ars
poetica
at the back
of the alley
you are going south
looking for a drinking
I am going north,
looking
for the source of the
chill
this north which is central
the mist that erases itself
unseen ocean
ships on it
calling hoarsely
throughout the night
I
was very pleased to see a new book-length poetry title in my mailbox recently
from American poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, his to whom it may concern (Berkeley CA:
Apogee Press, 2019). The book is structured in three sections—the suite of
short lyrics, “americana” (which appeared as a chapbook through above/ground press), and two sequences of short, accumulative fragments: “evening with
photograph album” and “to whom it may concern.”
Smallfield,
a poet and publisher who relocated to Barcelona from California along with his
wife, the poet Valerie Coulton, in October, 2004, is also the author of the
full-length collections Trio (Specter
Press, 1995), The Pleasures of C
(Apogee Press, 2001), One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (a collaboration with Doug MacPherson; Battery Press, 2003)
and equinox (Apogee Press, 2011), as
well as a handful of chapbooks, both single author and collaborations.
Smallfield
appears to compose via accumulation and seriality, moving ever forward toward
bundles of poems that shape into sections, and bundles of sections that shape
into full-length collections. As he responds as part of his 2014 interview for Touch the Donkey:
I’ve always admired
serial poems, but it took me a long time to understand how I could write them.
Because I believe in absolute freedom in writing, I don’t force myself to write
around a subject or theme. I love to write, so of course I write a lot. When I
look back over what I’ve written, the most interesting poems invariably group
themselves around the same concerns. I don’t think this is mysterious; it seems
inevitable that the most vibrant writing would be awakened by what obsesses me
most.
The
through-line of his poems bend, ever so slightly, akin to a guitar string,
bending the sustained note slightly higher or lower in tone. As part of the
first section, he includes the poem “ars poetica,” a poem-as-poetics that,
itself, riffs off the work of the late San Francisco renaissance poet Jack Spicer, specifically the second part of “Seven Poems for the Vancouver
Festival,” from his Book of Magazine
Verse (1966); Spicer’s original poem includes:
The Frazier River was discovered by mistake it
being thought
to
have been, like all British Columbia,
Further south than it was.
You are going south looking for a drinking
fountain
I am going north looking for the source of the
chill in my bones.
I
only know this, of course, because I look this same passage up every decade or
so, having the same phrases caught in the back of my own head. As Smallfield writes as part of his 2016 “Spotlight,” directly referencing the poems “the
narrow road to the deep north” and “folk,” both of which appear, also, as part
of the first section of this new collection:
After living outside the US for a number of
years, I found my writing returning to explicity ‘American’ themes. This wasn’t
a deliberate choice; I was recovering from an illness, and taking medications,
so my writing was under even less conscious control than usual.
The poems that emerged now seem a reflection on
my home country from afar, or at least from a distance within myself.
All of the poems were written before the recent
election. I’m relieved about that — otherwise, there would have been more
bitterness and anger, and far less distance.
The
second section is the poem-sequence “evening with photograph album,” a poem
that is most likely exactly what the title suggests, as he writes around
photographs of grandmother, and other elements of family history and histories,
perhaps an extension of what he offered as a return to themes, and to a country
he no longer lives in (I am curious at some of the writing he has done since “the
recent election,” and if the distances he speaks of have shortened). This
accumulation of fragments on his grandmother is a poem curious, in part, for
its extended use of the ellipses:
…that my grandmother’s story ended with
her…that my mother, for all her love, could not know it…how could two women so
different from each other ever understand each other…
…of course the story of my grandmother’s family
in ‘the old country’ went on, goes on…but my grandmother no longer understood
that story…how could she…after 30 years in a little town in the foothills---how
could she understand the years before the war, the war, the postwar…which she
understood—this lack of understanding—better than anyone…
…that the father should appear only obliquely…
…that the daughters have their own lives…that
no lights will be turned on in the forgotten rooms of their pasts…
…that this morning you are at the end of winter…
…that this afternoon I am in the end of summer…
…because place + time = ____...
The
third poem-section, the title section, is a poem that experiments with empty
space, one not as patiently frenetic as the work of Sylvia Legris or Jessica Smith, but as a meditative pause and calm far more prevalent than much of his
other work, writing:
row
I love it
I love it
music does that
how
I love
nothing
What is interesting in Smallfield’s work in this
collection is in how the shapes and themes do form as the book progresses, even
as the structures, in certain ways, pull themselves apart, accumulating as much
physical space between lines, words and thoughts as what can’t be seen. It is as though the
poems in this collection work to look back at that past, and that past self,
attempting to bridge that geographical and temporal distance, while at the same
time firmly establishing himself (the whom of the title and title poem he is
most likely writing to), both author and individual, in his particular time,
and in his particular place.
