Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

XTANT 4

A week or so ago my mailbox was blessed with a thud and a sigh. When the mailman sloughed off, I found the massive new issue of XTANT. Check out the Anabasis blog for a generous scanning by Ross Priddle of many of its visual poems. This is a collection of poetries worth their weight.

Macular Surprise II

Clayton Eshleman blurbs that Catherine Wagner stands on “the jointure of aether-headed Spicer and the manic Plath, making faces like a play pen, or a mycelian language pump.” The work in Macular Hole also intersects with Andre Breton and Jack Kerouac Mexico City Blues and Sonia Sanchez and Bernadette Mayer, and it also paves its own cobblestone autobahn, Wagner Turnpike, few road signs to tell you the way or the why (which is how I like to drive a poem anyway). More than once I missed the curved straightaway, rolled my car head over heel over head over heel – what a pleasure to regain my youthful sense of im/balance.

Macular Hole is a heady, tumbling mix of the domestic, the askance, the askew:

                              “Who is alert enough

to watch the corner while it vamps and shudders

repositioning the being hall as bright and deep

or fantastically dismembered

walls of animal?

The food inside my breast

needed a needer.”

(Allied with it were all receptacles, p. 53)

Macular Hole ssstretchches, screeeches, streeaksss denotation, connotation, neologism, language limber but never lost, almost autobiographically sur/real but oh so much more:

“My mother

I was fucked for

a coupling inside of that inside her

a split and crack and grotesque growthery

a veiny fish and limbs alarming off

and thrash her good

and split her out, a yellow wrinkling”

(Who admitted you, p.26)

Macular Hole is sassy, spicy:

This is called the

Mississippi

mash, this kind of kick – leg up,

foot smashed against both sides opponent’s head,

or spinneret, foot comes round your body

turning backward fast, and hooks ‘em.

Squeezed tight between my legs

so we feel safe and comfortable.

Who’s my fucker? Who will be my fucker?

(Kill so we feel safe and comfortable, p.11)

All the Cohere

From the very first, the center

that pulls fire out of ice

motivates matter, quiet, quick

              Now listen

all the other ingredients

deserve the best. The eyes

cohere on the table, feeding

from themselves

seperating inside from outside

The balance arms. The ears

signal all incoming forces

to the silent inside

Macular Surprise

I can’t get enough of Catherine Wagner’s Macular Hole.

One thing as reader I demand – yes, DEMAND, unequivocally, unabashedly -- un-un-un-un-un-un-un- – is surprise. With narrative, I don’t want to be able to predict what comes next. I want the next narrative event to knock me off balance, to throw me through my tenuous grasp of character/plot motivation, to tear it apart… With poetry I want the next word, next phrase, next line, to jar me in at least two ways: refuse/confuse the prior sense/sensory/sensual meaning/matter configurations I as reader have created, and to point away to so many other possible sense/sensory/sensual meaning/matter con/figurations, tenuous fingerings I as reader can feel and create…

The thirty-two poems in this “slim” volume meet my two criteria immensely, innumerably, indubitably, im-in-in-in-in-in-in-in... I’m pleasurably and immeasurably surprised. For this entry (there will be at least one other), surprise this one poem:

I was at congress with myself

I was at congress with myself to conclude

            should I tax myself, to strengthen my

                        reserves and strictly exercise

                        myself, so I’ll haul myself back up

                        if I fall down

            or should I ratchet down the tax, release the lever

                        and run outside and see what’s there to do

                        and give myself a job, or blow it

                        on one bamboozle eve extravaganza

the world at night was twitching and flapping out

            from my congress, and I gathered it in and dreamt

   to my outnumberment

Now who can’t be surprised by lines such as “on one bamboozle eve extravaganza”….