by Matt Hart
Lame House Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming
Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
I’d like, in death, to be able to say of myself that I spent more days feeling inspired than not. Certain great poets continually encourage and foster this need. For Guillaume Appolinaire (“At last I can hail I don’t know whom / They pass by me they gather out there”), for example, poetry is a place of worship and almost ceaseless inspiration. When he’s in a poem, he’s in it for everything; the common parts of the day are there provide more than enough dullness, sadness and horror. Yet even these sensations can be framed in language and divinity (“And their faces paled / And their sobs broke”). The very air around the poet’s head seems charged with static fuzz and unity.
Matt Hart is obsessed with the sky. In his first book, Who’s Who Vivid, it was everywhere. It was here: “Sometimes fluttering is all that’s required. / Or the air…” It was here: “O emerald, forgive me, / the sky.” It was here: “I was kept / in a blind spot, pinned to a sky by the house.” And it even closed out the book:
Write me
about anything.
The sky is full of words.
I am awaiting
your reply.
Hart writes about wings and about flying with ambition that reminds me of great French surrealists: the urge to escape is perhaps rooted in a kind of unaccountable sadness, and escaping into poetry is as close as one can come to escaping into the sky. Not dying: escaping into the sky (See: P-Funk).
Simply Rocket is the name of Matt Hart’s new chapbook. “Analysis is not all” he declares, and begins to develop a self-sustaining argument that a person shouldn’t seek truth in place of beauty, because truth is beauty—and that even if it is not, we ought to imagine it is anyway. Poetry becomes liberation; everything outside of one’s body is sky and escape.
Rocket is a rhythmic and urbane-antique progression of 14 (how apropos) sonnets. The repetition, the exuberance and the neatly-trimmed singsong of these poems will grab you right out of the gate. They rhyme sometimes, though the rhythm is what floats them beyond the stratosphere:
Or perhaps one discovers a wasp in one’s heart
or an astronaut listening intently to Venus,
then crying out with a dusting of crickets,
I think it not near far enough!
Beyond applauding Hart for his ability to land a sort of “ye olde” exclamation, you’ll also like his consistency; as these four lines conclude sonnet two, sonnet three begins: “Not nearly enough, but more anthemic than ever.”
The musicality is incredibly late 20th/early 21st century. His rhythms pause and loop, and he samples himself; the lines “Analysis is not,” “All manner of citrus” and “My little daughter demands it” are among many that pop up in a variety of places, as is the name Theodore Geisel, whom the poet “learned the love of repetition” from and reminds us in Notes at the end is more commonly known as Dr. Seuss. Repetition indeed. The title itself appears in another Hart poem, the peculiarly “autobiographical” poem “Black Box Cockpit Voice Recorder,” which appeared in Issue 5 of Parthenon West Review: “…without my glasses, I can’t see. So Daisy and I // simply rocket, bolt and breathe…”
Yet for all his musical enthusiasm, optimism and poem-chopping ambition, the poet likes to debate the issue of poetic form; he vaguely accuses himself of going standard, of following the traditional “verse/ chorus/ verse/ chorus/ solo/ chorus chorus” form as it pertains to poetry—that is, an overused form—the sonnet. Yet overplayed as the sonnet may be, Hart proves its place:
O super Frankenstein or a dog
named Dinosaur, kitchens filled with infants
and comets of rust sweet peas, mangoes,
silhouette aorta, today’s the day to sonnet—
Sometimes such willful ownership of the sonnet, of vaguely traditional meter, of French surrealist powers, and of, well, Dr. Seuss, will even make you laugh out loud:
What I learned from my wife—Cincinatti the poem
Hardhat the poem
My darling the boombox the cricket the poem
no irritable screeching
Kitchens filled with infants new dreaming of dust
Marimba the poem Too drunk in the poem
Boomerang toomerang soomerang poem Seriously
are you a bit overblown, poem?
This gets significantly funnier when you read the notes in the back: “‘Boomerang Toomerang Soomerang’ was the magic catch phrase used in conjunction with the boomerang of Lady Elaine Fairchilde, keeper of the Museum Go-Round in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The apparent childishness—Seuss, Rogers, ice cream, the perpetual, ironic doses of look at me, I’m writing a Poem—becomes rather liberating for the reader.
In “Black Box Cockpit Voice Recorder,” Hart declares, “It’s like I’m flying, / and I hate flying. But not this time, / and not this.” A boomerang, like a rocket (ideally), goes into the sky and comes back. Matt Hart has done that with the tastefuly tight and artfully crafted Simply Rocket; it’s secretly inspiring and one of the best sonnet sequences in recent memory.
*
Tags: 8 stars, John Deming, Lame House Press, Matt Hart
Posted in reviews
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