One of the very best things
about poetry is micropublishing. My definition of micropublishing is any book
or journal done in such a fashion as to preclude bookstore distribution, even
via Small Press Distribution. Two very
different examples are sitting on my desk. I’m going to look at one today, the
other tomorrow.
Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides are printed on a single of
sheet of paper, which is then folded into a simple pamphlet. Printed on a
schedule of eight issues per year, the Broadsides must just now be completing
their ninth year. With a distribution list that has swollen to 750, Pollet’s series may produce small publications, but they
get excellent distribution for poetry. The current issue, no. 70, is 5 Pastorelles by John Taggart. Since
individual pastorelles are numbered 5 through 9, we know they’re part of a
longer series. This is especially good news, because these are among the
strongest poems Taggart has written. My favorite is number 8, organized around
an image any Pennsylvanian will recognize:
Young woman
Amish
green dress black apron translucent white prayer bonnet
strings of her bonnet trailing in the air
rollerskating down the road
by herself alone in the air and light of an ungloomy
Sunday afternoon
herself and her skating shadow
the painter said
beauty is what we add to things
and I
chainsawing in the woods above the road
say what could be added
what other than giving this roaring machine a rest.
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics identifies the
A genre of lyric poetry most frequent in OF [Old French]. In the classical type the narrator, who is sometimes identified as a knight, recounts his meeting with a shepherdess and his attempt to seduce her. Sometimes the narrator is humiliated, even beaten, or the shepherdess makes a clever escape; in other poems they make love, either with the consent of the shepherdess or by rape. (888)
Taggart’s pastorelles seem
more confrontations with an Other, capital O, as with
this poem, the first of two parts to “
Cleft fissured
the appearance of veins
close vein against close vein vertical and
criss-crossed
dark
crevices between
dark
between the blue-grey veins
each trunk each small trunk woven a woven fibre
of exposed veins
against early March snow still remaining
venous fiber bark
of the tatarian honeysuckle.
Tatarian is a mysterious word, not found in the online version of the American
Heritage Collegiate, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate, nor the OED. The latter volume, however,
suggests that it is a plausible variant of tartarian,
which can mean alternately
§
related to the
Tartar people of central
§
poisonous
§
infernal
§
a cloth like
silk
To use an unknowable, or at
least undecidable, term in the focal position of the
final line is an interesting strategy. This poem is a verbal equivalent of
close photography – by choosing a term that is itself Other right next to the
final word, Taggart manages to render the reader’s sense of referential focus
both so close as to seem verbally “blurred” right before it snaps back into sharp
relief with the brilliant honeysuckle, a
word as important for all its lush & contrasting sounds as it is for the
familiar image. And while I have a
much more positive association with the Tartars (owing to a friend who has such
heritage) than one might
Taggart has woven in his
signature use of repetition into what is otherwise reasonably straightforward
description, an approach that feels to me more grounded than the works that
carry reiteration to a dervish-like intensity. I’m also intrigued about the
extra leading between lines, which give the stanzas a more open and ethereal
feel than they would have had single spaced. He’s not the first poet to do this
(think of late Oppen, for example) but I always find myself wanting to pull
these lines together, as though they were starting to drift apart.
