Jordan Davis' Million Poems Journal, at its best, delights -- unabashed, full-bore wordplay, sudden, surprising, funny-bone connections. These poems could spin away from their pages and all I could do is laugh. Though they are never really about anything, they're about everything: the intersection of language and perception perpetually under construction, or as he puts it in the eponymous poem, "Million Poems Journal":
Not that any poem means a million things
But that anything said truly, known or not known,
That is, a sudden breath
Fills or leaves you,
That's worth seeing
For a second.
There it is -- always -- in plain sight.
Here's another taste, the last lines of from the first few poems (sorry, folks, I gave away the endings. But hey, you know Hamlet dies and you still watch the play. The play's the thing!):
Scuffling in my longing, sure, anything suddenly
Am I?
I won't decorate the quasars of well-meaning
Except as the carriage rises with the city lights
From gold to gold and back
A sexy girl is sitting behind you
On the inbound LIRR car 2977
The door ajar then wide open
Stone-eyes, drink some water and guard
The raw gentility there, the better decorum:
Raucous, undisgraced, exemplyfying
A generosity to accident
It's worthy of further discussion that at first blush a project to write a million poems values quantity over quality, but this book and Davis' blog constitutes some pretty convincing evidence that this project values both. I for one, charmed by the quality, await the quantity. I'm particularly interested in watching how the latter affects the former over time.