It’s rare for a poet to radically change the primary drive of their verse as they age. If anything, the very opposite is more apt to occur, for the poet to progressively stand more revealed, for the approach to the poem to move closer & closer to those first instincts toward writing that drove them to the poem, that ever so uneconomic pursuit, whether at age ten, 17 or perhaps 35.

I’ve always thought that this was because the largest impediment to writing was not lack of training or of skill, but rather the degree of cultural baggage that we – I’m including myself here as much as anyone – bring to the poem, the instant we go from thinking about writing, a condition of absolute desire, to the actual attempt to make literature, to get words onto paper. There is an enormous gap between that first state & the second, one that we all perpetually fill with all manner of extraneous crap, everything that we imagine that Literature (capital L) is supposed to be. When we’re just starting out – & I’m definitely speaking for myself here – it’s almost impossible to find the poem through the Literature.

Thus a good writing program would not only be one that introduced the fledgling poet to all the possible strains that are being explored (& have been, historically) in the poem, but one also that will help the poet to strip away whatever might prove inessential. So much of growing up as a poet has to do with unlearning as much (if not more) than it does learning.

I was ruminating over this while reading Alan Davies’ admirable new chapbook, Book 2, published conjointly by Other Publications (Alan’s own label) with Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. The Alan Davies I first knew through correspondence back in the early 1970s was an ardent & exceptionally well-educated surrealist out of Boston. The impulse to the surreal is still completely visible now thirty years later.

Book 2 is a single 26-page poem – I don’t know if there is a Book 1 somewhere.* Stanzas alternate their orientation toward the margin & linebreaks:

And then the weepings

start to wail

all over the pale green bodices

of hills

A little bit of cadenced

buttery softness

envelops this compact hardness

and lets us feel that we have

a somewhat

less hard heart

Somewhere some hunger still lunges

The warm swallowed sallow sadness

that time micturates

almost euphemistically

settle like a nettle

in a warm breeze

Often throughout this work, as in this passage, multiple things are going on at once. At one level, it is a surrealist text, although surrealism of a late & particularly North American kind, one that is as aware of Barrett Watten, Jerry Estrin & Dan Davidson as it is of Octavio Paz or Andre Bréton. At a second level, however, the poem builds on surrealism’s proclivity toward using nouns as absolutes rather than as referential signs to offer a curiously sentimental satire, sort of Bréton as read through Jeff Koons. Davies’ ear is also active – that last stanza above moves radically toward a different prosodic resolution with every single line.

I’m intrigued, to say the least, at the idea of someone who can use a literary tendency lovingly, as Davies does here, while in the same moment ratcheting up its characteristic features into a text that is more than just a little over-the-top. In part, he does this by understanding the separateness of eye & ear in the poem & using them – simultaneously – to different ends. It’s not a question here of the bicameral mind so much as it is of the ability of a reader to multitask within the performance of the reading itself. It’s not an uncommon human experience – anyone who has eaten while driving or surfed the web while talking on the phone will have exercised similarly divergent skills – what’s remarkable is that Davies manages to set this up within the poem itself.

Davies has earned his reputation as an artist who is unafraid to try the outrageous, but a work like Book 2 demonstrates that he does so with a purpose. Underneath the dream syntax of surrealism has always lurked an idealized landscape, a certain tragic heroism visible, say, in the moonscapes of a Dali or Tanguy, and which comes across in poetry as an unspecified urgency. Davies pushes his imagery to the point of parody & uses sound to undercut any residual earnestness.

Davies goes further, letting the reader in on the process:

Waiting for the words

appended

willing and waiting

Or should they then

up ended be

Or be up ended

Squalling birds

unseen but heard

so seen

I try to imagine how Davies could have written this – it’s mysterious almost in the same way that Christian Bök’s ability to create parallel poems using the same letters in the same order, but with different words, is mysterious. It’s not just that every stanza, sometimes every line, undercuts the ones above, but that they often perform this process on themselves. Thus this “little gerbil fettered thing” is completely serious, for all of its flamboyant nonsense.

Davies has moved so far inside his original surrealist impulses as to have arrived at some new place altogether. An interesting point of contrast might be someone like Ashbery, whose surrealism is far softer, almost decorative, & whose wit is more consciously (& cautiously) subtle – in a place where subtlety is not necessarily a value. If Ashbery’s texts are perfect little luxury machines of language, Davies is mounting a far more serious argument with a far sillier façade. If you rip the language apart, what lies underneath?

*Book Two also happens to be the title of a work by Thomas Meyer that was excerpted in House Organ & discussed here previously. I now know that Meyer’s piece is part of a larger booklength poem, called Coromandel.