Poeta Doctus

Last week I shared a poem a little more complex and elusive than what I’m wont to compose of late. Whatever difficulty it presented was more logical than anything.

However, a more persistent concern with no less complex consequences for that linguistic art whose medium is essentially public has been a struggle with how to maintain individuality in the face of all the forces that would liquidate it. During my undergraduate studies, “the Death of the Subject” was a hot topic. Today, the Subject is, again, dissolved in various identities, whether gender, race, class, or something other, or, even more gravely, as mere data, profiling a pattern of consumption.

In this poem, from Ladonian Magnitudes, that most public of things, language and text, is folded around the singularity of intertextuality and personal allusion to create a space for individual thought and, paradoxically, dialogue and expression. “A Visitor from Jerry-Land” answers an unpublished poem by the dedicatee (though included as an appendix to Ladonian Magnitudes). To further complicate things, its field of reference is unapologetically personal. Nevertheless, in this nearly hermetic space, it remains possible to engage urgent poetical, ethical, political, and existential matters at the site where they all in fact come into play, the individual person.

A Visitor from Jerry-Land

to Daniel O’Leary

“The makar must a wanderer be”

The chance

97% in my favour,

as even the hooligans

who stoned blind

Homer knew,

is the nether lands’

weather is variable

as the garden’s flowers’ colours’

pleasures under its lights.

Sloth, sallow, must swallow

its name’s root’s in Sanskrit

He-Who-Causes-To-Fail

Ferret out and squirrel away

what you can quoth

Master Ant smugly

even before his widescreen TV

where the Albanians’ Lada

is shot to shit and first one

on the scene’s no medic but

a cameraman focussed

on the slumped driver

his passenger’s shock-eyed begging.

The gravy, this meat’s juices

heat-pressed by kinetic attention.

We drove here in a Peugeot,

right away downed two Stoli shots,

and now, hours later, one makes

it up as he cooks supper while

the other scribbles his version

at the dining table. The sheer volume

of spirits swallowed and inspiring here

prevent the endless end of ill-fare.—

Look: the light waxes every morning

and night argues its obfuscations so

we might see its numbers plain.

In this light

an 18th century volume

of Juvenal with French crib

beside the new reading-chair upstairs

aside the modern English

concurs.