Hypnogogic Reviewing: Daniel Poppick & David Gorin on Conrad, Kunin, Reines, Ward
Daniel Poppick writes for West Branch Wired about Dana Ward, Ariana Reines, CAConrad, and Aaron Kunin; and includes within the essay his email exchanges with David Gorin (who has also written at length about Ward and others). Poppick treats the poem as a likely agent/refrain of infection, and the possibility of writing one's own in this state simply derivative of reading.
You feel that you are an extension of the poem, and vice versa. The poem is an organism, not a metaphor for an organism, but an actual body that eats, shits, and breathes. You are twins, it just happens that one of you is made of the alphabet and another is made of an alphabet.
Later, in one of his letters, Gorin gets there too, quoting Ward: "Ward writes: 'See why I'm nervous at the level of production? / Anything can be a convention // even (especially) love.'"
The essay acts as container for thoughtful reviews of texts like Kunin's Grace Period, Conrad's A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, and Reines's Thursday. Here, the latter read before sleep, and considering Spicerian poetics:
I can think of no other poet from my generation who so brilliantly performs the ecstatic clarity of erotic paradox, the erotic being the field on which all manner of transferences occur, Robert Duncan's place of first permission where D. W. Winnicott's "playing in time and space" happens, and not just the tingles you felt the first time you saw David Bowie dressed up as Ziggy Stardust, summer o'er-brimming your clammy cells. The frictive heat generated between the music that seems to be channeled from a god and the violent rebuke lovingly hurled back, the insistence on using the received command against that god to tear open a third realm between—these are not just pyrotechnics, they produce the temperature the poem needs to travel from one body to the next.
Where Poppick's writing here gets liminal, even posited as a "dream," Gorin's is personal. The states rest well together when thinking on Ward's The Crisis of Infinite Worlds:
Dream from March 26, 2013 [read Dana Ward's The Crisis of Infinite Worlds before sleep]:
Dribbling some kind of liquid on the concave face of what is either an animal-like plant or a plant-like animal. Whatever or whomever it is, it seems to enjoy or need this.
~
In A Century of Clouds, the poet Bruce Boone asks "how is it possible to make a truly human social life for the first time?" For me, this is the central question hovering over Dana's poems. Which one was receiving in that dream? The what or the whom? And where from?
~
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Dan Poppick wrote:
David,
"Soon" arrives to the bloodstream faster than "now" these days because in these last weeks of winter, when it's still cold but there's no snow on the ground to immobilize the car, one tends to breathe from the tank of pure potential more than one might a few months later, when the sun is directly overhead and the white noise issuing from the box fans at the windows of a scorching apartment sounds like living inside an engine of the present. Who knows what the fuck I'm talking about, but I do know that when we were in Boston together a few weeks ago and it snowed for three days straight, sharing a cigarette with you outside while we watched the neighborhood and cars disappear under those aerodynamic drifts made me feel like we were briefly moving at the exact same rate as everything else, though of course that spell was broken as soon as the snow stopped. This muddle is probably why poetry has always felt most potent to me during winter—cold weather and gray skies make the original heat of production radiating off objects more perceptible by contrast. I think your question about whether this kind of speech is common ground or barrier probably changes with exposure to sunlight, an expensive mood ring. But is that poem an object or a life?
Check it all out at West Branch Wired.