Tim Davis, Dailies

[Here is a fairly old, kind of slapdash review of Tim Davis's first book, Dailies, that I had written for Tripwire magazine for their Winter 2000-2001 issue. I'm posting it because Tim is now writing regular poems and reviews, or poem-reviews -- he calls them "Photems," which I think suggests they are also photographs -- for the website artkrush.com. I'd always wanted to revise this review and someday I will, but for now here you have it in its raw glory -- huge citation from Bataille and all -- though I've corrected a few basic errors and given it a nip and tuck. I take a few cheap shots at a particular poet in this one because of another book that had been released about that time -- not the one mentioned -- for which I ask your indulgence.]

Tim Davis
Dailies
The Figures
111 pp.
ISBN: 935724--77--X

Writing of another city poet, Baudelaire, Jean-Paul Sartre describes an ethical and aesthetic background (or battleground) against which a description can begin of Tim Davis’s unique idiom in Dailies:

In order for liberty to be complete it has to be offered the choice... of being infinitely wrong. It is therefore unique in this whole universe committed to Good, but it must adhere totally to Good, maintain it and strengthen it in order to be able to plunge into Evil. And he who damns himself acquires a solitude which is a feeble image of the great solitude of the truly free man. In a certain sense he creates. In a universe where each element sacrifices itself in order to converge in the greatness of the whole, he brings out the singularity, that is to say the rebelliousness of a fragment or a detail. Thus something appears which did not exist before, which nothing can efface and which was in no way prepared by worldly materialism. [...] The deliberate creation of Evil -- that is to say, wrong -- is acceptance and recognition of Good.

This may seem an enormously oversized frame in which to place a poet who is often noted for his quirky neologisms, improvisationally resonant (very American, part bee-bop part-Olsonian) rhythms, stream-of-consciousness near-hysteric joke-making, and desire, it appears, to mask a natural sincerity behind a hard-core urban irony, but that is because we are not living in a country known for its attention to a complex (and significantly contradictory) moral/ethical universe, or at least one that is not easily thrust into parody by the note of a sexual scandal or backdoor money, or subsumed under the blanket term of “pragmatism.”

Davis, like all poets of roughly thirty years of age in the United States, was an adolescent during the Reagan years, when the Christian right were pulling the marionette strings of American politics, and in which the idea of flattened, readily-accessible “good” was infiltrating public-speak in the nefarious forms of both “family values” and the “politically correct,” a virtual minefield against which any significant detail -- any dive beneath the glass floor of narrowly ethical expression (or shall we say being?) -- was rendered perfectly visible and per-fectly condemnable in a single gesture.

Against such a background, any adolescent wary of the terms of socialization -- and in some ways any member of the marginal classes who happens to be situated in a non-marginalized social sphere (like a college) -- becomes “something... which did not exist before,” that which, by not dissolving into the background of the social fabric being described, endlessly, through channels as diverse as aerobics commercials and U2 videos, could only situate itself on the side of “evil.”

But America also has a rich counter-cultural tradition, one in which Davis finds a place. The names of Lenny Bruce, Ed Sanders, and Frank Zappa are often heard of when discussing Davis’s work, and it is perhaps on this seamy side of comedy, rather than in “evil,” that one would want to situate his writing (not to mention his author photograph, of the author hanging naked from a Joshua Tree).

The problem, of course, is that Davis is a poet and not a comic, and he uses words, lines, sentences, often in fragmentary forms, the entire machinery of which rebel on the page against this dissolution into the fabric of the whole (there’s a bit of Mallarmean melodrama in any poet who strikes out against the dominating whiteness), and so the category “comedy”, and even “satire”, does not extend wide enough through the universe to contain what is happening there. Hence the recourse to “evil,” at least in the Manichean sense -- productive evil, or the detail that is found in and against the void -- which is not a native product of the United States.

So the question, then, is regarding details. The work is called “dailies,” the reference being to the uncut film shot during a production as it observed after a day’s work on a movie.

Oddly, two other books of poetry were released at about the same time with references in their titles to the same activity. Perhaps there is something in the zeitgeist that is asking, after so many years of “non-referential” writing (which is how Language poetry is often, inaccurately, described), there is a desire to touch ground with the physical and personal (as if it were that easy), and hence a return to the “lunch poem” ethos of Frank O’Hara or the heroic “dailiness” of Mayer’s Midwinter Day: what I see matters, this little ephemeral moment which I will alchemize with my training with words can, itself, be a poem.

There is a need to break past the epistemological torments and sublimities of the “French lyric,” or the post-Marxist syntactic social subversion that seems difficult to discern while easy, and prestige-enhancing, to describe. Hence, I will write one a day; after two years I will have 730, most of which will be kept in my underwear drawer until they are discovered by loving peers.

This sort of bravado -- “moral exhibitionism” in Benjamin’s term (describing the surrealists) -- becomes the sad activity of bankrupt literati when it decides to stay within the frame of O’Hara (or Ashbery or Koch), not even adopting the full range of possibility that these New York poets pointed toward but adopting their symbolic value. David Lehman’s Daily Record, in fact, seems to derive entirely from one element of one single tone of one of O’Hara’s poems, and never leaves that safe area lest it risk being a unique, sovereign poem.

Davis, conversely, only touches down with O’Hara in an oblique instant, perhaps somewhere from the heart of “The Day Lady Died”; from that point on, he is traipsing off into the wilderness, a maximalizing effort outside of (though not above, which would be hard to do) O’Hara’s urbane and catty scripts. His details, then, are not Coca-Colas, the names of his friends and De Koonings over the mantles, but the pantheon of poetic techniques and political contradictions that have surfaced since the fifties in a world of increasing globalization.

The rush of comedy and torquing of reference takes on a tone of invective despite itself; it becomes the harsh discord that Adorno describes in serial music, that scream that is the natural speech of the post-Romantic crisis of subjectivity. Yet this is not “dark” work in the manner of Baudelaire or a German Expressionist, but because there is no room for it (in the offices of New Directions, where he was working at the time and where he wrote the poems), the “oppositional” tone of invective seems to take over, at times.

Here is the entirety of “Shy Riot”:

history pimps itself it
depletes itself I say
history is a selfmade man -- and worships its creator
history hanged itself to avoid the daily task of dressing
like mackerel by moonlight it
shines and stinks
            [germany sent seven thousand gasmaks to Israel today]
history is a despotism tempered by epigrams
there is no other granola like this
on the board of who am I incorporated sits
lists deposed by history’s inquisitors
times you’ve yelled you whoreson zed
times it befell the three little sows
trade in houses for hotels and
heft the rent
                           [flying tigers]
why should men eat shrimps and avoid cockroaches
methodology of the fucker      [flying
                           tigers]
history is the worship of jackals by jackasses
pickle-herring in the puppet show of history
say steering clear -- all arks are off
nobody can beam and warble while
chewing pressed history and diabolical mustard
fresh baby cranium peelback [context]
dust on the saga
basta

We are nearly entering the rhetorical universe of Pound’s “Usura” canto, here, but whereas the modernist found a central theme, even an area of placidity (in the Platonic perfection of forms) against which to judge the failures of history, Davis is flying into the open: “why should men eat shrimp and avoid cockroaches.” There is kind of an inversion in all of the Davis’ poetry, each sentence (or line) turning back in on itself so as to avoid any chance of easy comprehension.

“Shy Riot” is one of the easier ones to “understand,” it seems to point outward to coherent “meanings,” but in general Dailies is a drama of never quite breaking away from the language and soaring to the next thought, the next “utopic” vista, the satisfaction of the abstract promise of... abstraction.

Nothing is very abstract, the philosophical words take no hold, nor do ideals ever surface beyond the things (from “Smart Poets Society”):

(rodrigo’d get a village reargaurd hard on)
1-800-COLLECTIVISM side of fries
the body is (quickly, fill in “duck-billed raven”)
a place for forest fires
if not full on fusion (tear it torrid)

The complex of Dailies is that it seems to exist in contradiction to the basic tenants of pragmatism and the “good works” of our Puritan forefathers; it doesn’t want to succeed as product, something that can be added to the great heap of American literary achievement (the literary equivalent of a green lawn), and yet it chooses the daily over the ideal, parataxis and improvisation over the formal seductions of the “well-made poem.”

There is a New England moral tone resonating through these poems, and yet this tone can never escape the clanging, equally opinionated units of phonemes that suck it back into language. It is as if E. E. Cummings put away his tab and space keys and instead plunged into the heady intoxications of hyper-referentiality before getting down to the tale of the anti coprophagic Olaf.

Sometimes the book is difficult to read because of this; one waits for Davis to soar -- into invective, fiction, reverie, lyricism -- but because meaning is never surrendered, and because the erotic, sophisticated and, perhaps, comfortable semantic slippages of deconstructive poetics are never explored, one feels as trapped in the details of history, culture and the ceilings and floors of the ethical sphere as Davis, the “selfmade man who envies its creator.”

Perhaps this is true freedom, or the closest one will get to it, not as a solipsism but with a sense of oneself as “detail,” that which stands against the whole and creates but which, then, cannot speak but through inverted or negating gestures.

Posted by Brian Stefans at October 14, 2002 01:25 PM