The sun hasn’t shined more brightly on New York City since the early poems of Frank O’Hara than it does in Jordan Davis’ Million Poems Journal. This is one of those books that let you know almost instantly that you will have to read everything this particular poet ever writes. I’d actually known that I liked Davis’ writing before this, but until I had the book in my hand with its perfect clover green cover, I don’t think I understood just how deeply I felt about his work.

 

The O’Hara comparison is deliberate. In some ways, Jordan Davis strikes me as being closer as a poet to the late museum administrator than any other writer since FOH stepped in front of the dune buggy on that fateful night in 1966. This isn’t to say that Davis is an O’Hara imitator, however. There have been plenty of those, none to my eye successful. Rather, the secret to O’Hara’s poetry (something he shares with Davis) consists of two specific ingredients: First, you have to be yourself. & this can be the hardest thing in the world to achieve. You can’t, for example, be Frank O’Hara. Second, you have to be able to think rapidly & with great precision. There are lots of fine, even great poets, who can’t do this. Robert Duncan, for example, is someone who moves through his works with enormous deliberation – you can almost feel his mind slowing down the movement of the poem. Not so Davis.

 

Here is one example, which I’ll follow with a caution:

 

Jubilee of Evening

 

These are the killers

Linking arms in a circle

Turning in a circle, singing

“We are all killers, hey”

“We are killers all”

 

Every girl is a cat

Every dog is a boy

Meet me at the reservoir

And I’ll hold you blurry

Like a camera in the wind

 

I wish I was a tentacle

Being ground into paper

I wish you were my leader

Rounding the corner, singing

“Evening, evening”

 

My caution is this: like Lee Ann Brown – another relatively young New York poet who fulfills the two conditions I listed above – it’s difficult to generalize about Jordan Davis’ poetry from any individual example. Because each poem is so different, because Davis’ tendency is toward humor* & since his works generally strike a casual stance, it’s possible to imagine that they’re written quickly or with little attention to craft. This is a charge with which, 45 years ago, O’Hara himself had to deal. Yet in all three instances – O’Hara, Brown & Davis – it’s a charge that never bears up when you actually look at the poems. If they were just “tossed off,” how on earth do they all get to be so well written?

 

In “Jubilee of Evening,” for example, we see a poem of the circle dance – we could trace the history of that trope back through Robert Duncan to Blake to antiquity – yet never has this archetypal scene been performed in quite this way. The lethal undertones of the first stanza** are dramatically undercut by the second which combines an notably skewed linguistic comparison – those first two lines are not parallel – followed by a particularly contemporary image of romance.

 

The third stanza can be read a variety of different ways, depending I think on whether the reader envisions the figure of the leader “rounding” and “singing” as returning thematically to the circle dance of the first stanza & thus generating hardcore closure, or else as carrying the poem to an entirely different third place so that the work functions as a postmodern triptych of distinct moments. Both readings are plausible – this would be a very “teachable” text for that reason – and nothing that I can see in the poem tips the author’s hand here.

 

Virtually every poem in this book can be read fruitfully this way, yet to very different ends just because the poems are so different – Davis is as unconcerned with creating an all-over effect or signature style as any poet I’ve read – and yet these poems become instantly recognizable. I suspect (understatement) that the title poem to Million Poems Journal, a comic masterpiece that is every bit as good as Corso’s “Marriage” or any like poem by Kenneth Koch, will be Davis’ anthology piece for awhile, yet it’s radically unlike the sculpted & crafted poem above.

 

Davis has been posting his poetry in various blogs for months now, including at least 738 poems since last September in his Million Poems blog that picks up in some ways where this book ends. That’s 738 poems without any visible evidence of automated text generation procedures such as Google sculpting that might enable any other mere mortal to generate so much text in such a short time. If the poems don’t work as well in the web format, it isn’t so much that the poems haven’t gone through the filtering process of selection for a 92-page collection, such as this book represents, as it is that the rather endless HTML page (with an excessively small font) creates a sense of sameness that is quite different from how individual works negotiate the finite limits of a printed page. It’s in that more defined format that Davis’ different writing strategies really “pop” and grab your attention. Even though, as has been the case for all of the Faux Press volumes, I have some qualms with the actual design of the page in the book itself – the paper is too white & glossy, closer in spirit to Time Magazine than to the buff matte warmth that a printed page can offer. So, happy as I am to see all of those works available, however temporarily, in the endless scroll of the web, what I’m really looking forward to most is Jordan Davis’ next book. And the one after that. And the one after that.

 

 

 

 

* Albeit with a noir twist that I don’t see in Brown’s poetry.

 

** I envision a group of Israeli rogue settlers dancing while wearing Uzis strapped to their backs when I read this stanza. This suggests something quite unlike the “carefree” apolitical nature of O’Hara’s first gen NY School poetics.