Attention Span 2011 | Stephen Collis

Louis Cabri | Poetryworld | Cue | 2010

A book that, manoeuvring in very tight spaces, manages to exhaust the possibilities and potentialities of inflection and pronunciation. Minimal and maximal at once. There are texts here you have to sing to hear. In others, the pleasure is really in hearing Cabri himself read them. This is conceptual/procedural work, but Cabri is no purist—he mucks with what he comes up with—as the final arbiter is always going to be the sound of spoken language, tuned to its minutest variations.

Garry Thomas Morse | Discovery Passages | Talonbooks | 2011

Morse has for some time (and over a number of books) been exploring the possibilities of a kind of Poundian arch poetry-speak (where iconic cultural rubble is at once celebrated and mocked—oh how tired it all is, operatic and unwilling to leave us alone). In his new book Morse turns that learned, lurid, and laconic eye on local history (George Vancouver’s “discovery” of the Canadian west coast) and his own Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations heritage. Morse is a poet where to hear it is to believe it. And he wants his frog back, Smithsonian.

Mark Truscott | Nature | Bookthug | 2010

I wonder how many words are in this book—maybe 200? 250? Scattered like a few pheromones on the wind of 80 pages. Constrained to the utmost degree, language here still reaches out to deictically indicate a world present and immediate beyond the page, as it simultaneously produces a phatic echolocation of the “here” and “now” of its almost pristinely empty but nevertheless “textual” pages. Truscott is a minimalist’s minimalist, a slow poet so slow you pull out your field glasses and wait and watch, breathlessly, for the slightest movement.

Donato Mancini | Buffet World | New Star | 2011

Mancini’s books have to me read something like primers or textbooks (I mean this in a good way): here’s everything you can do with the alphabet (Ligatures); here’s all the ways you can twist transform and torque the letter form into visual arrays (Aethel). Maybe those books were the necessary “exercises” for this new book, which puts a masterly stamp on what Mancini’s been up to. Yes, there are visual pieces here; yes, there are procedures and fun and games, lists and statistics. But there are also long probing poems about what how and why we eat—a biting, sharp, hilarious and disturbing critique of the industrialization and commodification of the simple process of primary reproduction.

Rob Stanton | The Method | Penned in the Margins | 2011

This is what I wrote for Rob’s blurb: “In Rob Stanton’s excellent new collection, ‘the method’ is clear: ‘that something so complete … does not need witness.’ The problem to be solved here, however, is what to do when that ‘complete’ ‘something’ is not actually present on the page. Through translation, through omission, through compression and the minimalist precision of ‘canny wee things,’ Stanton creates a marvelous texture of voices and references which offers us a glimpse of the just-barely-thereness of a world thought into being by language. At the centre of the book is a vital sequence of sonnets, written in response to Luk Tuymans’ paintings, that pushes the boundaries of the sonnet form, offering an array of approaches to the ekphrastic moment. As Rilke comes in and out of view as muse and phantom, The Method shows that, while ‘completeness’ might not need our ‘witness,’ we, however, nearly wither under its impenetrable gaze.”

Amy De’Ath | Erec & Enide | Salt | 2010 

I have to admit to limited familiarity with contemporary British poetry: Some Prynne, some Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady (not really a Brit I guess), Tony Lopez, Caroline Bergvall (now there’s someone to trouble national boundaries!), Peter Larkin, Allen Fisher. But if Amy De’Ath’s work is any indication of where young British poets are/are heading, then it’s a pretty good place to be/going. De’Ath is a poet with such a smart ear, fuelled by a rhetoric at once cocksure and in doubt, drunk with poetry’s past but fully engaged with the present post-spectacular moment. This book is “a little ferocity in bloom,” and I can’t wait to see more from De’Ath.

Cecily Nicholson | Triage | Talonbooks | 2011

This is Nicholson’s first book, but it comes growling and howling out of years of community service, social struggle, and an intense and long-term investment in language and the land. From the disasters of open pit mines, the suffering and loss of precarious communities, and the solidarity found in collaborative resistance, Nicholson weaves a dense linguistic surface where we cannot escape the complicity of capital C “Culture” in the endless wars we wage against the earth and each other. I flat out love this book, and find it a clarion call I simply cannot ignore. All the same, it leaves no one off the hook, nothing outside its critical-poetical gaze. Triage is rough, but someone has to sift through the damage to find what can still be saved. Nicholson is a “good” but honest “doctor.”

Brenda Iijima | If Not Metamorphic | Ahsahta | 2010

If not metamorphic, then what? Iijima’s answer is a book of transformations, a book that says—there’s no alternative to alteration (a kind of “what does not change…” sort of formation). That constant metamorphosis keeps Iijima’s readers on their toes. Not unlike two other (however different) poets whose work I love—Robert Duncan and Lissa Wolsak—Iijima manages to ERASE the line between discourses that we might mark as distinctly “spiritual” or “political” (adding the somatic and ecological into the metamorphing mix). The human here is entirely repositioned within flux—which is, I think, where it belongs—”biome / with no exception.” There is a headlong plunge to this text (as with other Iijima books), so that “a sentence can’t handle this fall,” first page to the last. Whenever I read Brenda Iijima I find, sooner rather than later, I stop reading, and start writing. I think that says a lot about what she’s doing. This is fecundating work, to the extreme, steadily eroding the boundary between reading and writing.

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Stephen Collis’s most recent book, On the Material (Talonbooks 2010), was awarded the 2011 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Forthcoming books include Lever (Nomados), To the Barricades (Talonbooks), and a book-length essay on “change.”

Collis’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Meredith Quartermain

George Bowering | My Darling Nellie Gray | Talonbooks | 2010

Political. Playful. A textbook in procedural possibilities. Also thoughtful and heartfelt.

Sheila Heti | How Should a Person Be? | Anansi | 2010

I think of this as a conceptual novel as all the characters are real people. It’s constantly making us think about arbitrary boundaries between fiction and “the real.” Questioning and extending the form of the novel, too.

Eileen Myles | Inferno: A Poet’s Novel| OR Books | 2010

Cross-cuts are dynamite, I wrote across the top of page 76, the chapter entitled “Poetry is making money.” It’s a poetry page-turner.

Louis Cabri | Poetryworld | CUE Books | 2010

Louis has invented a whole new genre of sound-sight-reference cross-play unlike any poetry you’ve read anywhere.

Miriam Nichols | Radical Affections | Alabama | 2010

A brilliant synthesis of the last 50 years of literary history (the relation of poetry to philosophy), and a map of where we could go from here.

Dodie Bellamy | Pink Steam | Suspect Thoughts | 2004

I read Bellamy for her fascinating house of mirrors.

Kate Eichhorn | Field Notes | BookThug | 2010

Turns the anthropological machine on its head.

Renee Rodin | Subject to Change | Talonbooks | 2010

Renee speaks from the heart—across her kitchen table—about parents dying, about friends who survived the holocaust, about being young and in love.

Stephen Collis | On the Material | Talonbooks | 2010

Winner of this year’s BC Book Prize for poetry. And well deserved too!

Michael Boughn | Cosmographia: A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic | BookThug | 2010

Who could refuse an epic with Holstein cows grazing in it?

§

Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking won a BC Book Award for Poetry. The Dalhousie Review described Matter and Nightmarker as “perhaps the two most noteworthy titles” in recent radical poetry, “prescient, daring,” and “undoing the knot of human understanding.” Recipes from the Red Planet has been shortlisted for a BC Book Award for Fiction and the ReLit prize. Quartermain’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Stephen Collis

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | TinFish | 2010

Site-specific poetry at its best—collages, documents, and roller derby—what more could you ask for? Sand continues to produce some of the most earnest, delicate, and pointed political poetry out there.

Jane Sprague | The Port of Los Angeles | Chax | 2009

What Sand does with Portland, Sprague takes up in Los Angeles, only with more thorough-going lyricism. Ikea products come ashore, drug dealers get busted, and the commons once again raises its head amidst new enclosures—”this / in the how now moment sullied biosphere.” One of my favorite poetry books to come along in a while.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Pitch: Drafts 77-95 | Salt | 2010

The next installment of DuPlessis’s major life-long poem, now getting up over 800 pages all told. I’m finding the increasing pleasure is in following the Drafts back “down the ladder,” as it were, along the line of 19, as there are now 5 poems in each 19-poem cycle which pass over each other once again, picking up on stray elements, deepening and contorting themes.

Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light | Station Hill | 2010

Long one of the best under-recognized poets, Wolsak’s new “collected” includes everything from The Garcia Family Co-Mercy and Pen Chants to her amazing prose-poem/essay, An Heuristic Prolusion. Precise thought, compressed imagery, and a deeply human sense of the universe and our fragile place in it. A book to keep close by at all times.

Jeff Derksen | Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics | Talon | 2009

Selected essays from one of his generation’s seminal poet-critics. Need to know what neoliberalism is and how poetry (as it must) bites the hand that feeds it? This is your book. I know of no other writer who can so seamlessly move from complex analyses of political economy to wry readings of avant-garde poetry.

Rachel Zolf | Neighbour Procedure | Coach House | 2010

Poems from a stay in Palestine, the opening section, “Shoot & Weep,” is alone worth the price of admission—some of the most powerfully affective statistics (!) I have ever read, as Zolf weaves magic out of Butler’s Precarious Life.

Jules Boykoff | Hegemonic Love Potion | Factory School | 2009

Along with Derksen, Rodrigo Toscano, and Kevin Davies, one of my favorite guides to the perplexing terrain of late neoliberal mayhem—and what poetry might be doing there. Sharp, sharp wit. News that indeed stays news.

Josely Vianna Baptista | On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids | Manifest | 2003

A late discovery for me, and the press might not exist any more, but Baptista’s poems, in Chris Daniels’ painstaking translations, certainly satisfy Dickinson’s requirement that poetry take the top of your head off. South American concrete, material lyricism—this is language as I want to meet it—a net thrown over another world.

Erín Moure | My Beloved Wager | NewWest | 2009

Essays from some 30 years of a writing life, reading Moure on translation—amongst other things—is a marvel, instructive and electrifying. I have deeply enjoyed this book.

More Stephen Collis here. Back to directory.

Attention Span – Mark Truscott

Laynie Browne | Daily Sonnets | Counterpath Press | 2007

Courageously and delightfully open.

Donato Mancini | Hell Passport No. 22 | Perro Verlag | 2007

Like much of Mancini’s work, this circuitry of messy tracings forces us to wonder not just how we read but what reading might be.

Carl Andre | Cuts: Texts 1959-2004 | MIT | 2005

I’m not too hot on Andre’s poetry, but I suspect pieces such as “Anaxial Symmetry” and “The Dialectic Between Two States” will keep me going for years.

Aram Saroyan | Collected Minimal Poems | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2007

Not only a music heard, but seen.

Derek Beaulieu | Flatland | Information as Material | 2007

Bullseye.

Jessica Wyman, ed. | Pro Forma: Language/Text/Visual Art | YYZBooks | 2007

Simon Glass’s annotated translation of Genesis 11:1-9 is worth the price of admission on its own.

Jordan Scott | blert | Coach House | 2008

I haven’t actually read this for a little while, but it was finally published in the spring. Go read it.

Trevor Joyce | What’s in Store | NWP & The Gig | 2007

This year’s discovery. Thanks, Nate.

Angela Carr | Ropewalk | Snare | 2006

Reads a bit like a grad school creative thesis, which it is, but glimmers dazzle.

Clint Burnham | Smoke Show | Arsenal Pulp Press | 2005

Holy shit.

Stephen Collis | Phyllis Webb and the Common Good: Poetry/Anarchy/Abstraction | Talonbooks | 2007

An illuminating reaquaintance with an important foremother. I loved The Commons too.

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More Mark Truscott here.

Attention Span – John Latta

Tim Atkins | Horace | O Books | 2007

Tonal mischief is the thing. “ODES II / 20”:

Although lack of theory prevents me from perceiving
The true nature of my oppression, Maecenas
Women of my age usually put on weight

This is the last time I appear in an avant-garde movie
What I’d really like to do is direct
My hands are shaking and my knees are weak

What, Jerry Lee Lewis meets Frantz Fanon? Atkins makes Horace’s six quatrains revert to six lines—brilliant move. Thus “Women of my age usually put on weight” descends fleetly out of: “Even now the rough skin is settling around / my ankles, and now above them I’ve become / a snow-white swan, and soft feathers are / emerging over my arms and shoulders.” (A. S. Kline’s version.)

Or Atkins Mauberleys up Horace (“Odes II / 28”) with a pinch of Housman: “Owing to a shortage of cocaine, / I turned my back on public life / And live in Market Harborough / With Robert Lowell’s widow, Caroline / / 50 Gauloises after Ezra / A pound of lip up fatty / And an anecdote featuring / Mein Kampf / / . . . / / I joined the school of quietude / & ended up with a beard, / Scones, towelling, and the flying day fixed. / Jeremy we could have done worse.” Smashing.

Stephen Collis | Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism  | ELS Editions | 2006

Put it amongst a select bunch: Zukofsky’s Bottom, Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, Howe’s own My Emily Dickinson, Williams’s In the American Grain, H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, Pound’s Spirit of Romance, and Duncan’s H.D. Book—all “poets’ attempts to write their response to other poets,” all “Janus-faced works—part exegesis, part original expression,” all “singularities”—works writ in a mode of what Collis calls “anarcho-scholasticism,” dabblers and enthusiasts working the archival holes, bridging the rifts. Such writing a kind of writing into the archive, the “world poem,” writing against the archive’s regulated keepers.

Howe, in “Melville’s Marginalia”: “I thought one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trail he followed through words of others.” Eliding itinerancy (Howe: “I cling to you with all my divided attention. Itinerantly.”) and name dispersal (Collis: “If identity is fixed order can be imposed. Resistance to singleness is a resistance to the enclosure of capital and empire.”) Collis’s terrific phrase: “scattering identity to the four corners of the page”: “We are traveling as relations through words of others to the lost origins of our other selves.”

Collis, on the nefarious “reach” of notions of “enclosure and privatization” of the commons: “To shut up speech. To shut up documents in archive’s exclusion. To shut up land so that it many be ‘improved’ and become profitable. To shut up definition in dictionary versions.”

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton (Hammertown Book 2) | New Star Books | 2008

A poem or series of poems that here, in its second “installment”—the mind behind the writing is too restless and indefatigable and curious for the word—seems suddenly and absolutely capable of most defiantly rippling out through the various juggernauts of the twentieth century’s collapse and into the present to encompass the brute history and giddy trials of a whole finicky continent, and beyond. Culley explores recent (and not-so) American history with the tamp’d down precision of Lorine Niedecker, the rumpled reach of Charles Olson.

. . . where rising fuel costs
temporarily trump
the fear of creosote & coalsmoke

to re-enable the choking fogs
that had disappeared
with the industrial base—

that all of this is safely tracked
from space, indeed,
to be lost is ultimately

economic, those people
under the rubble assumed
their cell phones

would save them, an island
held in place
with mirrors, they

can hear you, they
can see you, they
just can’t help you.

Trevor Joyce | What’s in Store | The Gig / New Writers’ Press | 2007

Reading around in its strange and bold and marvelous pieces, pieces that seemingly sprout out of nowhere, that exhibit incredible variety, that often enough seem spoke by ancient voices up out of the boggy penetrable earth, I think how what one cannot speak of, one calls genius, or quotes too lengthily. Joyce’s range is phenomenal. The book opens with a lovely set of tiny things, the “Folk Songs from the Finno-Ugric and Turkic Languages,” work’d up out some rudimentary literal versions. Here’s one:

A birch tree
bends on the hill.
For a plough, girls chop
a handle.

That moustache,
is it your first?
For caps, girls braid
fine tassels.

Which seems to catch that particular moment of adolescence when the girls’re outstripping the boys and there’s a combo of taunting and impatience and self-reliance going on amongst them. Too, Joyce reworks a series he calls “Love Songs from a Dead Tongue,” out of fifteenth c. (and earlier) Irish originals, and a series of “some of the surviving poems by Juan Chi (pinyin Ruan Ji, 210-263).” The upshot of the threading through of translations and versions is a splendid estrangedness, where the alien flips into customary, and one’s happiest reading the song of a horse:

How happy the life of a horse! Hey!
Till the end when they mock him
and whip him and kick him,
and for Purgatory sell him to gypsies.

Thirty years I served one man,
hauled his harness like a colt,
now I’m old I’m down and done for,
corn-stalks hurt my gums.

Smiths and farriers rot in hell!
Your tackle was the death of me,
they broke my head, they stole my skin,
now sheep dogs sniff my meat.

Caroline Knox | Quaker Guns | Wave | 2008

The temptation to go off into completely giddy self-effacery and nonsense stands down against deeply-soak’d-in and censorious habit (in the case of most of us): Caroline Knox defeats just that with moments of vocalic sprezzatura shying into ur-language, or post-speech, or pre-speech. I suspect that she’ll eventually become a marker of the “era”—she is consistently restless, inventive, unalign’d. Two pieces in a contrapuntal (bilingual) face-off:

DREYKEN

Dreyken fabe, wer ingete dreyken
(dor droy rittavittastee orn canar).
Preb. Refen ingete inget. Preb.

Santona nofa Xeroc;
Ter quittz mivin movip.
Morm faria greel Florida
faria greel pandeck.

BATHROBES

We took our bathrobes ad stuck them in the washer.
(Ritta put hers in the blue laundry machine.)
I said, “Refen ingete inget.”

Nocturnes are hard to Xerox;
birds follow the glare of water.
We prepare tax returns for people in Florida,
People in Florida whom we have never met.

(Translated by the author and Carline Knox)

Carl Martin | Rogue Hemlocks | Fence Books | 2008

My immediate sense is that Martin’s earlier work (Genii Over Salzburg) owes less to Ashbery: immoderate, sui generis, awe-inducing. No matter: there’s plenty of heart-stopping mischief here, effects identifiably Martin’s own. “White Cargo”:

As the adverse account shoos flies
there are still remnants of the dynastic fan.
Golf balls are tinder in the muzzle of art.
Camels like glittering ashtrays in the barber’s mirror
sink to their knees with domino teeth:
an advert for a fleshy deck of cards. Only
a straight razor separates hell from marriage.
And if camels are marriageable they adorn
the stern of this ancient bateau-citerne: The captain
smiling like a mule. How fitting for the French coast!
Noël, old boy, pass the oxygen—would you?

The highly palpable sense that that is verging on a logical (paraphraseable) sense—is not “merely” surreal—puts it into the territory of the uncanny. (Surrealism rarely does so: in the hands of most of its adherents it becomes tedious, mechanical, predictably “zany.”) Look how he rewrites Stevens, comes out looking like the King of the Ghosts!

NO SOP, NO POSSUM, NO JIVE

We must pit ourselves brutally,
testing the tar and pitch
of immaculate forefathers. Ditto, etc.
X-temporizing, scrounging luxuriously
as we climb intricate cobs, nipples
and rosy vellums inscribed with an oriole.
I see no further than this, though
I’ve been lower, into hell’s orifice;
popped back in like a rabbit!

Chris Martin | American Music | Copper Canyon Press | 2007

Martin writes: “Words lead double lives: anonymously adrift and tethered to authorship,” admits to how “One of the things that opened the world of American Music to me was plagiarism, ” and provides a splendidly variously listing of some of the “voices in the chorus.” In spite of (or because of) the approach, Martin’s voice is remarkably present, sardonic, toying, sheepish, mischievous, full of exceeding wonder—indeed, the “chorus” barely impinges at all. The poems are models of velocity and containment—they fly short-linedly down the page, they scoop together a whole range of things, worlds of simultaneity.

. . . the way the boy
Impatiently cultivates
His inviolate sheen, combing

The grates with his eyes, his fists
Hidden but surely
Balled, not often am I

Prepared for violence, though I find it
Natural, in me as in
The world, and it remains

Revolting, the brief
Desire to trample something
Living, loving certain

Registers of collapse, tiny pockets
Bereft of grief, it reminds me how Henry
Miller spent three years

Inside a slide
Trombone and I have
Found myself too

Sane, and sullen, and suddenly
I feel just like Bonnie
Raitt on the cover of Streetlights

Her mouth unself-consciously
Open, a little
Question in her

Eyes as if
To say, “I am so
Full of this . . .

This . . . what is this?”

Alessandro Porco | Augustine in Carthage and Other Poems | ECW | 2008

At bottom, a sense of language in excess, skittering (gleefully) out of control, uncontainable, dictating its own terms: manhandling its handler, mocking, fun. Porco’s work isn’t all so neologistically “ripe” as “Tugnutt” is—though the beasts Lewis Carroll (“winkel and wame” bastard son of “gimble in the wabe”), John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, and James Joyce himself do hold heavy sway.

In Boschland
did Tugnutt knock nock,
and in hogeye bacchi
winkel and wame
the quimwig quimbush;
fuzzymuzzy yawns
of the city, world-wary—
too, too much so
to ginch, zither or futz
with any impression of dee-
light: jutsum just some,
I would weary, bid
thingamy, and good-blite!

[. . .]

Down
whelk zouzoune,
the Musée des Poontenanny
schmoya of Goya fl-
unked by
gammon of Lautreamont and
Matisse mapatasi,
twat blivvets—the like
of which dollup off cooch rides
whipped by gimcracks
oosy-doosy
Yum-yum, Pum-pum,
Spadger, and Stinkpot streets.

Elisabeth Workman | Opolis | tÿpøgrafika / Dusie Kollektiv 2007

There’s something otherworldly about it: thinnish canary-yellow paper, imprint’d in green inks, covers of identical stock—it’s audaciously flimsy, an honest pamphlet and shot through (accompanying each of the twenty-six prose-looking texts) with photographs, architectural, signage, Arabic, a Michelangelo David against a brick wall, minaret silhouettes, a Bush-vampire fanging Lady Liberty, pines, debris, print’d every which way, and bleeding spectacular ghost images “behind” each piece. Graphic work and images by Erik Brandt. An slippery (hid) alphabetical scheme to the doings, the pieces chameleon’d, one’s focus going in and out in the reading, emphases shifting. Here’s “Notion of Arts as Frivolity” (01:14):

mercenary, maverick, or missionary—one of the three. Apparently, aside from the alcoholic, oil-eyed narcissist who hasn’t left the sealed villa in three weeks, you should submit to classification. Live on the street with a concrete-slab vista, among amiable guards you always make a point of waving to and the mechanical gushes of water over plastic rocks, marking the entrance. Live as a number under the name, most likely a neologism of capitalist & eastern ideals. There’s the over-chlorinated pool and the water that induces balding. Live a refrigerated existence. On the other side of the walls, the nature of the shifting desert, snakes, and the yellow school bus full of indentured navvies lurk. The nefarious cranking and tapping of industrial machinery define nocturnal white noise. You find yourself wanting to complain about local ways though you’re not really certain how much is local or how much you’ve become a non sequitur

Everywhere in Workman’s piece is uncertainty, failure, blockage, threat. Opolis seems wholly and profoundly of its era (an “era” partially defined by statements like Workman’s “heaven is as hell is a hoax I decide so I make up multiple eras all at once and so overwhelming one wants to explode out of sheer inherited longing”). The unnamed global city consciousness-miasma we imperialists’ve inherited (made) versus the longing for elsewhere. Workman, in a lovely line (there are many): “we dream omnisciently of there, which oscillates between never and now, operatic and open-mouthed.”

C. D. Wright | Rising, Falling, Hovering | Copper Canyon Press | 2008

A polis norteamericano in crisis, a citizen unmoor’d, a calling out (in two senses—for aid, to accuse). The center of the book is largely split between the terrific title poem and its “Cont.,” its continuation. Essentially a fractured (and gut-wrenching, and maddening) narrative of the immoral and illegal preemptive “excursion” into Iraq, it is itself punctuated by “to be cont.,” by contradictory reversals (“Not so; instead”), by doubts as to the efficacy of writing, period (“Nary a death arrested nor a hair of a harm averted / by any scrawny farrago of letters” and “This is no time for poetry”).

. . . And so I have come to want them—
them being, those people, the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania,
I can’t even bear to say their [expletive] monosyllabic surnames
for dread of it calling up their bland [expletive] faces; yet I have come
to want them, almost obsessively come to want them, to exist in this dread:
for the nondescript car to pull up and disgorge the uniformed men
with their generic words tapped out of their well-drilled heads;
for the blunted bodies of this couple to be riveted to this dread,
for their blunted minds to stick on this expectation as if driven into
their bones of the natural order upended—that their twins are dead. No,
that their twins are blessed to give of themselves so selflessly in this struggle
for our way of life as it is so correctly, so vulgarly called; though I do not want
them to actually receive this news to actually have the twins be dead,
nor for their eyes to be blacked out, nor their earthly functions
be stopped, nor their blood to quit flowing to their temporal lobes,
but I sincerely do want this couple this very couple, the current occupants,
to exist solely, wholly in this dread. Because we do.

An [expletive] lovely and fastidious apery of the lingual buncombe of war and its masters, the “current occupants.” Wright assuming the debased lingo of el otro lado (“the other side,” another recurring phrase) in an attempt to “get through”—though recognizing, too, that any addressee’ll see in “current occupants” a sign of junk mail, and likely toss it. No doubt “Rising, Falling, Hovering” is the most ambitious U.S. anti-war poem of the twenty-first century.

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More John Latta here.