Little Review: Michael Magee, MS

Spuyten Duyvil Press
1-881471-20-9
$10, 90 pages

Magee exaggerates the ludic, punning qualities of language to propel his lines deep into the space where Kurt Schwitters’ counter-Socratic Dada meta-logues -- the syllogistic catastrophes of the German’s lyric “An Anna Blume” are refigured repeatedly in this volume -- meets a sort of “Jive to Juba” African-American scat-talk (a la Harryette Mullen), all with the breathless pace, if not quite the soul, of Frank O’Hara at his peak typewriter-hysteria period. “The belles of St. Mary knell ‘The Real Slim Shady’ / have made up their minds and are keeping their babies / their CHANNELED HISTORY Knickerbockers by proxy,” he writes in “Convention-al: A Poem,” an improvisation that echoes with the eclipsed tragedies of American black history: “what Amadou to you / later, cable wires in the white poplar / a concrete vector”. The poem -- a sort of all-over critique of television culture that programs viewers’ sense of history into hard-wired mainstreamed truths, moves on -- with a nod to Wittgenstein -- to deconstruct the language-game, but still maintaining the stand-up poststructuralist momentum: “did you forget to program the kith? / if I tell you kith is self-programming, do I mean / a) kith : kit :: kin : kitchen / b) Knick fans thwart monikers / c) We’re born cable-ready / d) Ask your mama / the day-glo (hunter’s) orange wallet’s got a / heap of Signifyin in it / this item is not available in stores”. Not all of the poems in MS have such discernible motives -- some magic is lost when the poet seems vainly invested in maintaining the effect of a mind radiantly overloaded with linguistic possibility, haplessly reaching for the first neat pun or paragram he can muster for fear of being left behind, throwing in ten bad jokes in lieu of one good one -- “his dead brain melted in / her like a do, adieu to his dejected manor / the insular nationality of Carolina, miniscule / in the gales, foot-ways of the moon shouldering / the folds of waves.” (77) One might discern some philosophical language assay here -- the poem is named “The Comedian as the C Word,” alluding to a poem of Wallace Stevens’ -- but unlike in the best work of Charles Bernstein, who might be considered the muse of this poem (he provides one of the book’s epitaphs), one gets the sense of a poet slightly overpleased with his facility rather than hot on the heels of a poetic effect previously unknown to humankind. But the pleasures of this book are many: here is a poet interested in capturing the vicissitudes of a tsunami-force of language in forms that can by turns be as spare as Robert Creeley’s, as philosophically resonant as Lyn Hejinian’s lyrics in The Cold of Poetry, and yet have a boyish, infective charm (even if, at moments, it strays into locker-room towel-slapping tactility -- yuck-yucking over the word “vagina,” for instance). As Magee, already a distinctive poet, matures into a more complex, contradictory personality -- forsaking the easy play of “like mallards, like melba / toast we are / dying on the bank / like a bank shot” for the more sincere probes into the nitty gritty of readings of nearly-illegible marginal American culture (see “Leave the Light On,” with its faux gender-studies slant on the word “shaft”) -- he’ll have more than enough in the toolbox to make it work.