When I was reading Truong Tran’s Within the Margin last week, a curious echo – I’m not sure that’s the right word, really – sounded of another book I’m still in the process of consuming, Eli Drabman’s The Ground Running, the latest offering from Michael Cross’ Atticus / Finch Press. Drabman’s book poses some of the same questions as Tran’s, tho in a radically different way. Here is just one example.

 

[The music gets faster as]

mechanical horses crash

on through the sphere I

have been saving for my

second childhood night-

mare (I would then own

not the air, but the texts

in which air is described

as not sharp or pointed,

not smelling of Cornelia

unless having passed as

wind through the mouth

or hair of Cornelia, given

as she is to frequent fits

of vigorous outdoor exer-

cise) when I might wake

to find myself pinned by

the sharpness all around

the many angles closing

down around my elbows

and neck, and prey for a

steed with silver-flashing

blinders, with gears hung

to protect one innocence.

My first thought, typing this today, is that there is a fine line between precision & just being persnickety &, reading Drabman, I can’t tell which one of us is wavering on that razor-thin border. At one level, the words here have a bang together quality – listen to that great second line – that suggests an almost projectivist’s sensibility of the poem driven by sound & rhythm. On another, the lines seem so thoroughly predicated on being roughly 25-characters wide that it harkens back to the kind of shaped verse experiments one associates, say, with John Hollander, the utter antithesis of that first level. It’s all one sentence, turning no less on a verb prey that conceivably could be a typo. Finally there’s a level of condensation – consider the absent ‘s in the last line – that gives the writing a sense of pressure, knowing that with pressure comes power. That is, frankly, an awful lot of stuff going on simultaneously without even getting into its perfectly referential – if somewhat mysterious – content.

 

One result of all this is that my experience reading The Ground Running is almost antithetical to Within the Margin: while I virtually danced through Tran’s book in a single sitting – rare for me for a book of any size – the individual poems or pages of Drabman’s completely exhaust me. I read one, then I read it again, then I read in it some more & feel quite thoroughly exercised to have done so. I should note that I am trained (over thousands of books of poetry these past 40 years or so) to trust the second experience more. I often think of poetry as being reading’s version of weight-lifting: if you can’t feel it, it hasn’t amounted to much. Tran I think challenges that assumption very effectively. Drabman, on the other hand, brings me right back to it again. In some sense, The Ground Running feels more like Olson, dense & with all excess, all air, extracted, than almost any volume of poetry I’ve read in some time.

 

Virtually every page in The Ground Running is like the one quoted above, 24 lines long, a single sentence headed up by a line in brackets, save for a couple of exceptions that make an active use of space. Each poem (again with one exception) is one page long, always using some mode of lines that are roughly equivalent in width, generally in the range quoted above (tho a couple are, shall we say, fatter). If Tran’s approach flattens the reading process until it glides along almost effortlessly, Drabman’s does exactly the opposite: it compacts one’s reading experience. Viz again:

 

[Fists and rifle-butts flying,]

the blur of Will and Repre-

sentation is still the stiffes

t corpse on the block, still

stinking up my morning of

hell-as-banquet, O harmon

y of faux-elegant business,

O, These Men Have Come

Again, The Rugs Are Wet

W/ Their Spittle, Our Cas

tle of Leaves, All Crushed,

but it’s only a methodles

s darkness, a way to pro

ve the smallest hoax, thus

letting a spark glide throu

gh without real abandon,

throwing the harness aside

to get the horsies earnestly

friendly with absolute upp

er & lower limits, verses of

musical therapy cutting the

selves wide and threatening

bubbles in the bathtub as if,

in the living room, no calm.

 

One has the sense (I have a sense) that this shouldn’t work, but it does, powerfully. The core of Drabman’s magic trick is that he sends off mixed signals, densely packed. The eye sees a text spatially constructed, but the ear (mind) hears something very different indeed. An important consideration here is that these poems are, in fact, not justified – the right margin isn’t the slack continuous thread of a prose line, but rather a hard edge even more rigid than a traditionally enjambed line would imply.

 

I wonder just how such texts would go over with different audiences – that analogy I made a few days ago to visual kids vs. oral (or aural) ones. That Drabman knows just what he’s doing here is palpable – he even writes about it! – but the mad-gyroscope effect is so strong that you end up wondering just how does he do it even as he tells you, joking with a word like horsies. These are, as a result, exceptionally emotive texts.

 

Atticus / Finch Chapbooks can be contacted by writing to michaelthomascross@hotmail.com.