I’m totally jealous. Kevin Davies wrote “Lateral Argument” and I didn’t.
“Lateral Argument” is an as
yet unpublished poem that is circulating via PDF file, 20 pages of shiveringly brilliant writing. My first thought as I read
through this poem, composed over last summer, was: well, what if John Ashbery’s Flow
Chart – my favorite work of his – did have a beginning, middle & end –
is this what it would look like? Then I thought: well,
what if Flow Chart had a social
imagination, a politics? Or at least one that was coherent?
These thoughts reminded me
of a comment Davies himself made in a footnote, one of four, to a letter this
blog ran on November
1. In the body of the letter, Davies argued that, contra Louis Cabri – a poet with whose writing Davies shares more than
a passing affinity – “The first two generations of the New York School
In my own case, Berrigan was crucial to my education. The
first thing of his I read, in the year after high school (while working
desultorily at the local mill), was "Tambourine Life," in an
anthology at the local community-college library. This event was, I think,
similar to what Ron
describes when he first encountered The
Desert Music: the sense that
there was a writing practice that could account for the vagaries and
particulars of the life I was living, one that was not tied to the prosody of
either the Romantics I adored or the academics I abhorred.
In “Lateral Argument,”
Davies puts up, giving substance to the vision sketched out above:
Not all the fruit trees hate you –
just
this one.
Freud once attempted to purchase Mexico
Mathew Arnold hated ducks, just hated
’em.
Martin Frobisher
cooked and ate an entire cabin boy.
Jack Spicer invented the clap-on clap-off
lamp.
Fatty Arbuckle faked his own death and ended
up running a go-cart track in Alabama
Goya lost his nose
in
a practical joke gone very, very wrong.
Backing slowly away from the bear, not
looking
in
its eyes. Pretending to be asleep.
Ignoring the tornado.
Refusing to acknowledge
the
legitimacy of the mudslide.
Not flinching – holding steady – when the
toaster
falls
into the bath. Glancing back, turning to salt, and not
caring.
Driving blindfolded on acid in the 70s.
Arguing for a lower
grade. Pulling the thigh
hairs
of the opposing power forward.
The title of “Lateral
Argument,” it seems to me, is very literal (lateral). The poem is very much
built around the stanza as its primary unit, often changing shape as the text
moves from one to the next. At the same time, the stanzas themselves are
destabilized by a process of “carry over,” the last line/thought of the
previous one bleeding into the stanza following. The device starts at the
beginning, with an ambiguous refusal to demarcate between epigraph and the body
of the poem itself:
“Persons exist
as
practical ways of speaking about
bundles.”
– Paul Williams.
They awoke in a bookless world studded with
lean-
to
performance artists interacting with electricity.
This must be the place.
Evicted from elsewhere, here at last
not
rest but an apprenticeship in container
technology.
A kind of music that, though apparently stopping,
starting,
stopping, more specifically never ends, thus
displaying
as virtue its greatest flaw. Successfully,
irritatingly.
Who here has access to liquor?
Several of these carry-over lines
break in ways that seem unpredictable & del
If there is a standard or
baseline stanzaic form here, it’s one that doesn’t really show up until the
fourth page & doesn’t fully take over until the 14th,
where (as in the last part of the first quote above) almost every second line
is ind
Davies has been an active
participant in the New
York
