BKS, the large block letters that adorn – indeed, that are – the front cover to a chapbook whose actual title, if you but look inside to the appropriate page, is really Jai-Lai for Autocrats, is in fact a brand as recognizable in post-avant poetics as IBM is in computing. Brian Kim Stefans, whose initials these are, is one of the most tireless & inventive culture workers of our time. As readers of Free Space Comix – the weblog – & this space will recall, Brian & I have not always agreed on matters of literary politics*, but this doesn’t detract from my joy at his work as a poet.

 

Jai-Lai, which was also the name of a class Stefans gave (& may still be giving)**, consists of two short series of poems. The first, “The Skids,” consists of eleven free verse poems, none more than a page long, each of which takes its first line as a title. The second, “No Special Order,” is a series of four unrhymed (and untitled) sonnets. The look & feel of the book’s two halves could not be more different. In one sense, this is a project that calls to mind Hank Lazer’s Doublespace, a similar attempt to bridge the two main tributaries of American poetry, a work that I will never forget Susan Howe blurbed rightly as “important and eccentric.” I read Jai-Lai, the game, as a direct allusion to the cognitive dissonance generated by Stephen’s chapbook’s two halves.

 

But, but, but… I want to sputter, the fix is in. & this is true for both Stefans & Lazer, actually. One can virtually – and accurately – weight Stefans’ comfort with these modes by their page count, 11 to 4, & he is indeed at least twice as comfy & into it in “The Skids,” an often brilliant sequence of pieces that process disparate bits in rapid succession, as he is in “No Special Order,” where he seems to slow into a more restrained (quietudinous?) pace that feels as tho it’s forced rather than felt.

 

There’s an irony here, in that the more manic episodes of “The Skids” can in fact accommodate more of the positive elements of the SoQ than do the sonnets. Viz

 

blue citizens conform
to green animal wishes
above yellow flutes
roll the red, anonymous pastures
of the chartreuse-tinted sky
we drink black fire
from it, lavender smoke
emanating from the pink tails
of the violet
cyclone fish, their beige eyes
inspired by visions of paisley intestines
filled with puffy, lithe cucumbers

in argentina, where they smoke
apple juice by the bushel
in porcelain cars
imported through a straw urethra
from the dominant superpower (vietnam)
listening to haitian speeches
by danish war criminals
on the combo air conditioner/radio
made of refurbished, petrified elephant dung
laughing in hoarse tones
at the slips of cartesian grammar
that erupt from the photogenic, sad doctoral student

a geographer of gertrude stein
awash in maps of orcs
piecing together middle english vocables
from neck-operated chimps
lumped in grant’s tomb
they had been baked while he was suffering
just prior to being born
in a rush of lascivious paranoia
_— other commentators on stein think that this wasn’t important
neither lust nor sleep frenzy impacted
the role furry, breast-eating edibles played
on the writing of “in youth is pleasure,” or of “hotel lautreamont”

Each strophe here appears to respond to a system as thoroughly as any villanelle. Colors organize the first, while a principle of inappropriate conjunction sets up all of the synapses in the second. But it’s the third, which both continues the process while, at the same time, commenting upon it, that demonstrates the degree to which this poem is rich with pattern. How much of a system is this? Every single poem in “The Skids” is composed of three twelve-line stanzas.

 

Metacommentary dominates “No Special Order” as well, but now the tone is entirely different. Here is the first sonnet:

 

And so the old new order and the new old order
have called my bluff: I don’t have moods
clinging to the cot – for pretty much the entire match
squirting eighty percent of the style.

 

there were fractions of a name, bar/cafe doggerel
with signals influenced by historical speech, but
statistically unkempt, a spastic honesty
in twelves. Didn’t think about it a lot, just wrote

becoming the tradition, massive in someone’s
delinquence, leashed to the inquisitive
and howling. Like you, I liked, tried to make it
a book – capsized by life, but only for the century.

 

          Feet were hung, and for an instant

my passions sprang from a gaudy intent.

 

This isn’t bad work by any means, but it has an almost valium-like air to it, as if Stefans is having to work to quiet it down, minimizing all the local color (literally!). The four sonnets can (& probably should) be read as a single argument. “I don’t have moods, though am particularly alive / in my distractions,” Stefans writes in the final sonnet, ironic for having bled any distraction – exactly what makes “The Skids” so wonderful – from the text.

 

Jai-Lai is an enormously ambitious undertaking, especially when one considers how modestly it presents itself. Stefans is capable of taking on the most difficult – and most important – literary challenges before us. Note that, unlike Lazer, Stefans doesn’t present the reader with a sequential narrative of form in which the post-avant triumphs over one’s initial conformist instincts – Stefans doesn’t want either side to win & wants to confront directly the problem that a “third way” doesn’t really exist, save perhaps in Stephen Burt’s imagined ellipticism***. That Stefans is up to taking on this challenge, even if he comes nowhere near untangling the Gordian knot, is why you have to take him for the major American poet he’s become.

 

 

 

 

* Brian’s rejection of the major divisions within literary history may seem admirable, but the “let’s everybody be great to everybody” approach strikes me as self-destructive  in face of the considerable institutional power of the School o’ Quietude (SoQ), which is virtually uniform in its desire to see BKS (and others, many many others) disappear. The clearest way to assess different strategies for relating to the 160-year-old School of Quietude, I think, is by analogy to the Civil Rights Movement, which similarly had to contend with an entrenched elite intent on controlling resources & legitimation that simply preferred to pretend that problems did not exist or, if they did, were simply the complaints of malcontents. Instead of Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, Billy Collins, Poetry, John Hollander, The New Criterion, FSG & Ed Hirsch, think Orville Faubus, Lester Maddox, Strom Thurmond & Bull Conner. When viewed thus, I think everybody’s positions & problematics become quite obvious.

 

** Just as Free Space Comix was the name of both a book & a blog – Stefans recycles everything.

 

*** Every time I mention ellipticism, someone sends me a note telling that no such literary movement exists. As a movement, I would agree – and would go further to suggest that this is the side of it that reflects its SoQ heritage – yet its importance as an intellectual concept (even more than as a readily identifiable literary style) lies in its desire to stake out just such a Third Way.