..:: CONTENTS ::..

..:: POETRY ::..
Charles Bernstein
  The Bricklayer's Arms
kari edwards
  from: obedience
David Harrison Horton
  Articles of Favorable Treatment (February 1912)
Mark Kanak
  Ensemble 
  derating curves 
  support bearing 
  Juniper 
  paunsdorf, the six or the eight 
  weimar
Friedrich Kerksieck
  Fifteen ways of water: 
  aspirations
Yung Seoul Kim
  Midnight Jade 
  On Asian Pears
Sundin Richards
  A Rooster In The Garden
  Looting Mary-Celeste 
  Hillbilly Dictionary 
  The Ruination Of My Right Arm   
  Pluviculture
Jeremy James Thompson
  Febrifuge & Foxtrot 
  PEEPERS (lick the candy mirror) 
  Beloved: Refrain\ you are a reel of film 
  Schmaltz Routines 
  Wearing the antique guile hat 
  Moon Shine (V/T)arnish

..:: PROSE ::..
Adam Benforado
  Ornament
Martha Clarkson
  Pigment
Todd Scott Moffett
  Divine

..:: ART ::..
Wes Tilson
  Cycling Mandalas

..:: REVIEWS ::..
J. Mara Goldberg
  Lyn Hejinian, The Fatalist 
Chad Lietz
  Claudia Keelan, The Devotion Field 
J.D. Mitchell
   Stephen Ratcliffe, Portraits & Repetition

..:: ETC ::..
  Contributor's Notes
  Legals
 

..:: ARCHIVES ::..
  Volume I, Issue I
  Volume I, Issue II

 

Claudia Keelan, The Devotion Field 
(Alice James Books, 2004)
Chad Lietz

   

Undoing in becoming in this her fourth full-length collection, poet Claudia Keelan eclipses the strident formal innovation of 2000's Utopic (also Alice James Books) w/ a sensitivity to new music afforded her organic poethic that permits the advent of a return--a pentimento of said innovation fused w/ the lyrical connaissance of the poet's earlier work. No longer is the personal (the I, the you) a DMZ :: maps & signposts are simply a way to go :: "What's left us                     Attached / & adventing" :: The Devotion Field ranges wide…

           :: Wm. James' feeling of of

           :: resistance vs. illegitimate government / national identity (what was turned is,
                          malformed, bellicose, imperialistic)

           :: antinomian contention w/ received tradition, humans, husbands, & muses

           :: of a mind to in a mind to give :: is of

           :: love :: primacy of :: this :: plurality :: "Of & Among…"

A locus(t)--Keelan burrows into the sod of Amurrika's tirepackt history (liberation campaign of this polis, new bright city reinvigorated) & chisels free the stony particulars of monuments. From Devotion Field's first declaration of interdependence, "Day Book":

           Looked inside                 An American soul An Amer

           I can soul inside

           I found                            An art museum

                                 Where my millions died (1)

& in "the verb auction" that follows any epoch, any event in "these historic times" (per our present tengallon scoundrel scion), any invested citizen must participate--& so goes Keelan, in pursuit of, ranging through the field ("is what knowledge is"), in search of the "single sun [that] illumines" inside every body.

           Passage & pursuit :: poet's Georgics :: complaint & question, alternative, commence

From Continental Congress to Birmingham to Academe, any thing de//ie, con-, noun//fined comes under question, underhand, not grateful for the bullshit dead, "Kicking inside the Godhead / Kicking inside the work": commitment to passage. The work.

           Walk through the doors,

           An I in an of--

           Even if in seems imperfectly done,

           Do not give up imperfectly. (26)

A devotion to change & action, as bodies forth the world, in synthetic (ie, squamous, plural) gna/ledge, guides these peripatetics; a devotion to & of change :: "Phenomenon Nuptial" :: allegiance lost & reborn in the worlding now :: "The Sybil's Afterlife" :: "I met myself & left / With me & she came home forever changed." (37) Passage through a "hole in the beam," into that space where definition can be defied, revised & enacted in perpetuum.

           & yes, Mr. Ashberry, there is a quotidian of an among…here beautifully sung.

                       cf. "Heredity":

           I did not die into a new heart.

           Dying was the heart

           & you who took our son's cut hair

                                 & sprinkled it among the flowers--

           Of suns, flowers are made.

           I is there, his hair

           spiraling through a flower.

           Nothing new, just a purple flower. (50)

& the dynamo of challenge & change :: organic & active world of ideas ::

           The gaps         I mean / I      put them […] / Love broke the line / & s/he was free (57)

           Service, service of the world, / Vision of God-- / Not separate things, just different. (61)

In this new challenge to a priori form, even as relates to the poet's own methods (here, confident in her devotion, in commitment to breath & action), the questions Keelan poses--from her I (imperfectly) in an of-to "a country going down, / In the aftermath of its occasion" (54) find their only most suitable alternative in antiphony, plurality:

           Be a moth in your life
           Be a quick movement among flowers
           Bloom (65)

  

//   Advance   //