Affordable PoetryTom Hibbard reviews
|
In this untitled and modest chapbook of new poems, Larry Sawyer looks in the mirror and sees - the reflection of a French artist named Armand Fernandez; a painting by Picasso; the gray-brown of a cold November day; imaginary molecules of irrelevant physicality, rather scattered and quizzical; himself too, sometimes humble and sometimes arrogant, disconsolate, mellow, especially, as Henry Fonda once said, ‘warts and all’. Now the shapes move
Sawyer, who lives in the Chicago area and edits ‘Milk’ online magazine with Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, wasn’t born in Nice. Perhaps in reveries he imagines being born in Nice, carelessly projecting the squalid-by-comparison, compacted features of where he was born into these revealing Matisse-ian forms. Where he was born resembles Nice the way Sawyer resembles Fernandez, the way human beings resemble a ‘species’, the way a palm tree resembes a pine tree, the way written language or ‘patterns on black wall-/ paper’ resemble the divinity. you prize the parrot at the doctor’s office Rather than dividing between have and do not have, Sawyer seems to divide between inside and outside. Outside is confusing; inside is bustling with purpose. Take one long last look at yourself in the mirror
Where in the reflection is oneself? ‘Businessmen go out with the wind’ The wind mixes with the self. The wind is everything mixing with everything, except what we have been able to separate out from it. In viewing his reflection, Sawyer attempts to distinguish between the predetermined and that portion over which he can exercize self-control—choice, reason, understanding. my heart is a clock, a rusty pulley with nothing to drink
Three things the minimalist cover design of ovals resembles to me - movie-version marks supposedly left by octopus tentacles on skin, body cells and pills. One poem in the chapbook is titled ‘Pills’. Pills would be on the side of the predetermined, the genetic, a uniformly manufactured chemical that controls humans rather than the other way around. As a prod, they ‘Turn the key to breath’ but also sometimes cause the self to forget the self, ‘skipping past my choked/ childhood of innocent calm’. the grim time frowned upon the players
The poem ends, ‘The captain goes down with the poem!’ Down or up, sometimes difficult to predict. Nor does it matter entirely. What matters more is being a captain rather than being captained—not an obvious or a pleasant role but rather an implicit and painful one. A renewed taste dries here I’ve included Sawyer’s poem ‘Geez’ from issue 13 of the online publication ‘Shampoo’ in the purview of this review, a poem I remember liking as I encountered it. It seems to belong with the poems in the chapbook and reinforces the chapbook poem ‘Venusian Primer’. Sometimes Sawyer not only doesn’t press his point but expresses pointlessness. Both of these poems contain alliterative sequences of unrelated words. In ‘Geez’ are lines such as ephedrine escapades erode extracted elegies These lines seem to despair of virtue, especially of trying to communicate in a sincere way. In ‘Venusian Primer’ the word use is alliterative and also nonsensical in defining made-up ‘terms’ such as ‘urp’ ‘turp’ ‘surp’. murp - meep murb melk mosp morst murz molz millifizen/ millifizzenzeit
The poem ‘New Vocabulary’ also fits with these. One quality the genetic and the invented seem to share is incomprehensibility. |
August 2003 | Jacket 23
Contents page |