Yesterday’s Songs


Homer sings the gods
of war,

Homer sings
“Uptown

Girl.” He strings his lyre
w/ piano

wire
if he’s got

the notion, molds calliopes
from white

bread then throws them
to the wine-soaked

ocean.

That was one of the poems I was thinking of the other day when I characterized Chris McCreary as a New Precisionist. It’s not just careful use of couplets a la Williams that I’m drawn to in Undone: A Fake Book – tho I’m always a sucker for those – so much as it is the balance of mythological & pop culture elements, & the extraordinary care with which he deploys sound – hear how the reiteration of long e sounds sets up the string of long i that follows, which in turn set up the rhyme of closure: notion / ocean. Sonically, this poem is as tight as a bear trap.

It’s hard to imagine, say, the Oppen of Discrete Series demonstrating so much play with sound. The Oppen of This In Which and The Materials would think it distracting. But I suspect that Oppen would find Graham Foust too full of Stevens, and Joseph Massey not so much too full of Creeley, but rather focused on the wrong Creeley, the one of Words and Pieces.

Which is why I think that the New Precisionism isn’t simply neo-Objectivism (even if I were willing to redact Objectivism down to the Oppen of the 1960s), although that may be one pole & Oppen absolutely is an influence on all of the writers I would identify as precisionist:

Disinvited

The romance of
shipwreck &

inevitable an eighth day’s
fever, some

Stratego mixed
w/ bits of necromancy

& so this mess
you’ve left,

i.e. attachment
to one’s captor, e.g.,

one pissed-off Tinkerbell,
or, c.f.,

another day of nickels,
the countless fallen

robins, et
cetera. Cannonball,

the boy calls, & then he leaps
overboard.

There are multiple games at play here, one of which might be characterized as Having Fun with Oppen, the difficulty being that “having fun” isn’t a phrase in the Objectivist Playbook at all. Another, even more pointed object of McCreary’s humor might be characterized as the twitchy, notational style that descends not from the Objectivists so much as the Projectivists, Olson, Duncan, Creeley & Blackburn, with a look back to Williams & to Pound. This starts with my beloved ampersand in the second line, then continues w/ “w/” in the third couplet (which [or wch] also raises the possibility that this is what McCreary means by “necromancy”), before slathering it on heavy: &, i.e., e.g., c.f., et / cetera (that linebreak strictly for sarcasm) before closing on the final ampersand, every much a big splash at the end as that produced by the narrative boy. Are we supposed to hear canon in Cannonball? I found it impossible not to do so, & even typed it out that way the first time.

A text like this throws up many more questions than answers in its wake, which is (to my reading) one of its great attractions. If this were fiction, it would not be the perfectly woven rug of a Nabokov or Fitzgerald so much as a Philip K. Dick romp, spurting new ideas, new beginnings every few paragraphs until the reader is lost in possibilities. Yet – more like Nabokov than Dick – McCreary clearly loves control. Nothing here has been casually spun out.

So what if we plopped George Oppen down at the King of Prussia Mall? The shipwreck of teen culture might turn up an almost Dante-esque mode of the comedic – McCreary himself is not so old as to have forgotten (& his twins will taken him back there soon enough), plus he teaches high school for a living, albeit at one of the elite private academies that dot the Philadelphia suburbs. A Fake Book, the subtitle here, accentuates the irony. The term comes from music, jazz specifically, for those print jobs that offer just enough detail for an adept to utilize as grounds for improvisation. What, in this sense, do we make of that title, Undone? That we are undone by our culture? That fake books themselves are often just loose sheets of paper, literally unbound? That what we are to read herein has a sketchy, improvisational relationship to the world(s) to which it alludes? Is the author here no more fixed than the ghost of Homer, or whomever is meant by “an eighth day’s / fever”? All-of-the-above, I think, and more.

There are just four works in Chris McCreary’s The Effacements, half a of two-volume book (or is it a two-book volume?) published by Gil Ott’s Singing Horse Press, the other half being a doctrine of signatures by Jenn McCreary. Two of the four works are directly related to literature: “Poe in Philadelphia” and “Twenty-one Suggested Readings.” One could probably make a case that the other two, “Awkward Minotaurs,” simply by the classic reference, and “Organ Grinder (Initials B.B.),” with its title’s allusion to Brecht, are similarly inclined.

There’s not an unhappy nor an uncertain moment in this book – McCreary’s use of his tools is deft & often subtle. “Poe in Philadelphia” is as much fun as any poem that’s been written since Frank O’Hara was taken out by a dune buggy 37 years ago. I’ve heard McCreary read it live & was surprised to see just how short “P in P” actually proved to be – the narrative premise is a total hoot & the individual sections are so rich with possibility & nuance that its economy doesn’t hit you unless & until you actually see the piece on paper. I could say more & even quote entire sections without much difficulty, but this is a piece that I think you could “spoil” by giving too much information, so I’m going to pass.

Far more complex in its relation to the written is “Twenty-one Suggested Readings,” a series of prose meditations occasioned by classic texts, Rameau’s Nephew; Emma; Jude the Obscure; Go Down, Moses; To the Lighthouse – your basic undergraduate humanities curriculum. The prose poems themselves are wonderful, although their relationship to the books specified, one prose poem or paragraph per book, reminds me of nothing so much as Gertrude Stein’s prose portraits in their relation to the objects named in Tender Buttons. What drove this home for me in particular was the piece entitled “The Sun Also Rises”:

This age smiles as if obscenity has something, some secret to take abroad, some thing that only we can understand. Suddenly all was shouting, moving toward the outside. Then a certain hour scented amusement and moved ahead. Falling to knees and filing requests, fixing orders for final consideration – this does not have anything to do with history. Bedeviled by this impulse he felt but did not recognize, he still smiled. He always smiled as if struck by the simplicity of all the ways to be damaged. Meanwhile we dozed deeply, mauled by an electric shock, filled with something secret, grasping a special register that only we knew. Of course we knew mortality, an aversion to the immoral things that we had done to debase the friendship, but with each gasping we could imagine the night.

That, my first thought reading this was, is better than the Hemingway, certainly of that novel. Then I wondered what it would be like to read this without thinking of Hemingway. Here, for example, is another piece:

Because the glass was empty as his head’s unfolding, his rejected lips and neck’s voltage thrown backwards. Her laugh turned inward between her small teeth, licking the soil from her glass. He promised himself to pass into the mirage as soon as possible, but each time the fear did not find good words to seal their lips. She heard terms addressed to her, her pride languid in the heat of language, which stretched itself as someone in a hot bath. This fever repeated all she had feared, and each second she yearned for a world where all would be ecstasy without end, surrounded by delirium, a blue space interrupted only by a darkness far far below. Between these visions, she is reminded of singing, remembers sisters beneath her. It does not think of anything, it has everything to destroy, it became, finally, all that she saw under these falls, all that she envied, it ascribed revisions to her lyric imaginings of executed youths. For this was it had always been, it was each mechanism an ideal, it was all that she now adapted to the passing of their lives.

I love these prose pieces – “her pride languid in the heat of language” is a phrase that is going to ring in my head for ages. But I don’t think it requires associating with a book towards which I might have very different feelings than those that percolate up as I read this text. In a way, McCreary reminds me here of the project of Simon Perchik, one of the underappreciated poets of the 1960s whom David Baratier has been almost single-handedly bringing back to wider attention. I’ve always liked Perchik’s poems, but I know that I liked them much more reading the texts cold off the page than I do thinking of them now as reactive, however indirectly & obscurely, to the photographs of The Family of Man, that coffee-table conglomeration of sentimental clichés that was de rigueur in almost every college student’s dorm in that decade.

Now think of this same text of McCreary’s above & associate it with Gone with the Wind. The connection certainly works, but it’s a different poem. Suddenly terms like “he” and “she” become literally peopled, the singing takes on a genre, we have a setting for all this longing & destruction, a flood of extraneous information crowding into the pronouns & contexts of the piece. The same is true with almost every work in the series. But I’m not at all sure that this claustrophobic process even depends on which great book is named in the title. For example, the poem above is not called Gone with the Wind.

This explained why I found myself enjoying these poems more if I had not read the book named in the title, and may even suggest a reason why I so often choose to read poems, any poems, before I look at their titles. I sometimes have the habit of going for pages of one-page poems before going back to glance at titles, but I don’t think I really ever understood why that might be more than – or at least other than – sloppiness on my part until reading McCreary’s series in The Effacements. Titles potentially contextualize & constrain every term in a text. I chafe against just such constraints.

In fact, if there is a danger to McCreary’s book, it is that this collection might be read as confined to the library when I don’t think this is the case at all. All four of these works engage the world as well any poems now being written. Only “Poe in Philadelphia” really requires its invocation of an author & even that doesn’t really demand having read the works, the public persona is sufficiently well known. [Though here too, there are alternative possibilities – another language game to try is to read the same text substituting Whitman for Poe whenever the name appears.]

Now is the point in this exposition when I should tell you what the title of that poem above actually is – but I’m not going to. You’re just going to have to buy the book.