Paige Ackerson-Kiely : A Moment as Roscoe Holcomb

from In No One's Land, pub. Ahsahta Press

Sadness is the boarded-up mill turning in my wrist.
Take me to the garden. Let me kill the livestock.

One by one mason jars are filled;
my beet-struck heart vinegared.

Everywhere I go, the casual brides.
The farmers lowering down on their elbows.

Angles in my narrow voice --
who has filched all of those round feelings,

the hapless skirts limp on the line:
no need to call in sick.

Nights from now I will join the river.
I will say current and it will be mine,

as a man turned away at the door.
In the meantime, at least, work.

Mice nesting in the walls,
rust dolefully eating the edges.

@

I had hoped to write a nasty post this afternoon, and I even had a target: this amazingly bad issue of Jacked Magazine where, unaccountably, Anne Boyer appears. Anne, what are you doing? I scold you. Look at the poems you are surrounded by:

rock
firmly rooted
in shallow sea
waves angry
suicide bombers
splinter shards
momentum
creates
water spray
droplets
reach for sky
the ellipse
of gravity
all is quiet
interlude
before attack

There should be an award for most aplombic yet gratituitous mention of suicide bombers, but this poem has already captured the heart of the jury for the dramatic relentless linebreaks of death. Indeed, Jack seems set to sweep the poeties, amassing (under different bylines) the concluding deep question? award:

They tell you that each grain of sand has it's place
                          & yes I'm sure that it does but
           where exactly might that be?

I don't know man, but that is so fucking true, it is so true. Fuck. I must change my life, but not before handing out the conceptual praise of woman as aching sublimated adolescent libido prize,

There was disorder
Yet the fluttering sound
Was in the words flattering
And like a poem, mysteriously she smiled.

I once went on a date with someone who smiled like a poem -- a poem by Franz Wright.

I suppose I'm being unfair, and am perhaps prejudiced by the fact that I bookmarked Jack with the note "awful". I quite like "Sail Oars Dunking Envy Thing Upside In and Side Down Out", by Michael Standaert, which has a certain eccentric energy, a kind of last-days of W.C. Minor feel:

His phone was tapped with a piece of mother's corn-custard
And the wine drank when the restorers ran out of his money
With vehemence he denounced his head between his feet.

Anyway, what I was saying was that I had wanted to write a nasty dismissive post but after finishing Eugene's work I was in just too much of a good mood.

Janet Holmes, editor of Ahsahta Press keeps me well-stocked with the excellent material that comes out. In the mail from a few months ago was (kindly) a clean copy of Aaron McCollough's Little Ease, case sensitive by Kate Greenstreet (Kate, I know I promised I get to you, I will, I will), Susan Tichy's Bone Pagoda. Today I'd like to handle the last of the Ahsahta bounty, which is this great work by Paige Ackerson-Kiely.

I felt that I had a geographic bond with Paige, because she now lives in Vermont, where I used to teach poetry. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten just how big Vermont can be. It's no Rhode Island, and you can put that on an ironic t-shirt.

Where Eugene is blast and slap and weeping, Paige is someone whose life out in Lincoln seems projected in some kind of distorted fashion -- the strange populating sense of Paige's work is in direct contrast to Eugene's explicit calling forth. There is a sense in which Paige's casual brides and farmers -- not to mention the livestock and mason jars and mice -- fill the blankness of the page in an organic, natural fashion.

This is a poem of plurals, then, with the few singular terms, heart, voice, river, man, door, dotting the text. I suppose the sense of plurality resting against singularity reminds me of the Breugel reproduced above (an artist, by the way, who features in one of my favourite films, Tarkovsky's Solaris, as a kind of vision of human complication in explicit contrast to the degenerate (and degenerating) scientific world of the space station the characters inhabit.

Paige, in other words, is making not a dramatic script for performance but in a way a specification, a scenario, a kind of forestory whose force comes from the inflection it gives to the imagination after it finishes with the work itself. This is the kind of poem that is difficult to end, one wishes with this kind of poem sometimes that there was some kind of musical track that could slowly swell and drown out the speaking voice, but I think Paige's "solution" -- to give a kind of sentience to the rust itself, to complete the population of this world, is pure skill.

In the end the cliché of the New York Times Book Review -- that this or that inanimate object ("New York!" "Ambition!" "The Fashion Line of Gianni Versace!") has become a character itself is indeed brought overabundantly to the reader in Paige's text. D.A. Powells' blurb on the back describes Paige's work as "joyful" (actually, since this is a blurb, he describes it as "joyful joyful") -- I think better a way to describe this poem is as triumphant, with the sensation of a poetic mistress leaning down over a world and inbreathing a strange kind of life.

P.S.: if you are wondering who Roscoe Holcomb is, we have wikipedia: Roscoe Holcomb (1911-1981) was an American singer, banjo player, and guitarist from Daisy, Kentucky. A prominent figure in Appalachian folk music, Holcomb was the inspiration for John Cohen's coining of the term "high, lonesome sound." A coal miner and farmer for much of his life, Holcomb was not recorded until 1950, after which point his career as a professional musician was bolstered by the folk revival of the 1960s. Holcomb gave his last live performance in 1978.