN
CONTAINER (Washington DC: privately printed, 2019) [see my review of such here]—I was curious to see what Jordan Davis had put together for Downs’
chapbook-length GREEDY MAN: selected poems (Brooklyn NY: Subpress
Collective/CCCP Chapbooks, 2023). Since my familiarity with Downs’ extensive
publishing history only exists across a relatively shorter span, I would have
been curious to see a bibliography of where (and when) the thirty-two poems assembled
here had been selected from. I know I’ve compared Downs’ work in the past to
that of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert (for a kind of extended,
documentary-style ongoingness), or even that of New York School poet Frank O’Hara
(for the “I did this, I did that-isms), but there’s something about the
overview of this particular collection that paints instead a portrait of a poet
comparable to a more pessimistic, even paranoid, version of the surrealisms of American poet Ron Padgett or Canadian poet Stuart Ross. As the poem “MYSELF CONTAINS
MULTITUDES” reads in full: “and some / of these fuckers / have got to go [.]” The
poems that sit mid-point and beyond in the collection are the structures I’ve become
familiar with through Downs’ ongoing work—short bursts that wend across the
page through an accumulation of short phrase-lines—so it is interesting to see
the left-justification of some of these presumably-earlier poems, such as this:
TURN OFF THE PICKLE
there is a lot
of laughter going
on among the
introductions
beneath the waves
there could be
a steady under
current as in
the realization
that the boy wonder
is a regis
tered trademark
I found a magic
vessel on the stone
beach and liquor
there inside it I knew
could restore me
to what I had once
been and so I took
off the plastic lid
and poured it in
the water
