On the flight between Chicago & San Francisco, I pulled a book by Jesse Seldess out of my laptop bag – O’Hare airport must literally have been the prod – and read it straight through while the rest of the plane sat entranced by Bernie Mac in Mr. 3000. I wanted to read it aloud but had to settle for that interior reading one does in public spaces. I also wished that I had had some work by John Giorno with me, something from his reiterative phase, because a strict comparison of the two would be instructive.

 

In Contact is a gorgeously printed chapbook from David Pavelich’s Answer Tag press up in Madison. The edition is just fifty copies & you’ll have to ask Pavelich whether or not any still remain to be had. The single poem it contains is extremely aural precisely because, like Giorno, it makes great conscious use of repetition. Yet where Giorno’s work always struck me as be vaguely assaultive in its stance toward the audience, attempting to unlock some psychic barriers, Seldess’ work turns on minute variations of syntax & meaning. Here, for instance:

 

To be close

Or face

 

 

For here instance

 

To be close

For here face

 

 

To stretch over

Or close

Or face

 

 

To be close

Or sketched over

Or face

 

 

To be close

Or sketched

Or face

 

To be sketch over

Or close

Or face

 

 

 

To be sketched

Over face

 

 

In contact

To be close

Or face

 

 

To be close

 

In contact

Sketched over

Or face

 

This isn’t reiteration for the sake of reiteration, only, but rather seems to sketch out a space (forgive me that verb) halfway between Giorno & Zukofsky, an axis I don’t think anyone has ever before suggested. And whereas Giorno’s poems would have been pretty straightforward monologs if you removed the repetition, Seldess’ poem continually angles off in different directions, some using far less reiteration than the section quoted above (which appears early on in the poem, primarily I think to set up the central theme around which the variations all occur). The result is a beautiful, extraordinarily gentle poem – one would never call Giorno’s work gentle – and I smiled at the end of the 22-page book to read the author’s note:

 

In Contact grew from my interaction with members of the Council for Jewish Elderly’s Adult Day Service and is dedicated to these individuals, the workers and families serving them, and all people suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia resulting from other conditions.

 

That comment reminded me, I must say, of just how much of my own sense of time in the poem – expressed most clearly as “the new sentence” - derived from my work with prisoners and their families in the 1970s. Out of just real-world interactions are our perceptions woven.

 

In Contact is a wonderful work, rare in that it is at once both simple and complex. That is a combination that is rare in the world, but is one of the possibilities that poetry is particularly well suited to expose.

 

I suppose that I should also note that I’ve used the words reiteration & repetition here rather than rhyme, in good part because a book like In Contact reveals precisely how blunt an instrument something like vulgar rhyme actually is. This book expands the potential of recurrent sound in a dozen different directions.