Democracy Boulevard
Kit Robinson
publisher: Roof Books, 1998
isbn: 0-93780-476-2
price: $11.95
Synthesizing influences ranging form the Creeley-esque minimalist lyric (and minimalist art in general) to the experimental poetry of Robinson's main associates, the Language poets, and from the expansiveness of John Ashbery's skids through middle-class consciousness to the dance around the "void" of the French lyric, Democracy Boulevard moves through eight sections of poetical investigations of the paradoxes of a radically standard lifestyle observed from the heights of a postmodern sensibility informed by "High Technology" and "Media Studies", not to mention "The Messianic Trees."
The opening prose poem "The Person" introduces the empty vessel of the narrative consciousness that is lurks behind the rest of the book:
The person is, as cliché-ridden isomorph, a creature of habit. One has certain convictions, obsessions, eccentricities, stylistic features, indications that set one apart. All this is begging the question, a delay tactic [...]
[12]
This is followed by the meditative poems of "Sense Data", with such playful pieces as "Distribution", a fugal poem lassoed back to its title word once in each line creating a surfaces that critiques as it acquires the depth it is structured to elude.
The final poem attains an impressive scale with its collage of humanist terminology with subversions of individual agency.
The alternating blind alleys of tooting your own horn
and lapsing into dark humors may be avoided by going
straight to the light available in escalating syntax
pronounceable only through sound, that agency whose office
serves up periodic reminders in the form of events, sun
bearing weight on the leaves, breezes just barely touching [...]
[20]
Robinson's skill lies, however, not in the Wagnerian sense overload so much in the water-clear resonance of words in sustained relationship to each other, a skill which comes to fore in the later, center-justified poems of the rest of the book.
"Nothing gets lost / but stays with us like the fingerprint of a world view" he writes in "Win / Loss Report" and the extended clashing surface of "The Messianic Trees":
You have a flair for
crystal gazing
insufferable
three sheets to the wind
mid-Victorian taco junket
rank lyricism
weasel word at the ready [...]
[33]
It is Robinson's ability to put these highly complex syntactical surfaces in contrast to the simplest phrases that distinguishes this book from the writing of his contemporaries, and by this technique he illustrates the shell of capital as it revolves around the suburban life.
Though the book suffers from a dulling ticker-tape like rhythm at times, even this rhythm, in the defter moments, substantiates a stable field for Democracy Boulevard's troubled meanings.
Baked society
the interstitials
apprehension of the world
bound
in the loose confederation
sweating love beads
of the poem
Separations
as if words named themselves
details pour out to sea
[101]
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