Nate Pritts
CHAPBOOKS GALORE!
Dana Ward. The Imaginary Lives of My Neighbors.
Chris Jackson. Poppers.
Aaron Tieger. Days and Days.
Ann Humphreys. Which Lies Are Necessary?
Tyler Carter. Egg Breakfast.
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Dana Ward, The Imaginary Lives of My Neighbors.
Duration Press e-chapbook
http://www.durationpress.com/bookstore/index.htm.
Not just a mixture of prose & poetry, it’s the prosaic & the zany holding hands in stone-cold earnest:
The details surrounding the shooting were hidden because everyone wanted to know what happened. My neighbors raised flags upside down in distress. The way flowered memorials breed overnight. As gifts there were curfews and blanket arrests. Police described clouds using gas they cleared out. The crowds dispersed glass with socialized rocks.
It’s this expected shattering that brings me back & back again to Dana Ward. Things are exactly what they seem to be, they’re called by their own names & held up for all to see. Outrage & outrageousness. Amidst all the hustle & noise of these lines, Ward is still working in a romantic vein, urging very human concern for our social state. The neighbors, desperate as any of us, are
…lifting their shirts and showing the bruises, others in stable condition can’t breathe. We leave for work and come home to a barricade, old ones are toppled and rolling.
In this world of infinite compromises, our subtle negotiations, the man-made cacophony is loaded with equal parts “wisdom and bunk.” Only the great big shiny sun is “made of perfect transmissions.”
In this short work of missed gesture, of frustrated impulse, of reach, Ward posits the reclamation of a voice. The voice is anti-authority, a brick hurled at all “soft and vague” pronouncements, & it’s finally only the crystallized consciousness, the last vestiges of a savaged beauty, that can save us, us “in love with the ocean,” us in the moon glow that “causes the beautiful plants.”
***
Chris Jackson, Poppers.
Katalanché Press.
http://www.katalanchepress.blogspot.com
These are aggressive & edgy poems. They shoulder their way up to you & put their face just a few centimeters from yours. Part of this energy comes from the first line of each poem (which a note tells us are bad subtitles from Kung Fu movies; “Beware your bones are about to be disconnected,” is an example) but this energy is generative, put to good use by Jackson. How else could we get to something as touching as this?
…for me a symbol of love is a waffle
iron be it successful or burning be sure you
have one as you build your house of lost
children and this is my prayer to St.
Stephen please do not hurt anyone and not
yourself anymore…
(Birth or Torture)
The frenetic-ness of these poems is aided by their grammatical unity (each is presented as only one sentence) that jumps through different modes of consciousness, a traffic jam of tone and voice that gathers as much meaning through juxtaposition as it does through sheer denotative value:
…but this is poetry and foolhardy poetry makes
imagined what was never meant to happen by which
not ashtray but hope is intended a hand
from a cloud three fingers
extended smearing ashtray gum across
my forehead I’ll tell you what I remember
I remember trying and failing I hope you
will forgive me my hands were shaking.
(Lately Penitential and Shitless)
Really, as aggressive as the language can be, as flat out violent, there is a deep & fumbling human compassion here as well. The speaker in these poems wants to tell us something about our hearts but isn’t quite sure how to do it. But the speaker tries and tries again, battering at this wall like it was the face of the enemy with such concentrated intensity, such linguistic spark.
***
Aaron Tieger, Days and Days.
Pressed Wafer.
http://carvepoems.org/wordpress/other.php
What is most striking about these days is that they are lived with an essential faith in what’s real, in the keen insight that is the result of focused attention on particulars, their necessary insistence on the common things of this world. What is striking is that, with all of that above, there is also uncertainty, doubt:
Sitting in the morning light like
so many others
pretending I like the morning light
thinking it warms me thinking
it soothes me thinking it must be
reassuring that nature
follows patterns, has order, like me
does the same thing every day.
(Kitchen Meditation)
These are personal poems, interior poems: quiet poems. But their energy is loud energy. Here the heroic self takes a walk down the street, talks out loud about what it sees & feels, wonders whether anyone is listening, wonders whether it matters & why, & keeps talking.
Throughout, Tieger’s insistence—his absolute certainty!—that something is happening. But what? & how to bring it home?
Here
and in the city, things
begin, things
end.
(Pastoral)
***
Ann Humphreys, Which Lies Are Necessary?
Hollyridge Press.
http://members.aol.com/hollyridgepress
The words that end Humphrey’s chap, “I’m certain I will never get over it,” resonate back through all the tough-talking poems. The work her is unified by persona, the speaker, by “Ann,” & it’s a speaker we can trust to avoid sentimentality while refusing to let go of memories. Any memory, good or bad, is a comfort – it’s a record, proof of continuing existence:
And scenes from a past
fly like bits of tissue from a moving car:
your terrible wet marble eyes in the back lot[..]
(Pick A Scene)
You can’t get away from yourself, your memories. Who’d want to? Over & over, Humphreys seems to question emotion while simultaneously wrenching us with the image of a past long gone or a present that hasn’t developed to be what it was promised to be.
But the real strength here is the voice, the consciousness, a tough lady looking at tough things in a tough way. Scrutiny:
Here comes the urge to encapsulate,
editorialize, using two example couples
and a wistful bent note at the end:
the representative anecdote[…]
(The Way to Do It)
These poems are sad but spunky, full of life as it was lived. Now: recollections.
***
Tyler Carter, Egg Breakfast.
horse less press.
http://www.horselesspress.com
At first blush, the poems that make up Egg Breakfast are fortified with a variety of ecstatic revelation brought about by a series of experiences purposefully estranged from their wholesome realisticity. But there’s something deeply human & affecting in these poems, too; underneath the noise, the seeming, there is a quiet attention to pure products of this world:
The deepest note ever
detected is 57 octaves below
middle C. Whereas, here
on earth, birds.
(Black Hole)
By implication, what’s natural is enough. There is a kind of new wave transcendentalism that flows through these poems. Though the language is occasionally startling, decidedly unnatural, the connections forged & the understandings reached are human:
Happy sunshine water lovers! Happy bullhorn
lazy day! Your flesh is crawling quickly! Toot
along! […]
(Summer Greeting Scrawled in Robot’s Hand)
This is language blaring & bright enough to shake us out of our normal perceptions. But rather than tossing out the real world in favor of something constructed (& so no less valid), this poetry wears its affiliation on its sleeve; it lets us know what world it lives in—“Proudly associated with the beautiful world” as Carter says in “Republics”—this world.
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