Michael Flatt’s Absent Receiver (Springgun Press, 2013) is an intriguing long poem series, coming
to 70 pages or so (including the couple pages of notes, which read almost like
poem snippets themselves). Alternating
between crisp moments of imaged insight and surrealistic word-play, Flatt’s
work limns contemporary life deeply felt.
Rather than attempt to directly describe, he anatomizes the method of
perception through language. For
example, on page 8 (there are no individual titles for pieces within the
collection), he writes,
until it has a name
it cannot be your
reference point.
until a fractal grace
leaves its trace
as water slips over a
rock
smoke will inlay its
message. . . .
I suppose at this point it is no longer revelatory to note
that language is a medium and that we approach the world through its distorted
lens, etc. But I like the particular
ways in which Flatt renders this notion, as in the quoted passage with its
natural metaphors of water, rock, and smoke, and that “smoke” encodes a “message.”
At times, Flatt’s unexpected ways of presenting the ordinary
can simply amaze: “grass,” he writes on p. 25, “is the earth on / green fire,”
then reiterates/elaborates, “if you get down to it, it is. // with your hands
down in it, it is.” Other times, his
exuberance is evident in the joie de
vivre he clearly has for words, or therefore I suppose I should call it a joie des mots (incidentally, Flatt
himself occasionally lapses into French and more than once references
Apollinaire). On p. 33 he creates a kind
of acrostic out of the word “motherfucker” and gives us a palindrome on p.
43. This is a poet who really seems to
feel both his life and his medium, and wants us to too. What more can we say to that than thanks for
your work?
Formally, there are a number of things going on in this book. I see something of Zukofsky here from time to
time, in the aspects I’ve described above but also in small details like
Flatt’s depiction of a neon sign — here “BOWLING
/ BOWLING / BOWLING” (with the
alternating bold text simulating the sign’s flashing), which recalls the
concretist version of the railroad-crossing sign in Zukofsky’s “4 Other
Countries.” The use of biographical
material transmuted into avant-garde form reminds me a little of Bernadette
Mayer. On the page, the sort of center
spine that runs through Absent Receiver
like an axis, dividing parts of poems left and right, recalls a not-infrequent
practice of CA Conrad (and what is Conrad really about if not, like Flatt,
exuberance?). But Flatt’s work does not
come across as derivative — it is exemplary of its own moment and context.
And, one thing I think is particularly unique about this
work is that it looks to rock music as an organizing principle. We have seen poets do something similar with
jazz (e.g., Baraka, Sanchez, Madhabuti), but not many that I know of have done
this with rock (or punk; Flatt’s bio tells us that he has been the singer of a
neo-hardcore band). (I admit here that I
have likewise incorporated rock/punk form into my own writing at times, which
perhaps partly accounts for my especial interest in this.) The book in fact begins with a mic-check
(“check // check // check // check”) and there are pauses throughout for “(reverb)” or “(delay),” the features of guitars played through amplifiers. Indeed, Flatt I think sees poetry as a kind
of “amplification” of language — “the page is an amplifier / shaking the lamp
beside my bed” (p. 47) — and on p. 50 he transliterates a particular style of guitar
sound: “quote: // chugga chugga chugga chugga.
. . .” Further metaphors of the
mechanics of rock occur. Flatt wants to
create poetry that has the visceral effect of loud, electrified music and very
often achieves this.
“[W]e’re sick of singing / the same song,” Flatt asserts as
he builds toward the end of this collection (p. 55), and although he has
antecedents, he sings a new one here.
Who hears it, though? That is the
big question implied in the book’s title, and on p. 65 he laments, “if signals
were sent, // they weren’t received.”
Obliquely, this refers to romantic relationships (there are hints of
this) or communication in general between people, and the static that is often
involved. But I think it also has to do
with poetry as a form of communication.
Do we really know what anyone means by lines like “this swan’s down gown
of a curtain / parting and I’m right back / inside the cricket’s womb” (p.
49)? Maybe, or if not literally, then on
other levels — of feeling and instinct.
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