Comp.
Kevin Davies
publisher: Edge Books, 2000
isbn: 1-890311-08-1
price: $12.50
What gets me is
the robots are doing
my job, but I don't get
the money,
some extrapolated node
of expansion-contraction gets
my money, which I need
for time travel.
[v]
So Davies sets the tone in his long-awaited follow-up to Pause Button, somewhere between the ridiculous of having aspirations, the sense of survivor's guilt in a world of indifferent social and economic commerce, the oddness of feeling one has a job and that it should be "fulfilling" -- indeed, of having a value-system at all.
Davies' poetics derive from the cross-roads of "projective" speech-based verse -- his challenging, never imprecise cocktail of alternating line-lengths, swift-moving fragments and page-splattered stanzas are its noticeable marks -- and Language poetry, which unapologetically divorces the fragment from constraints of organic form, plunging each unit of the poem -- rhythm, word, punctuation -- into the realm of social critique.
What strikes one is the elegance he brings to project; not a line is wasted, not a "white space" trampled on by some ego-driven drive to sully emptiness with authorial presence: "Yet / what if there is a perfectly natural / form, and god wants us to kiss it and talk dirty?" [49]
The long central poem, "Karnal Bunt", is a sequence of single-page arrangements hanging on the presence of the dot, the period; like a Calder mobile, each one seems just tenuous and balanced enough to maintain its tensions.
But Davies isn't one to fetishize aesthetic moments, as each line is spurred on its incisive, cerebral comedy that would fail on HBO but cuts to the heart of the post-leftist, cerebral literary community from which he emerges. "An edited Scotch ambiance of translated Chinese reads to itself" would not bring down the house at Comedy Central.
"Untitled Poem from the First Clinton Administration" takes the project one step further, adding the note of duende -- a sort of heatedness that runs up against his constructivist leanings -- as a stream of melancholic invective aimed at the free-trade-flattened globe and its promise and pretensions:
They don't care about the details but fuck with the structure and they'll crush your spine
A shell of other people
Reflowered
Pressed into action
Figures of demented nostalgia
With diplomas, credit histories
Unbridgeable gaps where their eyes should be
The cramp as such
Because it is written
Veins in the forearms of Satan
Like unanswered mail in a bag of donuts
The entire earth
Trembles in the throes of its decision-making process.
[85]
Davies humor -- like the best of the counter-culture sixties -- aims from the darker corners of the room, shattering the false light of economic progress and globalization. Nonetheless, he is not without light himself, bursting from the clashes of social contradiction and a not-defeated utopic urge: "Why be sad? / Kissinger will die / before they can upload him." [49]
Comp. is one of the best books of poetry to have emerged from the alternative American poetry scene in years, and is sure to revive many a reader's faith in the possibilities of poetry to speak, construct, goad, amuse, teach and, incidentally, survive the absurd, valueless stasis of the present time.
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