Matthew Dickman & Eric Lindley on the Mystery of Anthony McCann

Matthew Dickman waxes fondly about Anthony McCann's new book, I ♥ Your Fate (Wave Books, 2011) for the Tin House blog:

We fall in love and suddenly our insides become outer space. We are in Portland and dreaming of Austin or we are in Virginia and dreaming of Tennessee. It’s the profound experience of the “other”. There’s a statement I have often overheard in galleries and museums that tie up this experience in a perfect colloquial bow: I don’t get it but I love it, or any hundreds of derivations: I don’t get it but it feels good, I don’t get it but…wow!

This reaction is a human reaction and often experienced, or vocalized, in our relationship with music, dance, film, and visual art. So it seems strange to me that we do not allow ourselves this same sort of ecstatic experience with the reading of poetry. With poetry the above declarations too often end with I don’t get it. There seems to be an expectation that poetry should be, if at first a kind of puzzle, something that is, in the end, figured out...

I would like to argue for the embrace of a more mysterious, inexplicable, and unsolved experience of poetry. Let’s be in love!

Here then, a poet and book to help to you move beyond the cold serving dish many critics and misguided teachers of poetry would have you eat from- Anthony McCann’s incredible “I ♥ Your Fate” (Wave Books, 2011).

“I ♥ Your Fate” is a lyric book of poems that will make you feel like picking up a guitar, a paintbrush, dance your ass off alone in your room. That is to say, McCann will make you feel alive. And when, in the poem “Your Voice”, he writes:

But one day they changed the color of everything

It was kind of like tasting all the world’s locks

Read the whole piece here.

For another take on McCann's book, you should also check out the review by Eric Lindley at HTMLGIANT, which discusses "repetition as obsession: the thing detached from beauty, made into a tic or biological necessity/compulsion," and McCann's use of quotes, capitalization, images, and line breaks. For instance:

Sometimes, when he is alive and reading so you can hear him, McCann reads through his line breaks, like William Carlos Williams, while other times he pauses full stop (often when he is working within the kind of rigid structure that he makes for himself in the center section of the book, titled—like the book itself—I <3 Your Fate). For this reason it seems almost essential that we listen to him read the poems...

This passage results in a friendly disagreement with the author himself. ("AM: I disagree with you totally about the linebreaks.") Read it here.