I tire
rapidly as I write this thanks to a shot of Nyquil and off-brand Benadryl,
and as such, I feel that Mark Yakich's poems in his new chapbook The
Making of Collateral Beauty are written here for me right now, in
this hypnagogic state somewhere between the ebb of waking life and sleep,
that this is the perfect state to read these things which do not act quite
like independent poems (each poem herein shares a title with his first
book, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross)
but not quite as companions either. This is both corollary and new growth.
This set enriches the other set, and forms a sort of weird matrix superset
behind and on top of the former volume, sort of like a mythology that
pokes fun at the readerly response that asks for a poem to explicate itself,
or to offer up the moment that brought the poem into being. In this way,
it acts as a kind of interrogation of the sort of note this publication
asks its writers to provide.
Every poem in this collection asymptotically
approaches prose (unlike Unrelated, which is mostly lineated
poems with a few prosier bits). And each forms a link with the poems in
the earlier book (though not all the poems in Unrelated get the
Making of... treatment, meaning that there isn't a one-to-one
correspondence between the two books, title-wise), sometimes referencing
or riffing on one of the original lines or images, and at other times
playing with the idea of what poems are, what writers are and do.
The feeling one gets after finishing
these new poems is a sort of daze, surrounded by saxophones and circling
stars. Each suggests a narrative, an extra mythology to add onto the original
poems, but each is a bit off—spliced together, collage style, or
featuring some pretty big rhetorical jumps that touch at times on the
edge of something approaching dada. The poems are most effective when
the gaps they elide are complete surprises, as if each leap is the solution
to a rhetorical problem that didn't exist before the poem did. As such:
they are totally fun. They do amaze—the effect they have when the
last image or line juts out into the void is reminiscent, at times, of
Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendys.
As a whole the poems accrue to become a
weirdo self-mythology, continued somewhat in the other packaging of the
book (the impish author photo on the back, the author bio that perforates
the edge of credibility and reads as an arch extension of the real Mark
Yakich, the real Mark Yakich as reduced to bio form, and the new bio is
in fact an extension of the bio we see in Unrelated ), and, as
such, the book does the trick (that we hope it will) well. So: wallow.
Swallow. Hook and all. Buy the book, either for the work it accomplishes
by itself or for the dimension it adds to Yakich's first book that you
should already know, but in the case you don't, take this as a chance
to let them both caress your cheek. [AM] |