Hovercraft (Kenning #8)
K. Silem Mohammad
Kenning #10
Available from the publisher for $6.00 each:
Patrick F. Durgin
383 Summer Street (lower)
Buffalo, NY 14213
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A part of poetry is dead to me. I check out John Ashberry's Flow
Chart or Hart Crane's The Bridge annually, but not to
read them over and over again. My tradition is limited to carrying them. I
have no endurance to read dense epics anymore, and I accept that, but damn
my brain muscles to hell if they give out when I simply carry a big book.
For me, poetry's appeal lies partly in its brevity. I don't want it to last
longer than crack, and a typical poem doesn't. God bless 'em for learning so
little from Iron Butterfly. There's more than that, though. I love the
instant sizzle a line might bring me, or the images used to evoke a scene,
or a feeling. I like the clever way a sensualist can say "fuck", or how
Miroslav Holub's poems could make me horny for science or math. I read
poetry so that my own world of interests can expand, and so that the poetic,
fully realized worlds of Fellini or Tarkovsky or Stan Kenton crystallize in
my head like childhood memories. As Nick Piombino puts it in "With Open
Arms", poetry "discovers where the air is to be found". It gives our daily
lives their life. When I see frogs making nookie on a newspaper, I want to
wonder what headline their love is covering, or whether their future warts
will bear traces of a Cal Ripken photo. I fear, if I ignore the frogs or the
vulgar, chain-smoking, leather-jacketed midget at my old college, then I
miss most of what's cool about my day-to-day life. If not for Mark Strand, Kenneth Koch, Charles
Simic, Donald Hall, Jacques Roubaud, Louise Gluck, and the carefree
dreams of James Tate, like
his recent "Boobies of Fernando Po", I'd have a lesser life. I wouldn't be
trained to look for poetry that exists all around me, be it in an embryonic
or more shapely form, and I damn sure wouldn't find it.
So what does this mean? It means I agree with long-held beliefs of
at Kenning's editor:
poetry and poetics matter. It's not a snooty thing. It's a
learn-how-to-see-every-life-can-make-a-good-autobiography kind of thing. As
their publication makes perfectly clear, our words matter,
and expression is an important thing. Whenever you're writing emails to
friends and saying "Happy Holidays", or a simple "Nothing much going on
here", ask yourself if you've been putting enough poetry in your diet. More
than likely, you haven't.
An issue of Kenning
could be a great place to start a poetry fix, as it's ripe with an array
of voices, each using different methods to reveal a part of
itself. Form is big here, perhaps more important than some would like,
but it fits with the journal's philosophy. Ideas come to everyone, even your
pets, but only poetry can keep the ideas fresh. If Issue 10 is a typical
expression of the journal's mission, then there will be some poems, (poetic)
stories, or (poetic) essays with so little personal appeal that they will
make your brain a wee bit ill. The reason for this is not quality, but
one's own taste. As the number of voices in each publication is vast, you
end up getting an enemy, a best friend, a lover and a good, deep look at a
stranger you may have never thought about.
That the work is uniformly accomplished suggests that Kenning throws back far
more entries than it accepts. It's picky, it's demanding and it's good
enough to get veteran writers like Amiri Baraka. You might remember
him as Leroi Jones, a poet and playwright who used and abused the Ginsberg
scene, but he's remained vital in these, his Ezra Poundish years. The
section from Negrossity: What V. Dug has a wonderful musicality to
it, a restrained degree of anger, and a humor that's reminscent of Charles
Johnson:
...suddenly, he spun
on his heels and giggling followed the others out, with one drunken old
white man who wanted to recite Song of Myself.
So quickly?
Well, it was lunchtime.
Other poets of note to our readers include Franklin Bruno, the musician
we've come to know and appreciate in groups like Nothing Painted Blue. I was
not a big fan of his wordplay here ("in the home of your own comfort"; "I'll
sense you beatless"), but he has a good sense of humor ("Squeeze me
here/And there, I'll budge"), and is among the more gifted artists in the
journal when it comes to closing a work:
nothing succeeds like doing
nothing succeeds
For me, among the most impressive pieces in the Spring issue was Anne
Tardos' "Annotated Considerations". It has a sense of humor and adventure
that recalls the work of Queneau, Harry Mathews, and the beloved Oulipo organization. It's also
delightfully frivolous in its seriousness ("Horses who live on mezzanines,
maybe for political reasons, prefer speaking pidgin English"), and
ultimately fills me with envy. I'm also thrilled by Jeff Hansen's essay on
Mark Wallace's poetry; I never had read this young poet's work before (and
did not know he caught an 87 pound cobra in New Jersey -- a state record), and
each of the excerpts Hansen used had a depth and simplicity which recalled both
Miller and C.K. Williams. Wallace, at times, is also funny:
I can't handle the truth. I'd rather be chased
by boatloads of sinister Scandinavians and their bear Xerxes
than have to prove I exist. Would you like
social angst on those fries?
As for the finely composed work that displeased my puritan self, there was
Dodie Bellamy's series
of "Cunt-Up" prose poems. It's better-written than Bukowski's Women,
though that doesn't say much, and it tries to make the pieces perform too
much at the end. In some way, they would have been better as plain and
simple smut. Some comedy would have made them more inviting, too. Camille Roy's postmodernist "Trick"
tackled edgy territory more effectively, and is one of few recent works
whose authorial interjections actually pulled me deeper into the story. The
work is funny, poignant, fascinating and worthy of far more consideration than
this string of complementary adjectives. From the sheer "wordsmithery" of
her piece, Roy joins Wallace and Anne Tardos as writers whose
work I'll definitely revisit, and I'll certainly look at future issues of
Kenning too. They provide new angles on everything -- translations,
prose poems and "I-so-do-know-a-rhyme-for-platypus" poems -- and their inventiveness is just plain fun.
That said, I'm not among the audience that would blindly purchase
Kenning's publications devoted to single artists. Unlike many rock
bands, very few poets find their footing immediately, and it is young (or
yet-known) poets that Kenning makes its specialty. For me, it's not
mere chance that Strand, Simic and all my personal favorites are now
middle-aged or beyond; poetry is a bitch to do, and poetic talents are a
bitch to master. I'd rather listen to a young, flawed girl band like Feaze than
read the young, flawed K. Silem Mohammad, because Mohammad's failings in
Hovercraft aren't redeemed by youthful energy. His poems suffer because
his intellect is never held back; degrees earned by studying literary
theorists spill into his work, and make much of it seem like Derrida
translated into Turkish from someone with a degree in polysyllabic "ands".
While certain lines or phrases show
considerable talent and finesse ("the friends at home on a trick isotope";
"in the saddest pajamas"; "my plan is to sleep and never win"), Mohammad lets loose with his impressive
vocabulary far too liberally. I have never read a good poem that began,
"Protocal for a deictic siphon" -- and that's Mohammad's primary aim with
every poem. Still, I like his humor (can anyone say, "Roderick, my mortal
enemy", and not seem like a funny, Scooby Doo-ing guy?), and all his moments of
lightheartedness ("Get simple implants in Charles Ives/In the wise tempest
of his jihad/his Meat Puppets and his Ace of Base"). If he develops into
a major talent, this would be a fascinating work to revisit, so that one can
see how he progressed. For now, though, it's an overly difficult read
that demands -- but doesn't yet earn -- the great effort needed to maneuver
through its cursed academia ("Perflated radii abrogating ruin/ Pellucid
collonades/A wilting song").
-- Theodore Defosse
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