Immediately Accessible Innovation

Mark Weber, proprietor of Zerx Press, releases an annual duo poetry chapbook with Gerald Locklin. One half is Weber’s work; flip it over and upside down for Locklin’s. This year, Locklin offers thank you, dave: a brubeck tribute. The first poem, “ Dave Brubeck: Indian Summer; London Flat, London Sharp,” surveys recent Brubeck:

Somehow the fingers of great pianists
Seem never to get stiff. I guess there’s a lot
Of truth to “Use it or Lose it.” I use mine
For writing poems longhand, cupping water
In the YMCA pool, and carrying in those
Plastic bagfuls of groceries. And frankly,
They hurt like hell.

He’s done the same with his brain,
Still writing works as different yet pleasing
As the title tune of London Flat, London Sharp,
With the chromatic flats in the descending left hand
And the chromatic sharps (in the other direction: Up)
In the left; whereas on the new CD we get,
On “So Lonely,” first an eleven-tone row,
And later the full twelve.

This was the same principle
That made Time Out and Miles’ Kind of Blue
Such perennial successes:
Immediately Accessible Innovation.
Sounds simple?
Try to achieve it yourself.

Directness has often been Locklin’s poetic approach; his innovation has been one of pushing poetry to its most conversational reaches, and finding a music there. The last stanza above brought to mind other artists whose innovation made immediately impact. I remember first listening John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space and Stellar Regions, how those chaotic improvisations left me in palpitations. (Later I saw a scholar’s mapping out of those extended melodies; what was so visceral for me was also a systematic exploration of harmonic ideas.)

I also thought of the poet Michael Gizzi. Gizzi’s poems are able to be both wildly digressive and thematically solid, like a drunk walking an impeccably straight line. The following poem continually pivots about with fused phrases and shifts of topic in mid-line:

VITA OVA

I often start over
in a dark wood
the door in the cloud

is not heaven
as newly dead
perhaps I’ll become

a dream just night
and the Indian you feel
death sinking its saw

see angels and think poetry
think again
if one can achieve emptiness

well then
one could be in Sandusky
Von Negative said

he was dying to destroy
the pigeon in his head a man is
who he haunts

–from My Terza Rima

But fidget as it might, the poem is also a moving meditation on mortality.

FOREVER AFT

Up ahead everything comes to a turnstyle
A golden rod of never-ending wheat
It was my habit to take the wrong road
Jot my regards to the adroit gaucho
And Time being Time, disregard my arrival
You’ll see in it the clack of an instant
I love the poor because in them I see myself
It’s nice to be finished for a change
Didn’t I say astonish me
Wait for an infant at the moment of birth
To persevere is a form of forsaking
I keep my senses trained on the shock
Absolve me from the greetings of the world

–from Continental Harmonies

Here many of the lines could survive as autonomous statements. Instead, they’re stacked atop one another to make a poem. Another:

N.B.

I’ve been sick all my life
It’s the living end
The handicap is perfection

And by emancipation proclamation
I don’t know what day it is
No manmade answer comes

I’m on the shitter
Waiting for the sun
And they think they

Have the rest of my life to live
Shit happens
Because Fatass ate the sky

I’m giving him the brush
You think that sounds unfair enough
We have to give back the world

–from No Both

Gizzi’s poems have rhythms I haven’t heard before; his combination of chaos and cohesion is likewise new to me. Yet the innovations are immediate and accessible. I don’t work hard here. I don’t consult the dictionary or rub my chin. But it’s not for laziness or the lack of a chin. The poems work: they teach me how to read them, how to follow their moves.