Lots and lots of neat

recommended: Pierre Peuchmaurd

"It Will Come in My Left Lung," by Pierre Peuchmaurd
(translated by E. C. Belli)
 from Gulf Coast Winter/Spring 2012

One day I am going to die, and when I do it will be with all the poetic drama and cliche that I can muster. My body, my general circumstance will suffer with an exquisite romance. In fact, after reading Peuchmaurd's poem, I have started a modest list of poetic tropes I insist on experiencing as I am dying. (1) It will definitely snow, probably one of those light snows in January. (2) There will be blood. It will be crimson. (3) I will compare that blood to a rose, whose brief bloom made it "barely a rose." (4) I will rely on some appropriately lyrical set of objects to count so I can keep track of the seconds or minutes I have left in this world. Maybe it will be birds. Maybe forevers.

Granted, I cribbed this list from Peuchmaurd's poem. Because I want to die like that guy. What man wouldn't? "The women, / since you are about to die, / the women open their dresses." They leave you their address as they go. Which is pretty awesome. Oh, hey, pardon the blood that is "rising like a tide onto the lips," I am ready, my lady. Ready to go steady.

Which is, of course, ridiculous. But, then, the ridiculous appears to be Peuchmaurd's trump. Well, actually, lacing an otherwise beautiful poem depicting a presumably young man's death with farcical commentary is Peuchmard's trump. And it's this humorous stab at sentimentality (both cliched and beautifully wrought sentimentality) that lends the poem its poetic muscle. It is like if Banksy got ahold of "Dulce et Decorum Est" while it was being read for the thousandth time to an undergraduate poetry classroom. And Banksy would make the speaker fall in love with the dying soldier. Perhaps the speaker would wipe the frothy blood to kiss the soldier on the lips. Because, Banksy would imply, the poem makes death a dark romance even while it is protesting against the soldier's death. Why not show both at one time?

Is the Wilfred Owen poem so sacrosanct that you could never pull this move off? Probably, yes. And appropriately for this poem, Peuchmaurd doesn't go that far. But this "beautiful death" trope, the romance of the young man accomplishing some novena of vitality while he dies deserves to be prodded. Peuchmaurd doesn't puncture the myth. He pokes at it. He keeps it intact so the farce and the cliche can be enjoyed as one big sentimental bonanza.

Recommended links:
Gulf Coast
Catalogue of Goods 

Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation

The Cloud Corporation, by Timothy Donnelly
(Wave Books, 2010) 

You see there is this logic that has taken over the world. A logic capable of every imaginable feat: transforming the world into a math problem, producing clouds and inspecting those clouds for their profitability, producing furniture that grows nostalgic for its manufacturer, figuring parts of “him,” the speaker, because he is so innately a part of this world. But that logic, when given reign, is disorienting. Or maybe living through that logic doesn’t guide the speaker so much as leave him more acutely aware he needs guidance, like if you logically found yourself submerged in the Atlantic Ocean, and you got stuck there, it wouldn’t be all that comfortable. It would be nice if you could find a way out, even though everyone has pretty much consigned you to that one place. The fact of The Cloud Corporation is that logic will forever be a force of and with and contrary to the imagination. And these poems indulge that relationship to its utmost.

So how are you going to do make a poem where logic can be both pliant and structured? Logic, by definition, is complete, because it’s logical. It’s the statement part of a sentence. Logically, however, there must be a point in logic’s history, in its thoroughly redundant perspicuity, in the absolutely finite quality of this world that keeps opening to us until we’re reminded we don’t really know it completely, where all the things we believe whole and logical must eventually be found at least incomplete if not also wanting for more logic. Marilynne Robinson touches on this in her book Absence of Mind, where the presumption of having solved the world is always met by pure science or imaginative art with a shrug. Not quite, says the artist. Not in my research, says the scientist.

To describe the sublime as represented by The Cloud Corporation, I would draw an analogy where logic is a glow stick. Donnelly snaps the logic of late capitalism open, and yet keeps it intact as a system, because as a system it is breathtakingly thorough and insidious and possessive. It makes an excellent vehicle for writing poems. At the very least it gives no end to probing analysis and presumptive solutions.

What do you do in the face of this? It seems the most subversive action is boredom. But how does this speaker reconcile boredom with an obviously strident intellect? How does a speaker negotiate the stimulation available in the market with an eager and active and insular imagination? For the poems of The Cloud Corporation, these dilemmas are inexhaustible. And utterly insoluble. Of course, rest assured, this speaker endeavors to perform some sort of solution. The entire book is a project of proving. There is no end to proving. As a poetics of argument this book is treatise and Sears Christmas Catalogue and neighborhood covenant and profound delight. In this late capitalism, where every conceivable argument purports to have already been conceived, where every impression can supposedly be accessed, we are healthy provers. The Cloud Corporation guides us to the very threshold of proving. And at that threshold Donnelly looks out, like Keats’s Cortez, to show us a whole new landscape awaiting its proving.

Recommended Links:
The Cloud Corporation
NNDB (linking the world) - It's very ironic to me that this page exists and The Cloud Corporation exists. 

 

Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw

Angle of Yaw, by Ben Lerner
(Copper Canyon Press, 2006) 

Here is an homage to logic, a la Ben Lerner: “Monsieur, please accept this hole we have cut into your chest. Accept this hole as a gift. For your chest has asked for a place to store air.” To be clear, the preceding was not written by Ben Lerner, only mechanized by the logic he uses in Angle of Yaw. Here is Ben Lerner: “The public is outrage. Kindergarteners simulate bayonet fighting with the common domestic fowl. Does this blood look good on me? Does this blood make me look fat?” You can hopefully detect the common mechanics between the two quotations. The juxtaposition as self-defeating and self-vindicating logic. The comfort with the absolutely ridiculous.

This is Ben Lerner in all his majesty. And quite honestly, Long live the logical love brought in under cover of all absurdities! And long live the logic of loving contradictions. And for Lerner’s benefit, Long live the dark line drawn on white paper, and the negative lyric, and the logical structure evacuated of content so that all that’s left is a logical scaffold that may or may not warrant appreciation. And, maybe, expletive to every appreciation you might want to pay here.

Because, Ladies and Gentlemen, Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw is a land run on this giant, imaginative plane that resides inside his talent. Each of those little prose blocks in the “Angle of Yaw” sections is just one of the lots he’s staked out for his performances. They’re little plots where he can fail, fail miserably even. It’s OK. His poem “Didactic Elegy” should make that point clear. Because he’s put the critic in her place. And he’s put the poem in its place. And he’s put historic events that my cause you to reevaluate the poems in their place. And he’s even determined what should happen so that a work can be considered a masterpiece.

Reading Angles of Yaw is akin to walking into an art installation, with all the pieces fit along one wall of imaginative space, or multiple imaginative spaces, if you’re counting. And what you should feel while you’re standing there is that you’re part of the American public, an American public that lived through the Reagan Era, who is vulnerable to advertising culture and political rhetoric. There is a mission statement: “The right to have it both ways is inalienable or it isn’t.” And as soon as you can see how that mission is not a contradiction, then you have finally settled on an impossibly inhuman existence that is at the very base of appreciating Ben Lerner’s poetry.

Essentially, whatever might be said about Angles of Yaw will have already been addressed by Lerner. He is a logic that is clearly illogical, and yet in his illogic, he can be used in an argument, and when the argument is finished the reader will feel as though there is just now a very logical statement that Ben Lerner made. It is the nature of tense contradiction that Frederic Jameson claims is the promise of our postmodern experience. It is a contraction akin to the imaginary number in mathematics. It can’t exist, and yet it does exist, and it is regularly calculated for. 

Recommended links:
Angle of Yaw
Leaving the Atocha Station
PennSound Recordings from 2008 and on. 

 

Hillary Gravendyk's Harm

Harm, by Hillary Gravendyk
(Omnidawn, 2012) 

First, evacuate time. There is no time. There’s only object. And when you think of object, you should be thinking about the object’s relationship to a human body. How does the “glass needle bright / as a small sun” reveal the body as a feeling thing? More specifically, how does it reveal the body experiencing harm? In fact, this comparison, where the body as biological machine is exchanged for or replaced by an image, informs the metaphorical logic of the book. Or at least, while moving through the poems of Harm, the reader should carry the assumption that every image can be seen as a reflection of the body harmed. The sight of a piercing bright light coming from a small sun is equivalent to a harm being felt by the body. The small scents of coyote mint, sage and dust is equivalent to a harm being felt by the body.

In grammatical terms, this means many of Harm’s poems exist outside verbs, or at least outside predicates. For instance, the collection of poems, “Botanica,” relates a series of nature images that are often doing nothing at all. They exist. “The rock chalked with mineral lines; the monstrous plant life. Imagine a carriage wheel turning on sand. Crest of every rise on fire.” This “Botanica” is mainly nouns. You read through them, and they of one landscape. Is this harm? Should we equate each phrase as an illustration of harm? All the phrases together? Does that make harm a stasis? If we keep harm independent of time, does it allow for more accurate analysis?

I am reminded of middle school physics class, where the teacher was basically responsible for making us see that math problems occur in an ideal state. A body is falling from 100 ft. off the ground. It is falling through the space of a vacuum, not air or sky. Yet it experiences the earth’s gravitation, which means that its speed increases 32 ft/sec every second. And so middle school students can quantify the earth’s gravitational pull. And, by association, they can understand how to distinguish the gravity of one planet from another.

I don’t know, though, if Gravendyk’s impulse to isolate harm gives me greater insight about the body experiencing harm. Elaine Scarry describes how helpless a person is when he or she tries to describe pain, and I can appreciate the gesture in Harm to resolve that. But this noun-thick project isn’t necessarily affecting. I have a similar issue with Kerri Webster’s We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone. The fragmented lyric is immersive and honest. But to what affect? Both books remind me of a painting by Agnes Martin. They have that control, that intensity of restraint. And yet Agnes Martin affects me. What is on the other side of Martin that I don’t feel in the Gravendyk and Webster?

There is more to Harm than just nouns. There is this You, though he, she or it is never identified. At about midway through the book, the You passes from vague verbal gesture to someone or something that could be considered part of a We. But who are We then? In Brenda Hillman’s introduction she indicates Gravendyk wrote many of these poems around an operation. Is You, then, the healthy body? Is You the committed spouse? Is You the vague self felt during sickness? Gravendyk leaves the identity vague, which I believe is preferable.  

Recommended links:
Harm
We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone
Video of Gravendyk and Claudia Rankine. Reading together!

 

Donna Stonecipher's The Reservoir

The Reservoir, by Donna Stonecipher
(University of Georgia Press, 2002) 

There were a few summers during my late 20s when I was a fanboy astronomer. The first Friday of every month, at the archery fields of Forest Park, the members of the Astronomy Club of St. Louis would set up their telescopes and invite people to come and look at the moon, at Jupiter and Mars. It is an odd feeling to give shape to what you thought was supposed to be a star. But it’s odd that even with the more powerful telescopes, a planet looks like a paper cut-out of a planet. Jupiter looks like someone is standing right by the lens holding up a paper puppet of the planet. The telescope supposedly brings me closer to the planet, but I walk away trying to understand which impression of the planet is actually more real. Similarly, how does a star that I can only see through a telescope really exist in my world? For instance, the Pleiades cluster. I have seen them through a telescope, but I can never see all of them together. They don’t fit into one arrangement, like fruit in a bowl. No matter how hard I look, there is at least one star of the cluster that falls out of my focus, as though it were sinking back into space. It is a common experience to look at the stars and realize the earth is not the center of existence. But, in reality, that isn’t how I have experienced the night sky all my life. I look up at the sky, and the stars are there. Then I look through a telescope, and I have to understand that each star is uniquely distant from the earth. The sky has depth. Perhaps I will be incapable of fathoming it.

It’s the analogy that comes closest to my experience with Donna Stonecipher’s book The Reservoir. What is the depth of an aphorism? How do you sound the authority of a secret? What dimensions do we give certainty when we finally come to a decision? There are words we use, valuable words, that carry weight. And the poems in The Reservoir give that weight an anatomy. They shape that weight and figure its depth.

Stonecipher gives body to ideas, like a secret, identity, adolescent sexuality. She forms these ideas by preparing a careful accumulation of images. Though the images aren’t fully formed, they’re not so fragmented that the poems feel like a collection of splinters. In fact, what most characterizes the poems is the way these images cohere. There exists some associative thread connecting the images, though that connection at first feels arbitrary. In this way, it appears Stonecipher starts a poem by collecting random items. For instance, “White Mouth” starts with the star of an apple core, judging “each heart,” and the speaker filling herself with milk. But it is the consistent notes of white, center and evaluation that let the poem hover over a deeper, implied meaning. Is that meaning about “forgiveness the liquid eating away at the cool white stars”? Is it about purity? Is it some hybrid cross of the two? The pleasure of the poem is not knowing while still having a sense you do.

It makes sense, then, that magnetism should be one of the recurring ideas in the book. The night has to be attached to the day by something. A boy has to be drawn in by a girl by something. What is that attraction? How is it implication can feel like the consistently arranged hints that populate these poems? And, finally, as these poems stand in one book, what nature makes cohesion, and by extension, coherence, at all likely and possible and inevitable?

Recommended links:
The Reservoir
Conjunctions 55 (buy this issue, it has a poem called "Model Cities") 

 

recommended: Geoffrey G. O'Brien

"Six Political Criteria," by Geoffrey G. O'Brien
from Gulf Coast Winter/Spring 2012 

Is it really possible to form a more stable politics in 2012? Would it take six political criteria? More? And if more, why more? If you're looking for answers to those kinds of questions, don't start with Geoffrey G. O'Brien's poem. It might seems like it would be ready to answer lots of questions. It starts with such confidence and formality. But you aren't going to find answers to any of these questions. The answers don't exist.

On second thought, if you're looking for answers to politics in 2012, maybe you should read O'Brien's poem. You might learn something. Like quit thinking you can answer questions about politics! I admit I was lured into this poem by certainty. My certainty. O'Brien uses the rhetoric of foregone conclusions.  "We must rise as if to see what is / Really going on." There are things to do. We have purpose. And with this sentiment comes the images of towers and flowing honeys and clouds. My first instinct was to read this poem as an allegory that could teach me something about the current political environment. Sir, I concur. Life these days does feel like there's only "a percent / Chance of anything happening." I think I'm OK with that. I probably would rather know that the money I earn today will buy me fresh produce and a steady supply of Jif Peanut Butter. 

But the poem addresses stability only insofar as it can serve as a critique of complacency. In many instances, O'Brien presents an image of stability then he immediately turns to undercut it with doubt. "Why then do some people feel / Each dawn a new issue when / It's been growing and changing // For some time now?" Dawn is changing? Could dawn ever not be a symbol for new beginnings? Why isn't it enough to stick with one meaning for dawn? America thrives on consistency, especially when it comes to the meaning we lend to symbols. No matter how disruptive the American election cycle appears, how convulsive each end of the spectrum, 2012 is a time of complacency. We prefer order. If there's really any question about that just look at the size of the bail out we gave every sector of the American economy so that we could maintain the hierarchy and status quo. O'Brien's poem toys with the supposed benefits of order.

At the very least "Six Political Criteria" has the poetic framework that can express instability so that it feels like it's lingering on the edges of order. Or, what might be more disturbing, if these instabilities are actually inherent to the order we're now living in. The answer might lie with the dawn. "We must learn to rise as if / Seeing the inside of horizon // Or not at all." Does the dawn happen inside the horizon? Does that mean there's a dawn happening we can't see? Is there an end to the definitions O'Brien can figure for a dawn? From "running dogs with easy / Honey on their backs" to an "exercise in counter-melt," the rising sun (easily confused with the setting sun) seems to present some answer. I don't think the poem resolves which answer that is.

For my reading, people like to believe in the new beginning. It's morning again in America was Ronald Reagan's slogan in 1984. Hope, complete with a rising red-white-and-blue sun, was Obama's in 2008. It seems there is no end to our faith in new beginnings. But what's really beginning? Are we trying to foment revolution? Or just devising another complacent method of rephrasing what's been happening to us all along.   

Recommended links:
Metropole
In 2009, I recommended another poem by O'Brien.
Geoffrey G. O'Brien reading Gertrude Stein!!! 

Tessa Rumsey's Assembling the Shepherd

Assembling the Shepherd, by Tessa Rumsey
(University of Georgia Press, 1999) 

What if you could use a map to document the usual map-things, like places and landscapes. But then you could also use it to account for time and individual people and the feelings you had when you were seeing the landscape and being with the other person there? There are meadows that might give you a different feeling depending on whether you visited them with X, and whether they were blue meadows or yellow meadows at that time. And what if you could designate a specific city on the map as the capital of all this emotional history? It could be like the city is existing in the abstract while also existing in the your memory. The city would probably be the main feature of this map, because it’s the easiest point of reference. And it would fit conceptually with the map, because it’s where most of the emotionally relevant experiences happen.

It’s useful to think of Tessa Rumsey’s Assembling the Shepherd as a map like this, made as a four-dimensional document. Remember, the map covers time, so this map requires a kind of gigantic imaginative leap away from the two-dimensional. Isn’t a book of poems good for these kinds of imaginative leaps? Yes, that’s why Tessa Rumsey wrote this map as a book of poems! Assuming, of course, that this four-dimensional map is possible. Fortunately, it is a book of poems. And considering a book of poems’ normal facility with emotional landscapes, it seems a fairly natural step to designate it a four-dimensional document as well.

However, Rumsey’s book is more a thoughtfully geography when it comes to the subject of lost love, and of the dilemma inevitable when the speaker is moving past that loss even as it’s continually present to her. In particular, Rumsey’s reference to this city as a place where love happened, where the memories still feel fresh and alive to her, helps explain why it’s so hard to “move on” from this past. After all, who could possibly remove an entire city, especially when “Our city begins with a description / of heaven?” (from “Parable for the Sundial”)

To poetry’s great benefit, Rumsey is smarter than some mere city. For if a city represents meanings that she had made for herself, then it’s going to face the same skepticism as any meaning-making enterprise. For instance, in “The Smallest Effective Distance,” Rumsey explicitly refers to the romance that has passed. “You are my ex & thus / the past must outshine the present in a way that hurts / just to look at.” Romance is a sharp and ingenious craftsman capable of the most durable presences. But Assembling the Shepherd is not only romantic. Let’s call it romantic-conceptual. Like in the version of “Diagram of Faith” on page 30, “the rush hour of eternal return of eternal / renounce, as if multiplicity were the answer to ambivalence, as if / a wheel’s point of stillness hinged upon its spokes’ psychotic dance.” To call romance a system of passions connected with pronouncements connected with attitudes might be a modest description. Rumsey likes causal chains, especially when they’re reorienting meaning. And especially when they express the struggle that usually attends letting go of love.

Perhaps the causal chain is one of the ways you go about destroying a city.  You propose a new link between cause and effect. If planting the bomb in “Bluebells” might seem a bit violent, how about if the bomb creates a series of flowers in bloom? How about if you were to erase that old city where love happened, and replace it with Spring? Assembling the Shepherd is aggressive and often byzantine in its style. Losing love is confusing, though. Especially when love never leaves of its own volition. So then “a bystander explodes, inside my brother’s laughter, into springtime,” and all is better. The shepherd is ready to be assembled, and to usher in springtime, and to materialize new romantic-concdeptuals.

Recommended links:
Assembling the Shepherd

 

recommended: Kate Rutledge Jaffe

"The Climb Down," by Kate Rutledge Jaffe
from The Believer, October 2011 

I prefer my elementary school understanding of plate tectonics. The world shifts. There are these giant continental plates. In the beginning there was Pangea, and after a lot of shifting and wandering, we now have seven continents. And then, of course, the great mythological explanation in the tectonic universe: when two plates collide they form a mountain range. Does this really explain what a mountain range looks like? Sure. I don't have the patience to actually watch the real plate tectonics at work. And quite frankly, I fear what it looks like.

Language is unstable. In the poetry world, this fact is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It is not only done. It's done, did, and don't do it, please don't or I'll cringe. And yet, Kate Rutledge Jaffe's poem, "The Climb Down," is trembling with instability. It's like she put the poem on a fault line, and then a whole mountain range sprung up from beneath it. How's that for a mythology in only 12 lines!

What makes it unstable? To start with, I can't tell if the poem is told in first person or third. It might seem obvious: "I is the glance. I never finding stars." I would seem to signal a first person speaker. And for a contemporary American poem, an opening like this is jarring, but that alone shouldn't rule out the first person. Let us enjoy an irregular verb tense. Let us be made aware that there are verbal mechanisms in language. But what about when "I is us, unless us is a nebula, // then I is stars and Dad and Mom is good for little arms"? Is that still a first person? Has the poem made first person or third a matter of the reader's discretion? For me it is easier to make sense if I arrange these different characters (I, Dad and Mom) as a group of people, all in the third person. Then I can picture them as a nebula. Then I can enjoy this comparison of a nebula to a family unit.

Jaffe is playful with the language and point of view, but this play keeps us occupied in a certain quadrant of meaning. Yes, she subverts the normal grammatical usage, but all of this happens within a subject of family, with accessible observations about it. I don't feel lost, because the poem isn't willing away meaning. For instance, "Dad table-sighed: Toast? Insert and kick it under. We is animal." The family is eating. Dad is being funny with the toast, or he's preparing toast. And we're rambunctious or we're ravenous. Jaffe has moved me to a domestic quadrant, probably at breakfast. I don't need to know exactly what is happening so long as I can gather these basic pieces together.

Is Jaffe saying the family unit is unstable? She wouldn't be the first. But the great irony here is that the poem actually takes great comfort in the domestic. I sleeps "a green sleep." I "wears a glittering hat" while being pushed down the street. I am inclined to view this as an infant speaker describing how content she is with her family. I watched the Miranda July movie "The Future" this past weekend. I imagine this speaker like the cat voice in that movie. Sentimental and not fully equipped with the language to say everything she means. 

Recommended links:
Kate Rutledge Jaffe homepage
The Believer

recommended: Matthew Gagnon

"Some Novelties of Stagecraft," by Matthew Gagnon
from Boston Review, Jan/Feb 2012 

I remember these poems from a few years ago by Linnea Ogden. For instance, "Contact," published in 2008 by Boston Review. Ogden takes a snippet of legalese and inlays it into a lyric occasion. So simply. And so seamlessly. In fact, the connection between the two could make you think the legal statement simlpy generated the poem from its own juridical intent. The beginning of each stanza may be legal jargon, but the sentiment syntactically fits within the lyric and offers further complication for its occasion.

What happens when you open the poetic possibilities of jurisprudence? I say subversiveness. It's like poetry just happened to wander into the courtroom, or the zoning office at City Hall, and then started kicking its way into the law books. Perhaps that's too kind and too enthusiastic a take on the poems. But I want political poems that aren't so brash and unsubtle I feel awkward for them while I'm reading them. Is Poetry really going to win a fight with fisticuffs? I don't think so. Subversive poems are subtle. They occupy their space quietly. They rearrange the logic of the space to suit their own terms. Ogden's poem appropriates and confronts a vital and active and self-consuming part of our culture. I would say it's closer to protesting the 1% than many poems that scream about how angry they are with the 1%. 

And what, in God's name, is Matthew Gagnon's poem doing? Looking for a corporate sponsor? Describing the lyric exuberance of a poem that has already found its corporate sponsor? Here, again, is an appropriation of language: underwritten, churning, in the pipeline. The term, "irrational exuberance," that appears about 2/3 of the way through the poem, actually has a Wikipedia entry to describe it. The fact is, Gagnon's speaker has been underwritten. And his message is spreading like water threading everywhere. But what does that mean? If a "punch line" has some sort of corporate backing, who benefits? In this world where Facebook and Google are going to use data about us for some supposed diabolical plan, I wonder why we are so eager to presume these corporations will harm us. 

Are we not capable of being like Gagnon's speaker: "storied and customized." That guy is like a "fuse box humming beside a thornbush." As with many poems of the exuberant, the ecstatic here is an ironic gesture. Gagnon hasn't really decided which way he would go with this. However, I appreciate Gagnon taking a moment to speak for the 1%. Or at least to slip onto the balcony overlooking the proesters and toast to subversion in all its poetic immensity.

Recommended links:
Boston Review
Maybe this is Matthew Gagnon? More subversion?
Some other poems of his at Conjunctions.

recommended: CA Conrad

"(Soma)tic Poetry Exercise," by CA Conrad
from jubilat 20 

I know I'm not the first, and I pray God won't make the last to say this: CA Conrad is irresistible. I'm talking I want the inside of his voice inside me. Inside, like the diction and rhetoric of these poems makes me think of 10,000 pressed cardboard hand-held fans all fluttering in my face, and they spell out "CA" in giant white script, and I think, why, I didn't know hand-held fans could pay attention to someone like me. But these fans, I think they like me. "CA!" I want to say. And I don't know him well enough to say just his initials. But when you read his poems, you feel like, "Hey, CA, don't I know you?"

What's funny is that that's what "(Soma)tic Poetry Exercise" is all about! How we know people. Or how people know each other on that weird psychic level. Maybe we know dogs like that. Maybe we know strangers like that. CA (I almost find it improper to refer to him with the more formal "Conrad") is toying with this common belief that we communicate just by thinking of someone. He's flattering our common beliefs. And then he's encouraging them. And from there, oh my God, it is irresistible. What he says makes sense. "We are one!" 

I can go on. CA has asked all of us to go on for seven days. Seven days is not that long. And, then, it turns out seven days is just long enough to make this "Exercise" something serious. Really, he is asking us to sit around the people we know, and later the people who are strangers to us, and to think about each of them. He says we should focus our attention, our imagined conversation. We should become masters of thinking like this. We should imagine being recognized. We should take notes about how it feels. And we should make poems with those notes. Poems! I feel like CA is telling this to me alone, and I want to make poems then. I finish reading this "Exercise" with so much delight and enthusiasm filling me. And I believe every bit of what he says. I can make poems, and I'll call them "By CA!"

And honestly, if you're reading this issue of jubilat, you need to pair "(Soma)tic Poetry Exercise" reading with the interview Matthea Harvey does with Abraham Burickson. He's the founder of Odyssey Works. Burickson and his crew will create a performance tailored specifically to you. As in, they send a questionnaire, they find out everything about you, and then they show up in your life. And the point is your life will change. Or at least it might. 

Recommended links:
jubilat
The Book of Frank
Advanced Elvis Course (I don't know what to say about the book, but this edition is large-print! No eyeglasses needed!!)
CA Conrad has a home homepage.
Odyssey Works (for the adventurous!)