Kate Greenstreet : [will become rock hard but never lose its taste]

from case sensitive, pub. Ahsahta Press

A funeral. I had to speak. The words just came.
There were so many dead.
Even as we were burying them, no one was sure who was who.
Everyone was saying what they'd take, if they could only take one thing.
The men would be allowed two things, and nobody knew why.

@

Does anybody listen to the band Godspeed You Black Emperor? I have had "Lift your skinny fists..." on repeat while reading Kate's book this week, and I think they go very well together.

I reviewed a chapbook by Kate last year. I enjoyed writing that review because of how Kate's poetry works for me: she is not an overly referential person, indeed, on the surface her work doesn't bristle with the (sometimes literal, sometimes figurative) footnotes of much of contemporary poetry, but she spurs something associative in me.

I liked Learning the Language, but case sensitive (I believe the title is both case sensitive and "case sensitive") is just an order of magnitude beyond what has come before (although "Bridge" actually does appear here.) Kate's book came out in September of last year but I have no hesitation in nominating her book, and Eugene's as the two absolute must-reads of 2007. Search the blog, people, I don't say that very often. I mean, seriously, buy these books.

Ron Silliman has a bit of the bully in him at times, and his recent swirly was an offhand referral to Anne Carson as "faux avant". Whatever that means -- I'm not sure (does it mean Anne is so self-consciously avant garde she has lost her authenticity? Or does it mean the reverse, that her impicit claim to being an experimental boundary pusher actually masks a deeply conservative point of view?)

What I'm getting at here is that Kate's sustained performance -- the poems in case are part of a continuous chain, though they can be read separately -- is really in the same part of the poetry Hilbert space as Anne's Decreation. The similarities between the two poets I think are instructive and can be helpful in opening up Kate's work to a new reader, but certaintly do not exhaust the things that might be said about case.

For one thing, Kate's work is I think quite a bit darker. (Hence, I think, the helpfulness of Godspeed in the reading experience.) Both Anne and Kate are poets of the intellect: for Kate, that intellect is a kind of miner's light that casts strange yellowy shadows on the walls. So we begin -- taking this very short poem above as an example -- with the darkness of the funeral, indeed, a mass funeral.

But Kate peoples this scene with a kind of childlike intellect: capable of surprise ("the words just came") and interrogation ("nobody knew why".) It is this lively, by which I mean unquestioningly alive, voice -- in these short, declarative, grammatically simple phrases, the sensation is of darting eyes -- which animates the book, and draws things together across a generous volume.

It is this unity of approach -- this is not a volume thrown together over a number years as the author passes through enthusiasms -- that really pushes this work into a new realm. Kate is not really interested in the alchemy of the word, she is not a coiner, or even a joiner, there is no syntatical modernity here (perhaps this is what Ron means by "faux avant"?) Instead the work here is patient, plain -- late Yeats and not Joyce, in other words -- concerned with direct communication.

A poet's drive for directness can be wearying, of course: there is a surplus of earnestness in poetry and quite a bit I find myself wanting, dammit, to be entertained by a poet who is really interested in telling me something deep. "Dance poet, dance," is what I think a good number of poets need to hear.

But Kate doesn't fall into this trap. There is an art -- a plannedness and a fastidiousness and an artifice -- here underlying the simplicity. I think that's something a lot of contemporary poets have really lost track of -- fireworks and ingenuity are wonderful things, but if I had to diagnose a contemporary malady it would be in these overuse of this lyric mode (if I had to diagnose the root cause it would lie, I think, in the desire to out-compete -- sometimes the contemporary poetry world feels like a row of black SUVs at a traffic light, each blasting music through tinted windows.)

There's a lot more to be said about Kate's work here, but if there was something I could emphasise, it would be in the immense readability of her work: this really is a work that draws the reader along:

[on icy streets makes winter travel safe]

What would I do if I were serious?
Most people have been dead for more than twenty years.

I was getting my car fixed, waiting, and
a man, an older man who seemed to have a hole in his throat said
Hi.
Remember me?

Everybody wants a simple answer.