How does one gauge influence?

 

Two of the books I carried around with me during my Virginia roundabout this past week were Kevin Davies' Lateral Argument (Barretta Books, 2003) & Jim Behrle's City Point (Pressed Wafer, 2000). Both books are great fun to read, with much going on, but in each instance part of what goes on is a relationship to an earlier mode of writing. In Behrle's case — and I hadn't expected this, knowing him principally through his blog — projectivism, or at least a side of the New American Poetics that one could trace to Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Phil Whalen &, more recently, to the likes of Bill Corbett. In Davies' case, the connection is to language poetry.

 

Both of these poetries are close to my heart, tho one obviously is so close as to make me itch:

 

Not not this. What,

 

this then?

 

That's Davies writing. Just typing it makes me twitch.

 

Lyn Hejinian has argued that language poetry is or was first of all a relationship to knowledge & that an almost symphonic heterogeneity of detail is a characteristic feature that results from this — yet projectivism, especially as practiced first by Olson & then by Blackburn had a very similar epistemological reach, a desire to be able to include anything & everything next.

 

Here is Behrle's "Power Outage":

 

a fat candle beneath a leggy one.

words through my fist's shadow, huge on the page

 

only our street,

windows around the corner electric.

kids playful on the dark hill.

 

Boston Edison's "aware of the problem"

and has "dispatched a team."

that's a relief.

 

book abandoned,

a room full of candles.

 

writing a poem for the new Meanie

out Sunday at Waterstone's.

will it be ready?

 

truck headed up the hill

against the one-way, headlights

push the dark.

 

we need more words for "the dark."

minute before

the lights return

seeing how lonely a candle

over the dead phone looks.

wick still, its shine rings the wall.

 

Reading this, I find myself intrigued at Behrle's choices, for example to mention not just the name of the publication in which the outage either will or won't impact his ability to complete the work, but the date & location of its publication, yet not to name the abandoned book. It's not simply that Behrle's the coeditor of Meanie, but rather that only at the point of anxiety do Behrle's terms come into a sort of terminological hyperfocus. Elsewise, with the lone exception of the electric company, nouns function here as types: truck headed up the hill.

 

It's against this correlation of anxiety with naming that Behrle makes his demand for "more words for 'the dark'" It's an extraordinary act of metaphor, particularly coming with all the surface features of a poetics that has been said to eschew metaphor.

 

I can't make the same kind of reading, I realize, with Lateral Argument – even tho I think Davies work here offers both greater range & more depth than does Behrle – simply because I feel so close to what Davies is trying that I don't trust my own judgment. At 27 pages, with ear & wit turned up to the max, Davies' poem feels like a major work of art. But in some ways (many ways) I would trust that conclusion so much more if I couldn't find my own reflection here. That, in turn, makes me feel that I'm being unfair to him, and very possibly I am.

 

Davies uses line length & positioning to give a sense of poem as field that is itself fairly close to the projectivists (tho more so to Duncan than to Olson or Blackburn), which renders it almost  impossible to quote here on the blog. Further, Davies does something else that I've seen a few times of late of often ending a sentence in the first line of a new stanza, so that it becomes impossible not only to see the stanza as anything like the contained "room" of words implied by that term's origin, but impossible also to quote the stanza out of context. It's a mode of writing that resists any sense of rest until the poem's very end, which means that almost any excerpt would have to be "incomplete," if not actually "bad."

 

This makes it easier for me to explain why I think Jim Behrle's poem is a good one, but it's Davies' Lateral Argument that will gnaw at me far longer.