Well, I figured I should start off the blog conversation with some very cursory thoughts about Kelly’s choice, “Fits of Dawn” by Joseph Ceravolo (thanks for providing the PDF, Kelly!). I’m excited for these discussions to start! Whoop whoop.
To me, part of the appeal of “Fits of Dawn” is its esoteric nature, particularly but certainly not limited to the first half of the book. This collection makes no bones about being obscure or elusive; in a way, it reminds me of some of the poets from the Vienna Group (for example, H.C. Artmann or Ernst Jandl—I’ll try to provide links to the poems I’m thinking of as soon as I get the chance). Or maybe even some sort of Tourettes syndrome. To me, this is the book Merwin would write in the mid-1960s if he made up words, which I intend as one of the greatest compliments I can give someone. These poems resist didacticism, which I find extremely enjoyable; I’ve read this book twice and I had an initial “WTF” reaction. But the second time, there seems to be something at work here, although I can’t quite place my finger on it. And there also appears to be a very organic and germane congruence to these poems, tonally. The poet appears to have been in a very particular, almost irreproducible, state of mind when these were written. This is to say, in a way, that it appears that the poet almost shunned revision (again, this reading is very cursory), for the sake of maintaining that sort of tonal and psychological cohesion. These extremely daring aspects of the book have me smitten and charmed with this guy, who I'd never heard of before.
Does anyone else feel that this collection serves as sort of a modernist/post-modernist rebellion against the poetic canon, in a sense? Revolt against "Poetry with a capital 'P'"? A big "fuck you" to early Robert Lowell? Etc.
Yet part of its appeal to me also serves as a sort of downfall, in a way. For me, its esotericism also is manifested as sort of a middle-finger to the reader—“Hey, look what I can do and I don’t care if you understand it or not.” This isn’t to say that the reader has to be given bread crumbs to follow every collection through to the end and be a “meaning-maker,” but this sort of poetic isolationism, for lack of a better phrase, sort of distracted me from all the wonderful things the book was doing, particularly with regards to language and leaps.
Sorry if this is way too long. I figured I would get all my preliminary/premature thoughts down before I forgot them.
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I agree with the "big fuck you to Robert Lowell" comment. And I also agree that Lowell deserves it to a degree. More to come later from me.
ReplyDelete-radd
And to get nitty gritty doesn't it seem that things of esoteric nature are usually this way? Exciting, interesting, off-putting, uncomfortable?
ReplyDeleteOne thing I learned from Joe Ceravolo a long time ago was that preliminary/premature thoughts are the only kind we're ever going to have, and we're always going to forget them before we put them down, thank heavens.
ReplyDelete(Maybe it's not all that great, for thoughts, or for anything, to be put down, anyway?)