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Eric GelsingerBrooklyn, New York
I Have Come to Strenghten the Currency |
| A review of Aaron Lowinger's Open Night, published by transmission press. Not eating sunflower seeds
Fifty two weeks, fifty two stars: the book’s an American flag of a year: folksy, forever-fashionable, symbolic standard of life fully felt.
II As for the poems: Lowinger’s language’s syntax & sentiment are common but not vulgar: it’s the good stuff of the speech we all share. As in the “secret they don’t even know it’s a secret,” there’s no artificial, affected, or poetically inflated speech here. Simplicity is not interchangable with authenticity, or with clarity for that matter, but here all three obtain. And simplicity not only characterizes the line, it also determines within the composition: one line/one thought, on top of another: stacking sticks, like an Andy Goldsworthy work. One advantage of simplicity is that the poems rest on the most common, communing tradition: nature – be it sticks or speech or feeling. It’s an Open Night after all: it’s there for the taking. Lowinger’s lines are robust and independent, like stripes on our flag heralding independent agencies of a single federation. You could substitute for the “title” of a given poem any one of its constituent lines, and fail less egregiously than you do at most things, to be sure. The way the line demarcates both thought and breath, there’s no need for punctuation, any more than there’s need to interpolate the words “comma” and “semi-colon” into your own speech. Any more than there need be customs agents or money changings between the states. With very few exceptions (why impose a rule of prosody if not to strategically exempt certain speech?) each line is a self-contained unit of meaning and breath. Each line consists of what, in a sentence, would be a clause, so can be grasped by itself, often instantly. And, each line laid down in 2-4 feet without caesura: one short breath, which means it can be breathed HARD. Each next line lets you come back full-strength, full breath. There’s the insistence of strong emotion in the constantly renewed line. Nor do the longer, the four-foot lines, compromise the intensity; they force breath to trail off at the end, adding a different, sadder or more wistful emotion (see the last line in the 3rd poem above-- or the “secret” lines in the 1st poem, which achieve a kind of comical self-deprecation by the extra feet). Intensity can only be sustained by its respites. Those who go at life hard need their rest, and those rests are sweetly melancholy, reflective -- sometimes humorous things. Taking Pound’s own insistence Only emotion endures, these poems might last like rockwork: a mountain-range in the mind, optically diminished by distance. They’re also rock-like in that layer atop layer, line atop line structure, achieving sedimentary mass by a temporal process -- accumulation. Including time in the prosody gives the poems a feeling of time experienced, a documentary rendering of a moment through the human tools of the poet. A tree collects mass largely by putting down roots and becoming “heavier” by virtue of invisible manipulations -- toward conspiracy with other forces. Pieces which collect meaning or literary effect in a tantamount process are often described as organic: there is an apperception of going from tail to head which manifests a kind of epiphenomenon of reading. The open nights aren’t like that. They are aggregate masses few would call “organic” or “elegant”, despite the fact the lineated strata often interlock with rhyme and rhythm. They rather invite that other favorite appelation: “raw”; though I prefer “rough and rugged” because they are manly poems, suggestive of large forearms weilding heavy stuff. Herculean perception! Finally, the open night technique of accumulation inspires reconsideration of the precept: poems ought not include anything unncessary . Taking the 3rd poem above: to omit“eating onion rings”, or “applying for jobs every day”, or “on the phone very day” jeapordizes the intelligiblity of the poem not at all -- and does de minimis damage to the prosody. Just so, striking an item from a list does nothing to distort the identity of a list as such, yet the absence may be fatal to the roast-- or here, the feeling. So, this technique of stacking thoughts/observations/facts drives home the invaluable nature of every such thought and observation and fact, which is a life lesson of a life loved. Prosody indistinguishible from philosophy, morality, and living is prosody de veras. That’s not to say the poet isn’t being selective. Of course he is, but behind closed doors so that we feel the picture of the poem is complete, and all-inclusive. It’s an “effect” cynics would say. III The earth’s said to be a big rock, but life does grow atop it. Life grows upon these poems too. Half of them have been with me since 2006, when they were published as a collection by House Press. Now they’ve been married to newer pieces in this Transmission Press publication. Back in ’06 when the Miami Heat were champs and the stock market couldn’t open lower, the Open Night series wasn’t necessarily my favorite. But, the poems’ combination of particulars let meanings grow on them, when they’ve been long enough in the atmosphere of a mind. One would think such cultivation would take place in the more abstract fields, and so it does, but the particulars herein are chosen with a magic so they quickly become nostalgic -- fuzzy with personal meanings.
. . . . PBS tower crowded out by leaves
I go to the store
Lowinger ‘wholly dedicates the poems to night and the magic in connecting Earth to the infinite ocean of darkness around us.’ Night intervenes between earth and the cosmos, or separates them -- most would say. Herr Lowinger says it otherwise. His poems testify he believes that whatever air earth light comes between one person and another does not separate but connects us in a body we all share. The Open Night poems are shouted secret messages, electrical activity in the emotional system of this larger body (the electric city?).
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