by Eric Baus
Octopus Books 2009
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker
“Is there a second singer?”
Droves fill Yankee Stadium and offer their own witnessing abilities to the ubermensch of a caped, steroided maniac. Droves also disfigure harmonies on their accumulating lawn mowers, in their exhausting automobiles. Droves squeak their wet boots in and out of every subway car. Deep inside the liver of this mass of beings in motion, there is a churning to tune, to bring the blur into focus. And, oddly enough, a mason uses a “drove chisel” for dressing up the tops of stones and rocks toward a more “approximately true surface.” So says the dictionary.
Eric Baus’s new book reminds one of the really droning portions of non-narrative films like The Man With the Movie Camera or Koyaanisqatsi, and it is not even in the same league with Baraka, but it is large-to-miniscule in its scope. Most actualized objects (even spasms) in the book seem to be relegated to Baus’s world of “whatever there is” or “It”. In fact, the “It” may appear more than any character (if you can call them that); a weighty pronoun use bases itself on the shoulders of weak characters sometimes called “the woman” or “a man.” Actual names or more direct placements may assist the direction of what otherwise makes most of the poems stand still, not knowing which is Eighth Avenue and which is 8 Ave.
There are eight sections of the book, which also contain individual poems, although, that too is difficult to discern. Perhaps that is the point of Tuned Droves though—to produce an ineffability of distinguishing what from whom, and in that, a globalized (not like capitalism, like nebula) correlation is made.
A constant confusion makes use of itself as to what actually constitutes a Baus poem. Readers will most likely feel their limbs shaken in a plastic bag and their boredom washed in birdbath water. Make no mistake—this is sentence salad. A few, core, indefinable concepts (tree, boy, sun, bus) make a strained bone-growth to try and connect the entire universe. Though, if Baus is at least attempting to “tune” the “drove,” he is failing at bringing a blur into perfect pitch and tonal focus. The narrative (sometimes in prose block, even) smudgings act more like ink blot tests than lessons on humanity’s place and purpose in a swirling vast unbounded immensity of language:
“The letter said the letter was looking for another address.”
Or, “A tree did nothing today.”
It would be proper to place these phrasings inside of entire quotations of whole poems, but that is impossible as these sentences and statements could be placed into any other poem in the book.
A strength of the book is the overarching, mystical power of the mother figure that shadows and shines from the first poem (“The Sudden Sun”) on. She walks boys to water, gives birth, processes birth, names children, forms flowers, and folds “her arms to make a mirage, touching the snow in a sentence.” Baus definitely has a muscle for the unique imperative. However, he takes it way too far and carries it on longer than he should. He does not just climb the mountain, he goes around the range. Look, here, at the last line of the whole book, from “They Showed a Film of Walking to Water”: “Inside any good song is a small piece of snow is the one I am listening for.” He should have cut off the statement at “snow.”
The collection’s strongest poem, clearly, is “Inside Any Good Song Someone is Lost”:
There is a splash. There is another splash. There is another. There is a man a man two women a boy and a boy. Something else. Someone else. I can’t see past the wheat and birds I can’t see. There is a singer. Is there a second singer? There is. That is, you can record yourself from the center of a parade. The clouds are large. You are little and the clouds are so large.
Baus is impersonating Gertrude Stein, but his version of Tender Buttons would be a nameless, faceless, Sunday comic strip that the entire reading family could absorb over a bowl of Trix. Oddly enough, Baus also writes, “It is unlikely it is precise.” While poetry is not a chef’s meticulousness or a chemist’s exactitude, tuning the masses is, and should be.
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