by Geoffrey Gatza
BlazeVOX [books] 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Never Can Tell

I wanted to like this book. The set up is a recasting of Ezra Pound as Merlin enacting some kind of ritual self-sacrifice, killed by the irrelevance of his own magical poetic myths, and it contains interesting quotes from Buddha, Churchill and William Carlos Williams. The idea became less and less coherent as I read. In this book we do not care about Pound, Merlin, or the knights of the Round Table, or wonder at how magic persists without them. In the first section, there is much talk about food and the creativity of chefs, and if I had to choose, I’d rather eat than read poetry, but somehow with all this talk of food, I am never made hungry. It is one thing to try to cure yourself by glut, as was done so gamely in Fast Food Nation, but it is entirely another if you don’t like the taste of McDonald’s food in the first place. I am all for a reconsideration of our pieties, but this overwritten mess makes no sense.

Occasionally post-avant statements surface, purporting to be clear, such as “One cannot build a better poem without understanding / what is wrong with the present one,” and “literary anarchy seeks to unleash authority from authorship.” Do we need 160 unnumbered pages of bad poetry to prove it? Then a section on poetical anarchism is crossed out. That saves me from having to explain the idea. The evidence of the book suggests that a persistently incorrect use of the possessive apostrophe is involved, along with deliberately flaunting most of the homophones cited by grammarians.

If anyone is curious about anarchy in poetry, let them read the work of John Cage (and also Jackson MacLow). Anarchy does not involve suicide by glut, revolution by petty annoyance, pseudoliterary emetics or pretentious poses, whether ironic or not. It challenges us with unreadability, and the productive uses of boredom, but doesn’t need stagey histrionics. Though paradoxical, its emotional center is quite clear. It does involve saying a lot by staying silent, and saying little by talking constantly, but it also acknowledges at all points that there is no beginning and no end, and we can come and go as we like. It runs Thoreau through a blender, ignoring his embeddedness in the world of his time, while expanding his libertarian streak. Through the magic of clear thinking and the abiding discipline of silence, what is simple stays simple and what is complex becomes simple by becoming somehow different. It is also peace-loving, funny and oddly touching, whereas Gatza’s work tries to be but is not. Gatza’s idea of silence is the enforced crossing out of text, rather than a telling omission. His work tends to be busy and loud. Perhaps Gatza’s work is symptomatic of the mess we are in. I persist in the idea that if I am asked for bread I try not to give you a stone. Or maybe I sculpt a loaf of bread out of the stone, or plant a field of wheat. I proceed by offering a positive direction rather than proving how bad your current one is. The empty blab of the world tends to take care of itself. Even Zen Koans, so aggressive in their frustration of analysis have a bracingly spare humanity to them, and a subversive and sly sense of humor. Gatza’s work has none of these qualities. There is humor in the book, but it is not very sly. He persists in being a one man band playing on and on, interrupting himself, then playing the same thing in reverse, until you beg him to stop.

There is no idea that Gatza cannot talk to death. A potentially interesting section on Edward Hicks’ beloved proto-Hallmark Peacable Kingdom paintings is drained of its insouciance by the use of too many words. Many of the poems here seek simplicity but never stay quiet long enough to actually listen to the silence that persists. There is no easy conversational tone that cannot be rendered somehow strained, no tragic figure that Gatza cannot talk into irrelevance. The poem dedicated to Woody Guthrie does not mention music. Even the poem about Andy Dick manages to contain nothing engaging, even in the expected pop culture junkie sense, except the photo of Andy Dick, while somehow avoiding any mention of News Radio, acting, TV, or comedy. Of course, addictions such as Andy’s have a pointlessness to them that is not very appealing. If there is an emotional core to his work, it is probably in the poem “to be:”

I don’t know what to believe really.
I know how I feel and that’s one thing
and I know for a fact that what I believe
to be true and what is true cannot be

so what the fuck. I hate
well not really hate
so much as I am angered
by the calumny, but this

I mean fuck

Which is the funniest and most directly engaging poem by far, trust me, and I haven’t even read the whole book. I’m doing you a favor. This book is too pretentious to be seriously challenging, consistently funny, trashy bad or camp, if it’s trying for that. It’s often hard to tell. The last quarter of the book is taken up by “So This is What Happiness Is, (a poem marketed as a play)”, a burlesque of Arthurian characters and Jesus Christ, another potentially interesting idea that turns out to be curiously overstuffed, unfunny and pointless. Dada at its worst was more innovative, and better at offending artistic taste. This book vastly increased my respect for Duchamp’s urinal. If I’ve missed the point I don’t want to get it. The pictures and graphics, often busy and irrelevantly captioned, are a positive relief from the generally numbing text, and have increased my rating of the book by one-half star. Calgon, take me away!

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