Showing posts with label Burnside Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Burnside Review. Show all posts

Saturday, June 04, 2022

Angelo Mao, Abattoir

 

BIRD

What is a bird? How much does it cost? How much does its cage cost? The going price for laboratory mice is twenty six dollars an animal. What is it for birds? They used to sell them around the river, dry wicker cages, dried ribs like parallel construction. They sold them before I was born. How much did one cost then? How much would it cost not to be silent? You do not speak for yourself. Not while doing science. Abandon the project. Go back. go into the cage. Write about what you know. Tell me how to lower my voice near enough to silence so that the whole world can be heard, even the windings inside of this body can be heard, and finally I will know what stepped onto the park grounds and make an about face, turns around to look.

It turns out we know nothing about birds, neither the birds that have returned to the ponds, nor the ponds themselves, artificial as slaughter, whose overgrowing weeds are pulled out each night and burned. (Who does the burning? Where do they put the ashes?) Late night, walking home by the re-growing, re-heightening reeds slender as the knife tracks on a butcher’s board, I saw one bird hop branch to branch, like all of its kind baring a fantastically large breast, a rust red quarrel with air. I stopped. I looked.

Winner of the 2019 Burnside Review Press Book Award, as selected by poet Darcie Dennigan, is California-born Massachusetts poet and research scientist Angelo Mao’s full-length debut, Abattoir (Portland OR: Burnside Review Press, 2021). Constructed as a suite of prose poems, lyric sentences, line-breaks and pauses, Mao’s is a music of exploration, speech, fragments and hesitations; a lyric that emerges from his parallel work in the sciences. “They have invented poems with algorithms.” He writes, as part of the untitled sequence that makes up the third section. “They can be done with objectivity.” Set in four numbered sections, the poems that make up Mao’s Abattoir are constructed through a lyric of inquiry, offering words weighed carefully against each other into observation, direct statement and narrative accumulation, theses that work themselves across the length and breath of the page, the lengths of the poems. “The first thing it does / Is do a full backflip,” he writes, to open the poem “Euthanasia,” “Does the acrobatic mouse / Which rapidly explores / The perimeter comes back / To where it started / To where it sensed / What makes its ribcage / Slope-shaped as when / Thumb touches fingertips [.]” This is a book of hypotheses, offering observations on beauty, banality and every corner of existence, as explored through the possibilities of the lyric. Or the first stanza of the two-page “Dissection” reads:

Bodice the color of rose. Ligaments
of cream. Undone: parted. Opening
and for a brief moment hooking breath

to a forced, indrawn stillness so as not
disturb whatever hypothesis might arise,

nor disturb the forceped hand that enters
with its set of impersonal instruments

as formal as beauty.


Friday, May 25, 2018

Jake Syersak, Yield Architecture



“Architecture as establishing moving relationships with raw materials” streams from Corbusier’s jaw as if it were its own internal dwelling, a thing, as in: the marriage of the & ing. Something kingly as coming to the agreement an airplane’s in flight, though it’s a flighty background sews the eye through the usefulness of jets’ eyelets. What forwards this I through this—through any—environment is recognizing the design the raw moves on moves on. So I’m looking over the cast of lines: of life, motion, & the narrative kind—all the outliers we work in to affront. Will that affluent taste of fluency, squeegeed across a window tongue, Niagra into any fountained clarity? What physical insight this might justify, I’m unsure. Wolves swill into these fingerprints as easily as conversation eats them. But if crowning the integrity of building’s all we can amount to, best to follow those fault lines religiously. (“Skins, Skeins, History, Hysteria & Dust”)

Officially released this past March, on my forty-eighth birthday, no less (thanks, Jake!) is Athens, Georgia poet, editor and publisher Jake Syersak’s first full-length poetry title, Yield Architecture (Portland OR: Burnside Review Press, 2018), a book that follows a small handful of chapbooks produced by presses such as above/ground press and Shirt Pocket Press. Set in four self-contained sections—“Skins, Skeins, History, Hysteria & Dust,” “Soldered Opposite of Weather Was Yourself,” “Fractal Noises from the Foliage” and “Impressions in the Language of a Lantern’s Wick” (which appeared previously as a chapbook with Ghost Proposal in 2016)—Syersak’s Yield Architecture does give the sense of both a critical essay, and a poetry composed of fault lines, assembled in such a way as to tremble, pull apart and rattle against each other when required. Composed as an assemblage and sequence of direct statements, notes, sketched-out lines, lyrics, prose poems and pulled-apart sentence structures, the poems both challenge and give way, effecting a yield, even, against itself, and its own structure. If, as the late Canadian lyric poet John Newlove wrote in The Night the Dog Smiled (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1986), “the arrangement is all,” then Syersak’s poems are obsessed with their own construction, and even, in effect, rebel against themselves, arguing for their own dismantlement, even as they accumulate and build, writing:

fortitude’s resistance requires
            a moment’s tranquility revolve
                                          in a piece—of asphalt,
feather, or flight

point-by-point petrification of

                          a dove’s symbology of
                                         refusal, exacting

      up-gasps
of air
the lung-lids (“Impressions in the Language of a Lantern’s Wick”)

Inan interview conducted by James Eidson for Ghost Proposal, posted online on April 16, 2017, Syersak wrote:

At this point I’m pretty hostile toward anything that refers to poetic language as a “game.” I don’t mean to take myself too seriously (because I did, in fact, have a lot of fun writing this book), but I think there’s always more at stake. I blame the LANGUAGE poets for creating the mentality that poetry is somehow nothing more than a “game” to be played. There are too many life / death ramifications evident in language pervading our culture to think like that. Looking back, I actually think now that this book (what’s now the last section to a larger collection called Yield Architecture) was my attempt to purge the influence of LANGUAGE poetry from my own poetics. My poems will always be haunted by their influence, but I hope it endures as some centrifuge of sabotage, maybe through the formless material you cite that manifests through sensation. Anyways, you’re right: at the heart of this book is an obsession with paradox—the palpable vs. the impalpable, the ethereal vs. the concrete, etc. I’m obsessed with poets who share that obsessive deconstruction of paradox but want to lug it into the real world, charge it politically, and break it into digestible pieces. Juliana Spahr, j/j hastain, Hoa Nguyen, Will Alexander, and Fred Moten are all poets that were really present with me while writing it. Most everything released by Action Books, Ahsahta, or Commune Editions endures with me.