Selected by Jenni Russell for MiPOesias chapbook contest 2008.
Introduction
by Jack Anders
the light low on the mudflats
& the bushes red-blooming:
another ride to an airport,
the sun disappearing beyond
the bridge arcing orange over
the wide river, high-rises
(from "Last Lights").
I deliberately exclude the metaphor found in the next line of this poem in order to focus attention on the tactful craft and open eye of the imagery here. The eye is personalized, i.e., you can clearly tell that it is not, say, the eye of Elizabeth Bishop, or James Schuyler, or Spencer Reese; the eye or the inherent characterization of the narrator which any choice of images imparts, is not them, so, it is singular, it implies an entire speaking personality. Bishop knew this effect and so for her, the eye was a formal device affording a sense of relief because she was able to be as personal as her friend Robert Lowell without having to be as overtly confessional. Likewise, the eye here is a skillful use of objective correlatives or concrete images as a means of implying a subjectivity which, after all, given the tenuousness of the human, may not be able to define itself in any other way. Note the tiredness of "another ride to an airport" or, as you read it again, could it just be a mild fatigue, or even, a calm, or even a mild but warm pleasure, given the inherent beauty of the bracketing lines: only an eye, a subjectivity, with some amount of constructive calm, may appreciate, that is, receive from the world and now in the poem say, the red bushes before, and the bridge arcing orange after. And so we see how the tonality is variegate, in the way that the taste of a decent wine is variegate, in the way that we say it has hints of this tone and accents of that, as in a good wine review, hints of chocolate, accents of cherry. The tone is thus not extreme, but modulated. His use of contemporary, that is to say, not long established in tradition, effects, will occur a little bit further out from the core sign/phoneme nexus: disruptive effects will occur outside of and bracketing the individual words and images, not inside of them. He is not a "Language" poet like Ron Silliman, but we will see effects near the core, as with Ashbery or, as the following calls to mind, Alice Notley:
“take a pill & count to three” “I’ll
be reduced to ashes” “the three-eyed dove
will fly” “signatures without handshakes”
“lie a little, grow comfort” “deep is laid
in May baskets” “few can see the crane’s
red crest atop the pine” “but I ask & I ask
& they never come” “more rituals
are needed, standing before doors” “cycles
in midnight cul-de-sacs”
(from "Conversations in the Ward").
Compare that by Reeck to this by Notley:
"The water" "of the river" "was mild-temperatured," "the current
gentle" "I soon began" "to swim—" "in a moonless," "starless darkness"
"The sky held no clouds—" "no luminous" "spheres existed here"
"Yet the sky was" "a sky;" "for the river air" "was fresh & sweet"
(from "The Descent of Alette").
In both cases, there is a distortion or disruption -- the use of quotes to demarcate fragments -- however the distortion occurs at the level of the quotes, slightly outside of the embedded series of words. As opposed to distortion within the word, which thus disassembled, might better be called a sign or a phoneme:
o reche modo
to edire
di za
tau dari
do padera coco
(Antonin Artaud, from "To Have Done with the Judgment of God").
Artaud's words here are deliberately and intentionally words which do not exist in a dictionary. Because they are signs whose signification is nonexistent or private, the word as word in its normal sense collapses, and we see the word stripped bare down to sign aside from meaning, phonemic or musical value aside from meaning. This irruption of the meaning-effect of the word by disruption of the word itself is an extreme formal tactic which cuts off vast areas of communicability otherwise accessible to poetry. Reeck is too much of a classicist to go that route. So instead he questions the meaning of words, and thereby, the meaning of things, by the way he deploys strings of words and images which are actually quite pellucid and clear in themselves, but which are subject to distortion a little to the outside of them. The role that the quote marks plays in "Conversations in the Ward" is like the role that the repetition and circling from the pastoral to the industrial plays here:
That I’d like to be with you, where the river meets the
river, & the other meets it back, when the winter sunlight
meets the river down from the sewage plant, where
the sewage meets the river, pumped into the river by the pump
That I’d like to be with you, downstream past the smell
of the sewage pumped into the river from the sewage plant, with
your legs pressed against mine, watching the river on the
right meet the river on the left, as the winter light meets
the rivers between the cottonwoods, where the few bald eagles
scan the rivers, sparkling dirty magic in the winter light
(from "Fantasy of the Day").
At a crude formal level, one can see how such images as the sewage plant are needed to balance an otherwise potentially sentimental nexus of the pastoral river and the love statement. But then, there is also a second balancing or harmonization which consists of the winter light and something about the cottonwoods or eagles; and a further balancing of "sparkling dirty magic" like a pungent arpeggio set against that. The poem has a drifting feel like stuff pumped into a river. The interesting use of "sewage" somehow inculcates love-smells, and a vulnerability which is bodily which we know is essential to love but which is very hard to put our finger on or state in any way that is not poetic. So, he is using poetry simply for efficiency of statement which Ezra Pound would say is the correct means of differentiating poetry from, say, good, tightly written newspaper prose: what can be said more efficiently in poetry, as opposed to outside of it? The "outside of it" would be the discursive area outside of the quote marks in "Conversations in the Ward" or outside the carefully crafted balances or harmonic intervals of "Fantasy of the Day." Pound said poetry should be at least as well-written as prose and endorsed what he called "condensare," that is, condensation, compression, the compacted image; the question then becomes, when is a poem a more efficient, compacted, condensed expression of something, than prose is? And I would think the answer is that the poem is superior to prose when the subject is, for example, how a good wine tastes, or what love is. I am reminded of the scene in the movie, "Four Weddings and a Funeral," the great scene after one partner has died and the surviving partner, running out of words at the funeral and unable to speak further prose, begins to quote Auden:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Likewise, with Reeck, one gets the sense that each of the poems is beginning after that juncture where other words stop. The style is essentially classicist, to the extent that categorization remains plausible in a poetic culture where Rimbaud's mantra "one must be absolutely contemporary" has been hijacked in some places to banal and self-limiting excess. Again like Auden, the style naturally takes in and allows into the poem the unsentimental image along with the romantic; Reeck's "sewage" in the love poem I quoted is reminiscent of Auden's abandoned tram lines and traffic policemen -- an infusion of reality more loveable for being unsentimental. If sentimentality is a failure of feeling, Reeck avoids that failure by using the observed image as a means of implying the moods of the speaker, rather than having to say those moods in blunt and amorphous subjective terms: "I'd like to be with you" is as far as he need go in the love poem I quoted since the balancing of imagery implies all further sentiment. So we get that strange mixture of indefinable emotions, hints and accents, which facilitates our rough working definition of what love is. I see Reeck as an imagistic and disciplined humanist rather like Mark Doty, an inheritor of the classicist vein that runs through Auden, Bishop, Reece and Schuyler, and even to some extent Ashbery.
