Three of the four remaining Slack Buddha / La Perruque chapbooks have in common forms that might be characterized as quirky. Stephen T. Vessels’ ZIP Code Poems comes in its own envelope – dense reader that I am, it took me several days to get the formal joke in that – but, more significantly, each of its poems is composed according to the zip code of the poem’s “recipient” – Vessels apparently sent these by mail – one syllable for each number in the zip. A note on the colophon indicates that “zero is open,” which turns out to be important. Here is one poem “Mailed to L.,” who lives in Somerville, Masachussets, Slack Buddha’s own home zipcode:

 

in dark’s transparent

puzzling

weave

the 4%

that we perceive

 

More of the poems, tho, “go” to Santa Barbara & environs, especially to zipcode 93109. Twelve of the booklet’s 16 poems thus have the same syllablic count save for the fourth line, which Vessels generally crowds with syllables: one has 11, two have ten, two nine, four have eight, two have seven, and just one has four syllables. Still, without this variation, this book would be nearly as static in form as a collection of tanka, another five-line fixed-syllable approach to the poem.

 

What makes Vessels’ poems work is not his adherence to an exoskeletal method so much as his ability to demonstrate a discursive range within this format. The fourth line of this poem to 93105, another part of Santa Barbara, is as witty as it is literal:

 

three red-crested woodpeckers on a

telephone

pole

no message

just making a home

 

Vessels is somebody who is completely new to me. Indeed the only reference to him I could find on the net was to works apparently displayed as part of a show by the French visual artist François Bossière in Paris (to whom, in fact, ZIP Code Poems is dedicated). Vessels’ book made me feel oddly nostalgic, since in 1967 & ’68 I worked as a dispatch clerk for the U.S. Post Office in San Francisco, at an annex that largely received incoming third class mail delivered in ships, where my responsibilities included sorting the “route rack” for California – this meant that I had to memorize the first three digits of every town in the state* and send the mail addressed to obscure locales such as Happy Camp, Duarte, Tamal & Repressa to their appropriate section center bag. The first poem in Vessel’s book, mailed to 93117, immediately reminded me that Goleta – college town suburb of Santa Barbara – was one of my regular destinations. This poem is a direct comment on the book itself as well as the future of snail mail:

 

if delivery by hand becomes

obsolete

may

this

form become a testament.

 

 

 

* Of considerable value in the Post Office because I was the only person in my facility who proved able to do memorize this, which meant that I was largely left alone by the Post Office’s ponderous bureaucracy & that, even tho newbies like myself were supposed to have “split” weekends for several years, nobody was willing to challenge my calling in sick regularly on Wednesdays, since my days off were Tuesday & Thursday. Happy Camp is a minimum security prison facility housing state prisoners employed as fire fighters in California parks. Tamal & Repressa are euphemisms for state prisons (under the assumption that families will be more apt to write to a town than to a prison), San Quentin & Folsom respectively.