7 is a beautiful, but extremely modest, chapbook that was prepared, perhaps even written, to be distributed to the audience at a poetry reading in our nation’s fair capitol earlier this winter. The binding – literally a rubber band – suggests that this is not a project intended to last a thousand years. The title itself appears mysterious until you realize that the linked poem within consists of 21 sections, seven for each collaborator.

 

The seven by three form shows as well in the construction of each page, without which the work would have that pure linked verse quality, say, of  “Tambourine Life.” Each is constructed around three stanzas, the first two of which are only one or two lines long, the last of which consists of seven one-word stanzas. The first two sections – with one notable exception – likewise each contain seven words. In all sections save the first, at least one word appears which has been used previously. In a book that is only 146 words long, beginning to end, that reiteration gets felt. This stanza, for example, contains 113 words, only 33 fewer than 7.

 

The work is spare, but it’s not apt to be mistaken for neo-Objectivism. The opening section reads

 

My parachute
and artificial limbs are oil.

 

What I hear in this first & most of all is the work of the ear, the t & sh sounds in both parachute & artificial setting up a balance that is then pulled, almost taffy like, through limbs & then torqued in the complex vowel-work of oil. As a work, in & of itself, it’s simple & silly. And yet, also, it’s not. Like so many works of miniaturism (think of Grenier or early Saroyan or Coolidge), it’s also a project of magnification – everything in this couplet is preparing you to hear the twist in oil.

 

Reading a project like 7 raises dozens of issues. Does one read it as a single work? As a collection? Who wrote which piece? Is it possible that each page arranges the trio of authors in the same configuration? If so, then I propose the theory that CA Conrad, who has been an advocate for the poetry of the late Frank Samperi, is the likely hand behind the seven line works – yet I flipflop in my opinions of the first two pieces on each page. That looks just like Frank (whom I know). Or maybe it doesn’t. The book is a great tease.

 

The idea that it’s a book at all is part of the tease. Using a rubber band as a binding is kin in spirit (if more cheerful) to something like the Situationist scrapbook, An endless adventure . . . an endless passion . . . an endless banquet, which has a sandpaper cover. Where the Situationist book – a One Shot if ever there was one – can’t be put into your bookcase – it will attack the other books, literally scraping their covers off, 7 promises to dissolve or at least come unbound before your eyes.

 

My understanding is that it was created to be given away at a reading, the audience literally gathering & then dispersing. Those folks are the only people besides the authors who may be able to tell you if there is a consistent pattern of authorship in this linked sequence or if – tho I hesitate to imagine such – they maybe even cowrote these seven word sections, obliterating the nets of being.

 

So the idea of the One Shot here really provides an analogy to the work itself. Indeed, no publisher is listed, nor any address. The work amounts to a temporary convergence – there is a lot to like in these 21 little poems, not to mention the great mystery of the one six-worder –

 

battery of gasps between sleepers’ shores

 

beyond, that is, the clutter of hard consonants given way to the liquid tones at line’s end, but like three strangers at a corner, waiting for the light to change, suddenly aware & mutually bemused at the idea that their waiting together constitutes an instantaneous if evanescent dance, 7 was made to be read, understood, even maybe “grokked” in the 60’s sense of Heinlein’s great verb. But it consciously & deliberately wasn’t made to last.