Sans by G.L. Ford (Ugly Duckling, 2017)
Review by Greg Bem (@gregbem) On the periphery: Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating into Space by Spiritualized To have found loss promised in the promise of all fulfillment [. . .] What is memory to a poet? What is time to a poet? What is that briefest moment, feeling so frail and vulnerable, to a poet who describes it as fully as possible? There is still recklessness. There is still absence. There still remains the challenge of coming to terms with the fullness of our reality. In Sans by G.L. Ford, I find a degree of sorrow that is overturned by a degree of complacency that is overturned again by a degree of power exhibited by the sake of the poet for the sake of the poetry. It represents a valiant core with frilly, vigilant edges, and yet, like the best and most provocative and equally successful, equally failed poetry of the everyday, of the every time, this is poetry that is confused, represents a challenged and perplexing realm of liminal servitude. The poetry is the result of undertaking the vastest realms of the possible, and that is the horrific, deadpan flatline of the question of humanity. The categories I’d invented to justify my treasons gnawed at the deep and gathered reservoir of breath my flesh had [. . .] As I read Ford’s work, I couldn’t help but think of more romantic notions of the human, of that spirit that pervades us, that energy which spurs us on toward a sense of enveloping light and dark, cascading or crescendo, transient or crisis-complete. The definitions of this verse are excellently stark, with voices behind the poems that feel bold and daring and rupturing of the current milieu of the contemporary voice. This is work that is craft-laden, but evokes a respect for an egalitarian sense of the heart, of that which humanity once worshipped but has long abandoned. A book of time, a book of memory, this book is existentially offbeat and living in a world that has surpassed it. Which is why it is like gold within a pit of rust. Which is why it sits with the reader uncomfortably. Imagine holding a gold nugget while sitting in a pit of rust. Imagine the awe, and that horrific menace of the gleaming light of beauty that cannot do anything other than oppress through imprint of impression. Ford’s poetry glints and gleams disruptively in a world of image-obsessed droning and dreariness. Sadly, not even the reverberations of a pertinent poetry are ever enough to shock reality into new complexion and composition—just as the golden nugget exists, so it will never be more than an object that can be sold, or inevitably sold through immense, obsessive planning. Water flowed beneath the ice and ice beneath the water and all I forgot, I forgot by choice [. . .] In a more practical sense, the poetry in Sans is hardly without, though it certainly stands in its own right on a platform that notices emptiness. The form of the poems is crisp and shuddering: short lines that wrap down the page in lingual maneuvers that remind me of the first time I read Susan Howe, the first time I read Rae Armantrout. That is not to say this poetry is like that of those writers, but there is a jolt, a door left ajar, a burst of light that drags the target in, like moths burnt crisp by that soft buzzing electric light. There is a sense that what is being read is not what it seems. That there is much being left out, and perhaps that is directly in line with the perch of memory as a motif sitting upon this book, or perhaps not. Nothing is totally explicit, another benefit to Ford’s work—the upbringing of the obscure is one that rallies. There is a warping of time and the perception of all the energies through the psychedelic-level of hypnosis existing within these lines. They are horrifying. They are monstrous. They are enchanting and distracting and impervious and they brighten the page, let the day of the reader become more kind, sit like an unkindly idol in the corner of the page, in the corner of the room, the eye directly facing outward, filled with belief, filled with mystique, filled with the trance of the unassuming, the unassumable. Like worship stripped of prayer, the relics I chose to keep took the place of moments lost [. . .] Another Ugly Duckling author, Alan Felsenthal, wrote a similar collection of works earlier this year: Lowly. But in Lowly, Felsenthal evoked the image of the fire handler, the warrior, and the alchemist. The aims of these masculine figures, driven by the balance of Eros and Thanatos, are carried by the creative impulse. That alone corresponds with a significant beauty, a true ringing of the ears, pulling open of the eyelids toward the burst. But where the impulse and impassioned exploration of creativity’s edging and ownership sits with Felsenthal, we have the line drawn with separation from Ford. With Ford, there is warning, and “weeping” (to take from Ford’s “Enkidu’s Lament (5)”). As archetypal and magical these pages sit, they are still pages in Sans and there is a desperate sense of wonder and retrograde that spins all sense of knowing and leadership within the poems’ tones themselves toward dead-ends and graying zones. I spent a week cataloguing mouths, all the concatenations of lips and teeth [. . .] Like with a 2017 read through the bodies of Lautreamont or Mallarme, I know little of what to do to resolve my understanding of Sans, which is where its sequence of inspiration becomes more and more fabricated, instilled (or distilled), a product of satisfaction through its grotesque level of unhandling. It is pleasurable but distorted. It is fulfilling but wrecking. It is settled but filled with the echoes of writhing. These qualities reflect through the grubby mirror of literary landscape as powerful, outlasting, and antagonistic in the grand scheme of the canon, which means they are served forth as an offering of cryptic goodness, messy rebellion, and a vague representation of a reality that is certainly before and bleeding into that reality of right now. The weeping, I think, is the true harmony of Ford’s poetry which is destined to continue, to continue, to continue, the algorithm corrupted, Sisyphus in unfazed agony, the full moon missing from the sky.
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