Babstock's Airstream Land Yacht

Second time, the charm. I went on the waiting list on the library for Ken Babstock‘s Airstream Land Yacht once before and was away when it came it and they sent it back.

It’s worth the wait. I love the drifting at anchor through waves of registers and unexpected laps that somehow all work together. In a way it’s frenetic or calm, images cascading. I suppose it’s in how I take it, trying to watch each like my eyes following particular snow flakes or just marvel in the snowfall.

In a way it’s flowing and in a way detached and here and there, humorous, such as in So Hush a Mask of watching the images float thru one’s own brain while in the background there’s the guilty knowledge of struggle elsewhere.

placed the toe of one shoe
on the top of the other, which made me feel humble, a bit quaint,

as though I should be shelved next to pillows painted with ducks
and fisherwives smoking pipes
calved out of balsam. When another thought got ripe
I shooed it away before the smell hit.

It’s got a vividness to it. I wonder if each 14 or 15 line poem started out at as many pages and all the expected nodding bits were taken out.

I can’t yet work out my relationship to the words. Is it so well-wrought and so closed and tight that it is at Indy-500 speed and zinger polish? In a way I wonder if it’s mind candy, yet I enjoy it, such as the poem from the book The Nabokov-Wilson Letters

                 in the Kiwarthas, where we lit
Coleman camp stoves, stripped
                 in the river, and brought God near us.
The best lines of that stiff
                 correspondence we agreed
were Volodya’s.

I love the cheekiness of a person summoning God to come to a camping trip and sit as an equal around the campfire and the best speaker being not God the writer of Lolita. All the dissonance is amusing. All details are very specific to a time and place.

There’s the playfulness of images and contrasts. Language is concrete and simple but used to leverage enormous ideas and an ant colony of working details that amount to a call for action to wake up to political injustices.

There’s the sounds that more than entice. They are heady in Versification about immigrant labour and presumably middle class students trying a furrow, working hard although as outsiders, optional visitors to the vistas

…Watch what

the hands do: while sketched on the scrim
            between sleep and not, her thumb as infant
                        bats snurl into the pack that clings

                        to the flesh of her rising breast. Her eyelids
            want the field bisected, then want it magnified
or widened. We arrived one summer night

in the tobacco belt wearing bedrolls tied
            with twine, bailer twine, and slept
                        in an anachronistic ditch. Morning

                        shaved haze off the immigrant labour
            cattled on flatbeds that rumbled past
the quaintness of lettuce heads.

It feels wrong to nit because the way he says anything is spectacular. It’s a rush of a ride. But he isn’t going to change my mind on any issue or enlighten me but deepen directions I’m already going. Is that a useful message? Yes. To me? Hm.

I could learn a lot from mechanisms and structures but the assumptions of social conscience, of the tragedy of lower class and the blank apathy of the vast washed middle class…how will that sit with me long term.

In a way it is like someone’s about me profile saying
Hate : Hypocrites, smog, poverty and animal cruelty
Love : Music, peace, animals, ‘the good times’

Tell me you love smog and make me love it as well or spin music as a nefarious lucifer slight of hand and then I’m surprised. But with his surprising me line by line, why do I want more surprise? Which is more an answer to myself than to the work.

It’s a damned if you do or don’t sort of thing that I know I’m imposing onto the work. I have issues with overt agreement/alignment with my views and direct disgreement. One seems to have to be unrelated or obliquely different for me to be pleased which is an thing about me not about the work…Effect on what I take away from what his upshots are…If he talks about what I know and agree with, the consensus was reached before I arrived on scene and I don’t add anything, just get reinforced. Where my knowledge doesn’t overlap, I don’t know how to weight it. What fit there is between his and my sense of integrity… accuracy…. poetic licence… non-anal-impressionism? Because I know zilch about this person, (presumably because I’ve been living on the moon) I don’t know whether I can come away informed that “there’s a hotel in Oslo where Ibsen sat/for cognac/before yelling at the actors”, or was it somewhere else? Or was it that who reported that he was yelling was known for embellishing? Or it wasn’t Ibsen but that scanned well?

The answer to any of that is to read more of him. Which won’t be an onerous thing to do.