It was a mention on Drew Gardner’s blog, Overlap, that called my attention to the fact that Roof Books has put up a few selections from its awesome catalog onto the Electronic Poetry Center website: four complete books of poetry, plus – in two parts – Joel Kuszai’s massive Poetics@ volume, documenting the history of the Poetics listserv. Included among the collections of poetry are the following:

 

·         Kildare, by Stacy Doris

·         Gorgeous Plunge, by Michael Gottlieb

·         Protective Immediacy, by Rod Smith

·         The Future of Memory, by Bob Perelman

 

This is as good as it gets & if you don’t own any of the above, you should hie thyself hither to download them at once. I own them already & I still downloaded the entire set – there is no telling when I might want to quote from them – like right now – or read them further in that different way (those different ways) a screen makes possible.

 

One thing this reminded me of was that it was Protective Immediacy that persuaded me of Rod Smith’s greatness as a poet. I’ve known Rod for some time & had of course read his work in little magazines. Since I’ve moved to Philadelphia, email orders to Bridge Street Books, where Rod works, have become a primary means for me to get access to books of poetry & criticism that I find essential. But I don’t think I fully “got it” that Rod was already much more than a local poet who was a dedicated community worker, a meticulous & responsible editor, & all-around good guy. Partly this is due, I think, to the “aw shucks” presentation of self that Rod diligently promotes & partly it’s due to the fact that he is a quiet person operating in one branch of poetry where not a lot of the guys (I include myself) are quiet.

 

At first glance – & even later – the poems here are abstract lyrics, somewhere in that nebulous terrain between some of the poetry of Bruce Andrews & John Godfrey’s new Private Lemonade. Like Andrews – & also such poets as Louis Cabri & Jeff Derksen – Smith is hyper-attuned to the social nuances of language. What seem at first to be clusters of random words almost subliminally transform themselves into a constant track of political commentary with a sense of humor that is both dry & dour: But what really distinguishes Smith is the degree to which the poems here are driven not by the mind or eye, but by the ear. Smith struck me, when I first read this book, as the direct descendant not of Zukofsky or Oppen or Coolidge, but of Robert Duncan & W.B. Yeats. Take the following page, the first of “Write Like Soap”:

 

We're tired.

Fire the create crate soled.

The life to get top

ought to leak decease;

 

There's no trap, only subtle cushion
gathers sanction.
sanctions trust,
turns up

The date

(or torque) of that which there
on our said to it, would accumulate.

 
ditch the grand
task adjusts us
juggling a tune who's
nude flourish
masks a fluted
noose.

Not every reader will hear odalisque in that fourth line of what I take to be the double-spaced first stanza, but any one who does will, I think, be hearing the poem properly. That reader would already have noticed the foregrounding of the t, p & r sounds in the first three lines* – even above the flourish of the hard c in line two – & thus be prepared for the role of trap, trust & turns up in the next stanza. I remember that I was standing up when I first read this passage, because it made me dizzy & I had to sit down, I responded so viscerally to it. And still do, now, some years later.

 

Like John Godfrey, whose use of syntax within abstraction I’ve noted of late, the tonal elements of the second stanza here function transitionally as syntax becomes more important in the second & third stanzas – I read everything from The date thru accumulate as stanza three, neither single nor double-spaced. Beyond that end rhyme, the sonic engine of this third stanza is less the reiterative occurrence of foregrounded phonemes than it is the rhythm that paradiddles through that last ten-syllable line.

 

This in turn sets up the last stanza, which uses phoneme threads to weave an astonishing number of elements together in just six short lines:

 

·         The a in grand, task, masks

·         The ju in adjusts & juggling

·         The oo in tune, who’s, nude, fluted & noose

·         The n at the head of both nude & noose (accentuated as the first sound in both lines)

·         The fl in both flourish & fluted

 

The fact that remainder of the word after the fl in flourish is radically unlike what goes on elsewhere in these six lines thrusts flourish forward in our attention, setting up its linebreak as the most pronounced in the stanza, so that the two final lines tumble out as tho a single elaborate gesture.

 

This is just the first of sixteen such pages in this poem. “Write Like Soap” is one of those works that any writer would be happy to have as their “anthology piece” – a poem like this can make a career. But it’s just one of many great works in this book. The volume itself may be out of print – that might explain its appearance at the Electronic Poetry Center – but we’re fortunate in extremis to have it so freely available.

 

 

 

* All three instances of long i on the page occur in this one stanza, twice joined with r, then once with f.