One of the advantages of bird watching as an activity is that the process organizes one’s experience of any given hike, yet does so in such a fashion that two walks literally down the same path will be appreciably different. The supposedly stable elements of the walk – foliage, ponds, trails – now are seen primarily as a background context for a more variable &, to a birder, exciting element. Outlining, David Pavelich’s new chapbook from Cuneiform Press, has some similarities to a bird walk in that these short texts – seven in all, with none over seven lines long – have in fact been stripped down literally to the level suggested by the title, such as:

 

in exchange of profile

unshared span, shading

action

 

 

          in settling down

 

Or the following, which may very well be, at some level, “about birds”:

 

of crest and down

of step, of flight, of pattern

in nest differentiate

 

point – but no specific

series – but no specific

field

 

In much the way that Jackson Pollock’s painting might be viewed as being “about brush strokes” or the way Ellsworth Kelly’s are about shape, Pavelich’s poems articulate the process of the poem while giving away only a minimum of its “context,” as Roman Jakobson characterized the realm referenced by any given statement. In this sense, they are direct descendants of the poems by Zukofsky or Creeley that literally count out the positions within the text:

 

Here here

here. Here.

 

Or, also from Pieces,

 

Again

and again

now

also.

 

Pavelich’s pieces aren’t as strict in their sense of redaction, but rather – as in the first piece – want the reader to hear & feel the pace of the language, the space of that extra wide line break between the unfinished tercet & that final partial line. The shift in the second piece – I read it as first stanza birding, second stanza poem – makes not only a specific point, but does so with a humor that is interested in testing its own gentleness. I wonder, in today’s poetry, just how many readers will be able to hear that, but I do and am very glad to have found it.

 

Cuneiform Press does gorgeous work, but in very limited runs. This book is so beautiful that it borders on the obscene. Though I would not have complained at a heavier weight paper stock. There are just 100 copies. Pavelich I believe – I don’t know the man – is somewhere in Wisconsin these days, a part of the country where poets have been known to go for decades before anybody takes much notice. I hope we don’t have to wait nearly so long to see more of this careful, thoughtful, wise writing.

 

 

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No blog mañana. I will be traveling on business.