Carve has begun to issue chapbooks, beginning with Jess Mynes’ birds for example. I love that title, perhaps because it is so very Eigneresque. It would be a mistake to Mynes’ work itself Eigneresque, tho he has an ear for exactness that harkens back to the best instincts of the Projectivists:

orange
          for Slick


What’s the worth of
orange is what I found

and where I remain. What’s
of consequence therein.

What’s worth dusk
scattered without. In

the many is what’s we’re
looking for. What’s

with the soil under
foot. What’s in order

is elemental. What’s in
a perchance verb is

only a limited performance.
What use is a calm day

to my singing grand
mother. Do declare!

I am the beginning and you
remain. A cake of soil

if you will. What’s about
a she in I. What’s for this

head is desert openness.

Nine of the thirteen sentences here begin with What’s, tho it doesn’t always lead where you might expect, grammatically. More important to my ear, tho, is the use of the period which turns up at the line’s end just four times. Because of the reiteration of What’s, I hear that as a hard period, made even harder by that opening W sound. In the second, third & fourth stanzas, the period shows up near the line’s end, but the last three interlinear periods in this poem, maybe even the last four, all show up closer to the beginning. It’s a small detail, but one that shades the pacing of these lines & gives the poem an aural profile that is distinct & to my ear attractive. If sound isn’t what this poem is “about,” it’s very close to what is – the memory of speech patterns & verbal signatures that we associate with loved ones: Do declare! For a poem that at one level appears to be abstract, it’s remarkably concrete.

Not every poem here is this exact, nor this successful, tho several are quite close. Mynes gets on shakier ground when he opts for a longer line & more casually discursive style (viz. “No Fly Zone”). Mynes’ ear is so finely tuned to point-to-point verbal sculpting that when he backs away from that, he seems less certain how to proceed. Why he would even want to isn’t entirely clear to me – it made me wonder if he doesn’t worry about being influenced, perhaps by Creeley, perhaps by Coolidge. Yet ultimately he’s very different from either.

Younger poets – I have no idea how old Mynes might be, only that he works as a librarian at Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, Massachusetts, & hasn’t published a lot as yet – often want very much to fit in to whatever is cool or edgy, a desire that sometimes takes them away from their own quirkiness. In fact, most successful poets discover that those little quirks ultimately become the terrain for the major engagement of one’s mature work. One can read For Love, for example, as a work trying very hard to “fit in” to a poetic world that was, in fact, largely overturned by Creeley’s fellow New Americans, whereas Words & Pieces really hone in on his love for minute focus. Reading birds for example, my gut tells me that Mynes’ ear is very close to center for his aesthetic. I would trust that, wherever it led me.