The poetry of Joseph Massey may be the most spare of all contemporary poets. They are heavily imagistic, which at first tempts one to make a connection between his poems and haiku, but that connection turns out to be false the more you read. If haiku attempts to record a single image in its purest form, Massey attempts to record images that are slightly blurred, as in photographs where the photographer flinches just at the moment of taking the picture, giving the shot the slightest bit of motion. Massey’s project seems not to be about precision, but association. In other words, each image is an emblem of something larger. Sometimes our attention is directed to what the image portends:
Flies, sun-
dried, line
the windowsill.
Measure
what was summer.
In other poems, the image’s statement is more understated:
Spider web
(wind-
ripped)
weighted with
a wet receipt.
While I think the former poem is terrific, what I like about the latter is the work that the receipt does in the poem. The rip in the spider web is a tangible absence in the poem, a physical void, however small it may be. The receipt represents another type of absence: not only because has it been left behind by someone walking by, but a receipt is usually the proof that another short-term goal fulfilled, an errand in a litany of errands that consume so much of our time and yet are almost invariably forgettable experiences. In this case, not only has the transaction probably been forgotten, but the artifact that it ever happened has also behind lost. If you really wanted to make a meal of it, you could say that this in an anti-capitalism poem, though I don’t think that’s really the point. The point is the association between the two parallel images of the rent web and the receipt and what that says about our lives.
The poems above are from Massey’s chapbook Property Line from Fewer & Further Press (2006). The only other chapbook I own by him is Bramble, which was put out by Hot Whiskey Press in 2005. Bramble is a book of lunes, which is a poetic form invented by poet Robert Kelly that is intended to be the English language variation on the haiku. Since there are (in general) more syllables in Japanese words than in English words, Kelly pared down the haiku to a 5-3-5 syllable count (as opposed to the traditional Japanese 5-7-5). This type of poem goes two ways in Bramble: the capable but ultimately less satisfying poems in the book act like haiku, but substitute trademark American imagery for the Japanese:
television light
lies on the
American lawn
pulp mill steam plume falls
up against
dusk, the stretched red clouds
The other type of lune Massey writes explores new ways for haiku to operate, and actually seem most successful when they contain no imagery, or if the image is somehow obscured:
when you say it, say
it–what’s there
to be said–what’s here
just the sound of them–
engulfed in
fog–shuffling southward
dictation taken
daily from
the weather’s phrasing
All of these strike me as exciting examples haiku-informed American short poetry. From the complexity of the twisted syntax in the first poem, to the unnamed “them” that for me makes the second poem thoroughly haunting, to the reversal of agency in the last poem, in which the poet/self is simply the recording device the natural world uses to speak through (sort of like Spicer’s Martians), all of these poems investigate alternative ways to conceive of the short syllabic poem, that will of course never be totally divorced from haiku, but can add something new to the tradition as opposed to just mimicking it.
This is the first of two entries I intend to write about Massey. Next week I want to talk a bit about the virtue of chapbooks, using Massey as an example of someone who has managed to carve a place for himself without publishing a book*. In the meantime, here is a list of Massey’s chapbooks to date.
Minima St. (Range, 2003)
Eureka Slough (Effing Press, 2005)
Bramble (Hot Whiskey Press, 2005)
Property Line (Fewer & Further Press, 2006)
November Graph (Longhouse, 2007)
Within Hours (The Fault Line Press, 2008)
Out of Light (forthcoming from Kitchen Press within the next couple of weeks)
*Chapbooks are books too. You know what I mean by book.