Growing up on the edge of Berkeley in a house with very few books – and most of them Readers Digest condensed novels – I was what in college town parlance is known as a “townie.” But because Berkeley was part of a thriving metropolitan region, I don’t think it ever quite had the same sense of that phenomenon that one gets in true college towns – small cities in which the school is the only real rationale for urbanization, such as Davis, California, or State College, Pennsylvania. Still, I had a great uncle – his most visible public function was as a member of the utility crew that put up the Christmas decorations on Berkeley’s commercial streets each year – who couldn’t even mention the university without breaking into profanities. Another cousin was a realtor in neighboring Albany who made a modest political career – he became the mayor & was a founding member of the Berkeley board of realtors – out of making neighboring Albany the anti-Berkeley of the region in the 1950s & ‘60s. Economically, my cousin was a member of an elite cohort, while my great uncle – who would have stood out as a loser at a Klan rally – was not. In both instances, they felt threatened by the presence of an educated, multicultural & functionally transnational class in their midst.

 

If there is a divide between town & gown, there’s a second, smaller – but still very real & palpable – gap between any school’s graduate students & the undergrads. It’s not merely that the former are paid slave wages to teach the latter, a circumstance that both groups resent, but that grad students have made a conscious choice & considerable effort to be in this school & this department at this point in its institutional history, while the majority of any undergraduate class at anything less than one of the top schools happens to be there through a combination of chance & inertia.

 

Every once in awhile, an undergraduate, occasionally even a townie, enrolled in a school with a poetics or writing program turns out to be in exactly the right place. David Gitin has spoken of his good fortune at finding Charles Olson among his teachers at SUNY Buffalo, back before it was even a SUNY campus I think. More recently, another Buffalo townie, Lisa Jarnot went through the undergraduate program there. Indeed, I believe that Jarnot grew up in a household with even fewer books than mine. Almost exactly one year ago, I praised her work here extravagantly –

 

Jarnot may have the best ear of any poet under 40 – Lee Ann Brown is really the only other poet who comes close

 

 – but reading Black Dog Songs, Jarnot’s newest collection from Flood Editions, I think the reality is that I was underestimating her poetry. A century from now, I suspect readers may think of SUNY Buffalo as “that place Lisa Jarnot went to study.” She has a straight shot at being one of the half dozen best poets of the 21^st century. She’s so damn good it’s spooky.

 

Part of what makes Jarnot not just a fine poet but a great one is, in fact, her ear –

 

Idle land in Israel
and snails are in a sea,

a real deal in a diner sails
as salads in a sea,

asides aside, aside asides
in salads in a sea,

aside in rinds in lines in lines
as diners in a sea,

a din in dine is in a deal,
ideal as red a sea,

as in in dins asides aside,
and and and land and sea.

 

It’s the first line of that third stanza that really clinches this poem for me – it takes enormous courage to write that simply, precisely because to do so risks being misunderstood as simple in ways that are socially coded. That’s the kind of courage in writing I associate with Kathy Acker’s self-published early novels or with Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

 

As “Land and Sea” also demonstrates, part of what makes Jarnot a great poet is this fearlessness as a writer that I don’t think can be taught – it’s an open question as to whether or not it can be learned willfully. Part of it is also Jarnot’s ability to look at writing in the broadest possible terms. I thought at first to write “outside of history,” but that’s not it exactly. Rather, I think that Jarnot shows a willingness to take the whole of history on in even the simplest lyric. My guess is that this is what she has taken from her lengthy & in-depth study of Robert Duncan, whose biography she has written (the University of California Press will publish it in 2005).

 

The Flood Editions press release announcing the book calls it “Decidedly lyrical,” which is partly right. But it’s a dark lyricism, one that has more in common with Blake or Helen Adam than any of the usual suspects. The title poem, like many in this book, hovers between nursery rhyme – maybe in Jack Spicer’s daycare center, tho – and a pomo gothic gloom as “road kill” becomes an active agent & not only chickens, but cats end up on the griddle.

 

An exception to this dark side right in the middle of this book is a series of mostly prose poems entitled ”They,” which uses the verb love more sharply than it’s been employed since, say, the very earliest lyrics of Robert Creeley. Here is “They Loved Paperclips”:

 

They loved harmony they loved ant hills they loved food and cookies and harpoons they loved the sound of laces of the shoes and snow they loved the snow on Thursdays in the rain and when they met they loved that too and igloos and the trees and things to mail and chlorine and they loved the towels for the beach and hot dogs and the pool and also when the wind rose up they loved the ceiling and the tide and then they loved the sky.

 

The first of this series is entitled “On the Sublime.” Indeed.

 

Jarnot hasn’t been a prolific writer, or at least not a prolific publisher of her writings. In addition to the Duncan biography, it appears that there is a novel forthcoming entitled Promise X. Hopefully, 30 years from now – when Jarnot will be ten years or so older than I am now – we won’t think of her as only someone who also writes poetry. For she has the set the bar as high as any writer I know today. And one of the great joys of this often troubling new century is going to be in seeing just how Jarnot follows through.