Philip Metres reviews
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Equal parts philosophy and free jazz, standup and rap, Michael Magee’s roving first book, Morning Constitutional, is a chorus of Gertrude Stein and Ralph Ellison, Frank O’Hara and Ben Franklin, lifted to a rabbled pitch, and set to a language that careens off the confines of the page. Schooled in experimental poetry, philosophical pragmatism, and jazz theory, Magee melds an anarchic energy with a willingness to try anything in poetry; like a jazz soloist, Magee has the audacity to hit sour notes, with the conviction that he can bend them back into song. Why had I been there? There were the trees then, and the many little trees, and there were the several trees scattered about as well. I could remember thinking deeply of trees while looking up into the vast trees; such thoughts always lead me back to those days among the trees when I would sit lazily on the limbs of trees or half-gallop through the maze of trees, finally breaking out into a plot of trees. Trees were all in those days! Now, as I hunched in the trees’ shade, I could not help but be reminded of trees despite my sincere effort to put trees behind me, and set out for the trees which awaited me, patiently, like a forest.
What begins, perhaps, as a parody of ‘Birches’ (and the host of poems imitating ‘Birches’), soon gets caught up in the opaque oddness of the word ‘tree’ itself, as if one could get lost simply in the four letters thus clustered together. Language, initially employed as satirical club, becomes almost too heavy to wield and threatens the knock down the wielder himself. she either had a family episode or had watched an episode of ‘All in the Family,’ no one caught it. In any event, they put her away. In 1958 she’d married Trevor’s law partner — a close family friend, also named Trevor. In the lingo this became known as ‘The Trevor Series.’ Later, the rest of the family settled nearby, just outside of the lingo. The poem is Derrida by way of Groucho Marx — speaking to the slipperiness of language through the relentless use of puns, cultural references, and innuendoes. But the poem is not just a goof, finally; how does one speak about a life, in a world so mediated, narrativized, and virtualized that sitcom characters and chatroom voices are all real as our family members? |
Things ain’t ever going to change.
Over the course of this exploded sestina, the principal sentence — ‘things ain’t ever going to change’ — has crumbled, word by word, down to ‘things.’ By the end of the poem, the staid, fatalistic pre-industrial images of life of the first stanza — where gender and culture are unchanging entities — have turned inside-out, into a carnivalesque of images at once surrealist and late capitalist realism. The mastery of the poem — how it transcends a conceptual framework — is how it works both as a kind of manifesto to progressivism and as a real portrait of the pageant of American life. Magee’s poems succeed most when the language itself threatens to overcome the ideological, conceptual, or geographical triggers that instigated the poem in the first place. a human course which, the cops say, becomes necessary to
Magee’s obsession with the nation has the rhyme-mania of Heron and Dylan, but the poem does not act as agit-prop as much as it is enact protest itself. The poem becomes a symbolic action of dissent, even though the poet knows that dissent always seems to end up as the soundtrack to capitalism (a fate, sadly, of both songs echoed). I plug elegance
Perhaps the most personal poem of the collection, ‘On the Highway It’s Raining,’ alludes to the poet’s ‘debilitating condition’ — the dissolving of the myelin sheath known as multiple sclerosis: myopic eyes but my
That the highway drive in the rain signifies the journey through life almost goes without saying. This poem’s poignancy, however, derives from the way in which the speaker rides a language that veritably gallops to the ‘emergent sea’ — at once signifying emergency, the onset of disease, and the general direction toward which we all are moving, constantly and willy-nilly. |
Jacket 22 — May 2003
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