There were rumours of ill health, if rumour is the word: glancing mentions in interviews, etc. The full disclosure now makes me feel old, looking back at a younger self who simply assumed things will right themselves, he’ll keep offering up poems for me to read. And he may still, he may still.

I’ll be giving something, for what he’s given me.

The book is in the first person plural (mostly), a brilliant stroke in a milieu where conformity is normative. Ferris also does a top-notch job playing fast and loose with the chronology; time feels different behind those brown cubicle walls, I tell you. It’ll have you believing there is no time, no motion−that everything is simply a trick of the brain. Or to be seasonal: a trick or treat of the brain.

I’m reading with Ferris this year at the IFOA. Quite pumped about it, with my bonus Hospitality Suite privileges and all-access pass. It’s like being a roadie for Oasis.

Couple of Hayflick reviews: one new from Event (excerpted by Coach House), one old now posted online at Matrix.

A summer gone, nearly. Wha’ happened?

Joy Is So Exhausting, and there’s a plenty of it here. I haven’t laughed so hard since McGimpsey’s Sitcom. Much play with the found texts, the aural translations, discovery itself half the fun of getting there. Perhaps a touchstone for the book: “Replication is always imprecise,” cribbed by Holbrook for “Tse to Sea,” a poem that takes as its jumping point a textbook on evolution and then proceeds to enact generative mutations in subsequent lines—as a libretto! A tour-de force that ends with what sounds to me as a fresh take on genetic drift: “Peer alienation a slow swimmer’s prize.” Every poem is tour-de-force-ish and leaves you breathless. This is not your parent’s poetry. Holbrook deserves to win.

Chance also plays a large role (roll?) in Solie’s book, Pigeon, which is dark like Ledger’s Joker: “There is luck, and then there is luck, / and if there is any other lesson here / I will never get used to it.” Accidents, it seems, will happen, though Solie’s brand of existentialism can still proclaim, from the title of one poem, “Beauty and Reality Are the Same.” That we have consciousness at all is a puzzle, is possibly pathological(!), but still engenders ethical obligations that we’re flailing and failing at, the “only / animal to kill from a distance.” This book has a dangerous undertow that will carry you out to sea. That Solie is our contemporary is a fantastic stroke of luck. She deserves to win.

See what I did there? I created expectations and then undercut them. I’m the Iron Man 2 on this list, I guess. Is it possible to say you’re satisfied to be nominated and have anybody believe you? If it’s possible, consider it said.

Unfortunately, the review isn’t online Actually it is, plus Coach House has excerpts up. Two samples below:

“To study philosophy is to learn how to die,” for by knowing how to die well, we understand how to live well. Tierney’s poems enter into this tradition, though perhaps they prefer to accuse instead of instruct, illustrating ways we waste time and fail to seize the day. However, Tierney’s is not a didactic or morbid book, for the characteristic good humor and eye for odd angles found in his first book, Full Speed through the Morning Dark, are here too. In that first book, Tierney seemed heir to James Wright’s humble and sympathetic mode—a kind of friend-and-chronicler-of-the-woes-of-the-average-Joes. In this new book, he veers into the jokey, smart-ass, pop-surrealist realm where Tony Hoagland, Dean Young, and Russell Edson reside. Sometimes the novelty of this manner wears thins, but in his best poems Tierney accomplishes certain Albert Goldbarthian feats, weaving whiz-bang with philosophical insights that will break your heart.

†

Matthew Tierney has written two good books—The Hayflick Limit and Full Speed through the Morning Dark (Wolsak and Wynn Publishers)—both are better than much of what one will find in the contemporary American poetry scene. He never merely describes, for he is always developing a theme or idea or problem that exists in real time and real space for real people. He is aggressive and gets his hands dirty and doesn’t treat himself or human experience gingerly as if each precious perception were gossamer. He steers clear of the trappings of romanticism and the self-indulgence of the confessional. Yvor Winters complained that modernists could not “organize their material into precise statements within a precise form, because they do not know what they are writing about. They are myopic marksmen shooting at an atmospheric blur with a shotgun” (Selected Letters of Yvor Winters 189). If Tierney sometimes misses the mark, it is because his chosen target is too insignificant. He is often funny, but his poems never turn into standup comedy routines, as with Billy Collins or Tony Hoagland. And he never writes “the kind of empty thing one writes to write poetry,” which is the compliment Robert Lowell paid Philip Larkin (The Letters of Robert Lowell 630).

Been struggling recently with the alligator that is my “art” in the swamp that is aesthetics. This is where the above interview-ambivalence comes in: How articulate should I be about not knowing exactly what I’m doing?

I’m certainly one who believes in reasons, in reason, who shies away from talk about inspiration or mysterious agencies in any (R)romantic sense. Everything—the art, whatever—happens in my head. But the darts that I throw are nothing to the nails some people can hammer.

Whenever I feel I’ve punted a question put to me, I recall this Ashbery quote and feel instantly better:

It’s rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is the easier it is to talk about.

Not sure I believe it, except that part about it being rather hard. And speaking of people more articulate than me, I shared a stage with Christian Bök this past Saturday. I was reading Jeramy Dodds’ poems (long story) and pretty confident I did them justice. Nevertheless, glad I read before Christian.

In the lineup of high concept poetry books, this one has no bones about budding in front of the line. An interview with Lista in Torontoist.com covers in some detail the alternately named “remixed,” “translated,” “metempsychosic” nature of the poems. In short, each one borrows form from another specific usually canonized poem, e.g. Frost or Hughes or Sexton, tailoring the text to fit the narrative arc of Louis Slotin’s day-in-the-life.

Louis Slotin? He was a physicist who died working on the Manhattan Project. See the film Fat Man and Little Boy for the two-and-a-half star background check. (Note: the replica in my snapshot is from the Bradbury Science Museum, Los Alamos.)

I’ve one more adjective to add to the above list: fated.

For your perusing pleasure: consider that Slotin’s predecessor died in a similar accident nine months to the day before Slotin, that Slotin already had a “replacement”  in Graves, the man sleeping with his wife. Consider that the Project itself was predicated on the certainty that Germany would develop the atomic bomb, it was only a matter of time, “we must race ourselves to our end / or be beaten to it” (from Bloom‘s “Do. But Do.”).

Step back from a final reckoning of overall effect and take an imagined peek at the “voiceless” poet, Lista himself, in process. I’ve read three or four of the poems against the ones they’re “after.” Whenever Lista’s poem seems to want something other, to wander, to lineate its own path, he manipulates it to mark touchpoints in the original poem. In essence, to align it with a predetermined course. (Not so different from traditional formal constraints, but to a more explicit degree.) This, from “Louis Slotin’s Flaw”:

If there’s free will, it’s something like a hat,

set on my head, made for my head, though free

to blow clean off but then be caught by me.

One world, one motion, marshalled in combat,

its reflex rhymed against destiny.

What an apt description of Bloom’s entire enterprise. There’s an onion’s worth of other layers to the book I won’t go into. I leave their peeling to others.

Hats off to you, Michael. Looks like we’ll be reading together (or at least near each other) this fall at the IFOA.