For the last 12 or so years
I’ve walked around with a piece of paper in my right back pocket. Not the same
piece of paper, naw, but one that has retained the same characteristics
throughout: cheap copy paper, words of mild to severe illegibility wildly
schismed up and down the page, sometimes side to side. To say I begin with a
loose structure is understating it and most often I start my writing work while
walking my dog. In craft interviews I’ve read about other writers’ fear of the
blank white page, sitting empty in front of it, mind and body a dullard of one.
But with regards to writing poems at least, that’s never been a major issue for
me, as I’m normally on the move when writing, not staring at the computer screen,
not focused on writing at all. (I also write non-fiction and in the writing of
that I have stared, sometimes for hours, at the venomous screen, no worthwhileness
appearing anywhere in front of me.)
Although
I didn’t realize it when I started writing seriously—a period that directly
correlates with my dog ownership—perhaps movement embodies my entire poetics
and/or vision of writing. There are exceptions, dozens of them, but I don’t
particularly like narrative poems or poems with a staunch beginning/middle/end.
I’m not very drawn to epiphany and even revelation can seem forced within the
parameters of set lines and stanzas. I know I sound like a negatron, but I
don’t really care about fern gullies or fatherhood or fiery rhetoric.
In my own
poems at least what I’m mostly trying to get at is a moment and a
disappearance, in the way that I’ve seen faces or pieces of graffiti or
landscapes appear and then immediately disappear during the course of my walks—and
yet those momentary visions somehow stay indelible in my mind, for days, months
or years later. It’s an everyday vision that I witness, but via my there-and-gone
again-ness it somehow seems unordinary to me, and that’s what I try and write
towards—-the sparkling vagaries of the mundane, rendered technicolor in beige
and grey.
The below
two poems are taken from my 2019 collection Fur Not Light, one inspired by the work of the Russian Absurdists. (If you
don’t know them, this book is an amazing start.)
Composed between 2014-2018, much of Fur Not Light was written in prose,
lineation be damned, but the volume’s opening section is in lines, short ones.
Nearly all of that section was written while walking, aimless and attune. With
the two poems below I can distinctly remember the composition circumstances.
The first was written in the summer of 2015, over the course of three different
walks, Monday afternoon, Thursday afternoon, Saturday morning. One stanza that
first day, two the second and the last three on the third. (I later went back
and revised a bit but the thereness was already there by that point.)
The
second was written in the late fall of 2016, at Thanksgiving. I lived in Omaha,
NE at the time and was briefly housesitting for my friends John and Rachel in
my former hometown of Portland, OR. That poem was a two-walker, with the first
two stanzas written on Thanksgiving Day and the next three written two days
later. A lyric by Chance the Rapper makes a fleeting appearance in the third
stanza too. (I think?)
from “Be Yer Own Hitman (Deathsounds/Lovesongs)”
My past
A winter’s
thaw,
Sun intermittently through
Dark cloud.
As then I believed
I owned the air,
Everywhere;
Now succumbed
To my mere
rental
Of it,
For a short time,
At a great cost.
(Realizing
that under certain circumstances
Even the
sunshine
Can be a kind
of death
Poem.)
As today I
finally study
The meaning
of snow,
Of slush.
Thick
Mysticisms of
snow
Embedded
Within
Some
canyon’s
Every
pockmark.
*
I could put a
bullet
In my heart
Or a
sunflower
In my
hand
And today all
is a battlefield
Of
sunflowers,
Battlefield able
to shout
Without
having a mouth.
When did I
forget
How to
fly?
I
didn’t, I didn’t, I won’t.
Where the
river bends
Through the
trees
I am waiting,
Breathless to grace.
Keep
rowing past anyway,
Our stunned
copse
Of eye
contact
Its own
glittering
Bouquet.
When I was
younger I thought that poetry was about linguistic triumph. Now I’m of the mind
that it involves syllabic darts of rhythm, deeply felt but barely seen or heard.
Jeff Alessandrelli is most recently the author of the
poetry collection Fur Not Light (Burnside Review Press, 2019). In addition
to his own writing Alessandrelli also runs the literary record label/press
Fonograf Editions. He’s at https://jeffalessandrelli.net/.
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