by Jordan Stempleman
BlazeVOX [books] 2008
Reviewed by Rick Marlatt

American Progressions

Anchored by unique reflections on the vast, diverse American landscape and a lengthy, seven-part series of couplets, “The Day of Nicholas,” Jordan Stempleman’s String Parade thoroughly demonstrates the poet’s eclectic, yet accessible style while presenting a procession of instances and abstractions in contemporary American life and poetics. String Parade’s poems are like tiny mysteries that unlock secrets to a multitude of inner mysteries; they help define and unify the humanity in all of us.

In “Similarities,” Stempleman likens the stomach muscle’s perpetual process of intake and digestion with the multiple “takes” required to complete a car advertisement. The poem begins, “the stomach has a grossness to act, to clean up after itself / and say nothing of the dishes that pile up and go crusty / along the counter.” (42) Stempleman is deft at relating things that are ostensibly unrelated. Here, he migrates from the anatomy of the stomach in search of the equivalent to digestion: “when some car / is driven recklessly around some tight curve, and the slick / road sending out mist like some poor description / of an upbringing, is wasted take, after take, after take.” (42)

Stempleman’s associative abstractions, and the ubiquitous level of metaphor they might imply, are familiar—better poets have tread this ground—but benefit from an openness that leaves them wide and far reaching. He often omits nouns, leaving only the adjective, and he also changes nouns into their verb forms. His central subject often changes multiple times within the same poem, making unanimous interpretation frequently elusive and ambiguous. This elusiveness, however, is surprisingly accessible, inspired by everyday people and occurrences, using everyday language. Stempleman seems to be aiming for personality, but also for an artistic and societal reconciliation in his work, for seamless transitions between the horrendous and the beautiful as they rend the contemporary American sublime.

This sublimity is demonstrated in poems that bend reality, melding the worlds of movie set and everyday, questioning the differences of the two by nonchalantly exploring their similarities. “A Little Ambitious” demonstrates this dramatic phenomenon perfectly: “we live between the first sex scene and the last.”(70) “Claim of the Cyclist” begins with visual imagery which sparks his reflections, whereas “Order from the Menu That Which has the Ability to Cut Itself” is initiated by his imaginative reflections which direct the poem into a culmination of acute, remarkable imagery. “Style if Not” explores Stempleman’s own philosophy of poetics as exemplified in his work:

There’s the slant again, it sounds sincere, doesn’t chew
the furniture or skip the gudgeon
as safety would account. It tends to its attitude, even
when it leaks and runs and makes a mess
across the meadow. (33)

Jordan Stempleman comes at us from an inverted angle, and hints at an artist with original, evocative style and accord.

*