Protective Immediacy
Rod Smith
publisher: Roof Books, 2000
isbn: 0-937804-78-9
price: $14
Smith is part of an exciting DC-based community of poets who, for all their devotion to formal experimentation and a critical social vision, are generally very amusing, coupling a knack for stand-up "slacker" comedy with sheer lyric elegance.
This new book is a honed display in five sections of all the virtues of Smith's writing, including his complete mix-and-mastery of several strands of American poetics, ranging through Projective Verse, Berrigan-esque collage (more intellectual, but still with a Lower East Side "tune-in drop-out" dopiness), the clipped line of Williams, and the provocative opacities of the Language School.
As the epitaph to the first section, "The Boy Poems," states, "Humor is a process. Depression / a useful first step," and this synthesis of comedy/melancholy is what distinguishes the often intellectual verse of Smith from the pack:
Speaker: Agon means
that ache you can
really see, right?
non-speaker: in some
x, the gross national
awkward. Oh hell,
Speaker: "Prove it" --
non-speaker: Special lights
I blow then sip, brains
dumped over pumps, etc.
Speaker: Diet across
that; then what?
[14]
The page arrangement of "The Boy Poems" -- each with titles like "Boris," "Bert," "The Buddha," and "John Fitzgerald" -- are like word-sculptures, somehow beautiful to see in their stasis on the page despite the heady, fluid meanings of the poems themselves. "Simon" theorizes this condition:
The implicit is
Arrival, approach
impasse -- a hand issuing from a grasp -
These alternatives cannot be harmonized.
But harmony sucks anyway.
[17]
Human liberation is to be at stake in these poems written from the country's capitol, as the fixity of corporate systems upon the mushy human emotions is part of the drama inherent in Smith's colliding discourses:
This is the heart of all living
systems -- The workshop mode flows formatively
across the morphogenetic light-born attractor
at the focal point of time and reemerges as
the Diet Coke stain on Bert's disintegrating
mostly purple tie-dye.
[22]
Because Smith is so comfortable living among grand thoughts -- he has a natural "visionary" bent suggestive of mild-mannered Blake or a human-scale Pynchon -- his idiom has a worldliness which belies a mistrust in naive acceptance of political dialectics or theoretical superstructures. But it is when these two elements meet -- the mistrust anchoring the "vision" -- that the humor of human" bathos arises (he pokes fun at his theory-minded brethren, here, too):
A Nestea before the sex show
& a full length sofa bed
to teach the Cantos from --
this represents the temporal
hidden within the temporal.
The grapes though expensive
are "unimpaled."
[36]
Smith's ear, while not infallible, is among the more varied, restless and daring among poets from the Language line -- he can mix, in a single poem, verbatim quotes from Bob Dylan with polysyllabic science words, ballad-like strains, "plain speech" prose and weird word-lists, such as:
schierkase schmo
schmoose
schmooze
schmuck
Schnabel
[64]
sheer nonsense which tells, in the meantime, the whole story of the New York painter's fall from avant-garde grace.
Through all these dada-esque hijincks, however, he always keeps the question of basic freedom versus the (failed) social contract in focus:
the sum tottle seems to ink us out
sheepish science dealing & important
-- neither Spain nor Plain --
a health-related basic thing that people matter more than money.
[74]
"What's that little plan / you live in?" the poem "John Fitzgerald" asks, and Smith offers no answers, but no plans, either.
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