Aaron McCollough : The Third Poem of Jan Vandermeer

(Little Ease, pub. Ahsahta Press)

I shave my face and launch a bottle rocket
I scrape the walk to lurch into the highway

My face so smooth like the subtle field of scales
As no onse asks the threshold how the light works

Just saunter through and halleloo    complexion
Versheydenheden   world's fair   the world is fair

And foul   it reaches for me reaching for it
Above the city's face the breath invisible

That's mine
           with sun behind the cloud of meaning
Of sunny civil   gestures   conversations

Vrau fair vrau foul and the littered tabletop
To battlefield   a serpentine transaction

My taste of wisdom come
Through plasters painting hurts

This one's a little happy   good for her.

@

Aaron's new book was kindly sent to me by the publicity folks at Ahsahta Press; it's coming out 15 September 2006. I have a sort of complex relation to the book and the poem I'm going to talk about, so let's discuss that first.

Aaron is high art in his self-contextualizing. Little Ease opens with a quote from Foucalt and a snippet from Richard Cranshaw. The sections have strange, allusive titles: "Prologues from the Reformations," "Superliminare", "Hospitality." There are no explainatory notes to guide you into these things: they are just there, leaving you feeling either curious or rebuked depending on your relationship to high culture, continental thought and the American avant garde that has taken them up.

OK, so you have to ask: how seriously do I take this back story? When I see a series of poems with the name "Jan Vandermeer" in the title, what do I do? Google him? Is it OK (I ask myself) if I kind of think of Jan Vermeer instead and kind of free-associate in a Jim Behrley way on that really hot actress who played the girl with pearl earring in the Girl with Pearl Earring?

What is terrific about Aaron is that he gets all of this in a really kind of unsnobby way, which means that the first poem of Jan Vandermeer goes like this:

a florid sunsets [nice grammatical arabesque there, by the way] evening a drifting
eyes    my michigan (camaro hood propped
up with a hockey stick) of netherlands

Ever since, let's say, Pound, the idea of swirling together high and pop culture has been growing stale, but Aaron makes it new in a really subtle way. This is not flarf-fireworks, but something very measured. Under a poem with this kind of ponderous 16th century (or 1905) title comes this incredibly light jaunt. It's really fantastic.

I don't want to do a reading of Aaron w/r/t my own surprise and excitement that he is dealing with high culture without being a snob. There's so much going on in this poem and I think the best way to think of it is as a kind of string quartet of voices that both clash and build upon each other.

There's that Shakespearian voice that pronounces fair and foul, there's that bright child who likes the Dutch vrau and places it in between, and then there's a voice that I'll describe as the youthful cynic that finishes the poem.

What adds a double surprise and pleasure to this poem is the way in which -- in contrast to a lot of multiply-voiced poems -- these seem to arise from the same figure. It's a kind of voice-talent, or ventriloquism, that makes what would just be an ordinarily pleasureable poem into one that lasts in the mind.