Huge Cloudy by Bill Carty (Octopus Books, 2019)
We find, post-storm, the sky aspiring to hold more planes than ever before. Everyone on errands. Their traffic wakes me. Late for class, again. Late for everything. (from “The Decisive Moment”) “Do you not think this is ominous of good?” opens Huge Cloudy by way of its back cover¸ via the ever-so-floating curiosity of John Keats. “Ominous good” or elsewise may be slightly ajar, not quite the right phrase, as Seattle poet Bill Carty’s debut collection is more premonitory and mildly uplifting. It is a book announcing the fortitude of our relational continuum, a book that rubs up against the inner fibers of a poet’s momentary hallucinations of truth and distinctive realization. It is a kind, large-hearted book of gasps and furrows. Huge Cloudy and its settings of epiphany and arousal range from the Pacific Northwest to New England, and occasionally otherwise in-between or beyond. The book geographically honors the human experiences through the lens of a poet’s poet, guffaws and glances of the microcosmic decision-making of keeping-going and emerging-through. It establishes early on a literary momentum kept in check through the quintessential contemporary fumblings of Carty’s world. It is liquid more vernal, some fluid settled in the lowest region of the zone, a depression shy to motion, a basin I arrive at, thinking, this really is despair. (from “Not a Moat”) Each one of these poems, short and long, and of many spectra, is at length capable of filling the five major sections of Huge Cloudy with wax museum precision. A careful balance of the literal transcription of experiences and the fluffy, aerial methods of abstraction and blur bring about the phantasmagoria of Carty’s craft. It is a loving dreamscape bumping up against a casual gritty, an untiring reality of urban and rural American life shadowing and reflecting the same each poem’s speaker’s arousals. The lauded effort of psychological bend within the writing is both cautionary and attractive, challenging but accepting the comfortable, spacy reality of Seattle and periphery. There is confrontation and exquisite examination. Perhaps the wash of the gray of the city’s usual skies accounts for this; or perhaps Carty’s background as a reader and editor of countless other written voices throws his own into flux and measure one and the same. The arrangement resultant of this causation, whatever the source, gives off air of fulfillment and a juxapositional sense of ambivalent fervor. When this reality shows its face through the bright and bland ether, Carty’s witty writ emerges to capture like a photographic flash: a vision of sudden death though when it comes to that all anyone will talk about is the bees. (from “The Quick”) The epiphany of these poems extends itself beyond the experience of the poet into the realm of life at large. It is document and repository of emergence into the world. Where is discovery? Where is surprise? Where is the magical and important around each and every breath and step? For the daydreamers, for those that align with Carty’s positions, with mind in out of the poem and a poetics rooted in each and every step, discovery is everywhere. Carty’s book serves inadvertently as a lesson book in this imaginarium, in this stomping ground for the emergence of livelihood and delightfulness. Often, the life and delight of Carty’s field is supported by quasi-hilarity, quasi-horror. Often, it is acceptance following newness. In his longer, splicing sequence emerging after the first third of Huge Cloudy, “Aurora,” Carty describes the break and bend of expectation and constriction: “A sign / on the steps— / NO SITTING / ON THE STEPS. / A man sitting / on the steps, / giving me / the middle finger.” Moments like this, derivative of the many absurd intersections in the Emerald City, appear regularly and at once bring humor and breathe life into an otherwise static and muffled space. Clouds move. Humans move. Carty’s poetry is a poetry that moves simply by being. The night was humid. We stood by the burn pile and did nothing. It felt like the last thing we should do. (from “All is Retained Which has Not Been Surrendered”) Movement is representative in the size of that which this collection represents. But the size of what? Huge Cloudy is not solely of the clouds. The hugeness is derivative of the collectivity that we all face—together—in these cascading days of drama and threat and love. The bonding arises out of many spaces. Carty shares where comradery and a shared effort may be fueled by that which is depressing, that which is considerably challenging. In “The Desired Change will Occur,” a poem mid-way through the collection, Carty writes: “No color. No playground. At times, it seems / we only know each other / by a thread, but we love that thread.” Later still, near the book’s close, an indication again of that collectivity: “Forget the utility / of the heartbeat— / more often, it’s a sign, / and we have been known / to chase a good symbol / around Cape Hope” (from “Mutual Fish”). Bodies were bearable, then borne subaquatic through sky’s reflection, caliginous green clouds around the underwater lamp, black shadows of seals and passing schools. (from “Too Many Sharks”) These instances of solemn network and uprooting revelry are well-balanced with Carty’s placement of himself in Huge Cloudy, and they reveal mature measurement. There is more cause for writing, more reason for existence, than flourish and description of the bountiful beauty that surrounds us. This collection thus may be a kind test. It may be a book kept close to inspire and corral, may keep us fluidly on our backs staring up at life, waiting for the next vision to arrive and spur us into some flickering agreement.
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Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity by Benjamin Schmitt (Clare Songbirds, 2018)
But you kept on asking me why only some grow and others do not and what they will eventually grow into (from “Track 16”) Positioned to the reader as a book of two parts, two sides of an album, two collections of tracks, Benjamin Schmitt’s third book of poetry is both approachable and strangely mysterious in concept. It is a soundtrack to a poet making genuine attempts at furthering his understanding of the world around him, and incessantly documenting that understanding. It is a soundtrack filled with many of Schmitt’s evolving and evolved perspectives on gender, on masculinity, and male identity. It is also a soundtrack that is long, filled with many poems, perhaps too many. Side one and side two of this “album” of poetry are two sides of the same coin. They feature Schmitt’s typical wit and playfulness that his earlier books investigated. Schmitt takes the experimentation with form and approach and offers it in a spectrum of output. Some poems feel crisp, well-edited, and homing in on the point of the book directly. Other poems feel as though they were whipped up at the last minute and thrown into the book with a “more is better” attitude. As the soundtrack continues from track to track, with poems labeled numerically across the book, there are a multitude of moments of profound beauty that otherwise fall in line with a dull, ambient hum of the filler poems in between. Light patters on rooftops, sky and city indecisive as gutters catch the faith. (from “Track 5”) On its surface, Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity appears as gargantuan, an over-the-top examination of 21st century innocence-meets-experience belly-flopping across themes and shaking the overall pool of balance a reader might hope for with book-length expectations of verisimilitude. The ripples offer moments of excitement, humor, and the occasional intellectual quandary, and yet never seem to return the book to any pristine state. It’s difficult to grasp a book that provides a straightforward platform for delivery with the actual relentless contents inside; in many cases, connections that might link poems, motifs that harness image and place and tone, are either vague or absent entirely. Even the book’s core investigation on masculinity fades in and out throughout the course of the book as if it might not need to be examined in a full spotlight after all. On one hand, a book that is scattered offers a more robust approach to poetry through the appeal of ecstasy and rigor. The ars poetica core of Soundtrack is definitely present here by the sheer audacity of the poet providing his full hand, his indominatable range of approaches to everyday poetry. There is an intention of presenting craft and highlighting effort of the writing itself. On the other hand, I wonder about what Schmitt’s ultimate goal with this book was as he followed up on the establishing of the initial concept. No truer does this query appear than the last section of the book is identified: “Special Bonus Feature: Robot Horoscopes: The Twelve Brands of the Nasdaq.” This section, curiously titled, is lazily added on to the album as an anti-epilogue to an otherwise epic endurance test of experiencing Schmitt’s questionable curatorial skills. The coup de grace sits within these horoscopes, which are a sequence of sci-fi appearing out of nowhere and having little to no connection with the greater body of work. As a standalone piece, “Horoscopes” might be charming and even satisfying to robot fiction enthusiasts; but as an anecdote closing an otherwise potentially serious collection of poems about concepts of “man” and “man-ness,” the inclusion of this section feels a tad disappointing. They don’t ask about my past in this city that is why I am so free to relive it (from “Track 22”) All these criticisms aside, there are, as I mentioned, moments within the book that are startlingly beautiful. Schmitt’s occasional moments of stunning verse appear almost haphazardly, as if Schmitt’s truest voice was hiding deep within a poetic madman, obfuscated by the everyday hero of Schmitt’s usual and incessant voice. This philosopher-seer sits waiting to instill the reader with lines questioning modernity, crying out towards truth, and bringing Schmitt’s strongest lines of thought into the foreground. “Track 38,” for example, brings forward a stanza of archetypal brutality: “There was blood, each drop trembling / with terror as it fell upon / the ground, clutching love / in puddles of red citizenry.” In “Track 43,” another example, Schmitt brings out his inner symbolist: “On our walk / towards the purple pool / that nightly poisons the sun / maddening the days / with clear nihilism / you were taciturn.” Amidst the mess of Soundtrack, which played and played across my full morning, I waited for moments like those above to catch me unaware and pull me back into focus with the book. These quintessentially pondersome moments served as anchor points along otherwise droning verse. Oddly, the book’s intended message, so buried within, spoke strongly to me—as a reader who is concerned with contemporary masculinity, I began Schmitt’s work with specific hopes, and left the book with a furrowed brow as I contemplated a future with Netflix robots as sex workers. It, the book’s structure and appearance, did not seem to make sense in the grand scheme of Schmitt’s vision. What turned him on was the choice, that from millions of bodies he could discard the rest by choosing one. The violent- colored eyes that gazed back at him seemed trustworthy in their reliable defiance. (from “Track 53”) The book also contains some key design flaws that left me questioning the publisher, Clare Songbirds, and the process through which titles like Soundtrack get published. Many blank pages were scattered throughout the book separating poems arbitrarily. The small footer icon (a vinyl record) on every page occasionally rubbed up with final lines. The final section, “Horoscopes,” closed a page with a header that started the next section on the following page. Even grammar and language errors showed their face, indicating a troubling absence of editing: lines like “but does wanting poison loving?” and “a hired tough who waited” were barely noticeable but lacking grace nonetheless; seeing the faux pas of using the word “transgendered” instead of the appropriate and respectful “transgender” is a slightly graver slip. Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity is a curious project that shows respectable and admirable endurance of a poet capable of significant risk-taking and demonstration. The poems capture Schmitt’s identity and identity evolution in a fascinating collection format that is flatly aligned with the album concept. The book is overloaded and could have been more impactful, I think, in a smaller, concise, and chiseled form. Perhaps Schmitt should have made more room for a B-Sides (though I imagine 100s of poems already fill that document) or even a full-length sequel. |
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All reviews by Greg Bem unless marked otherwise.
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