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 suddenlyAm I?
I won't decorate the quasars of well-meaning
Except as the carriage rises with the city lights
From gold to gold and backA sexy girl is sitting behind you
On the inbound LIRR car 2977
The door ajar then wide openStone-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.
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