Massey's Exit North Arrives

It’s been a year since Joseph Massey‘s Areas of Fog There’s a sudden upsurge in the amount of Joseph Massey…he interviewed Rae Armantrout and has two new chapbooks coincidentally coming out at the same time Exit North from BookThug and Mock Orange from Longhouse.
The poems are characteristically minimal in Exit North. The palette like the words are controlled, colors of hazy white and greys with a spot of color being a rusted paint can in a sludgy river. It’s a pity to quote it online in that each poem segues to the next and is in such a pretty font. (No note of what).
Even among the short lines that interrupt each phrase, there’s not the sense of disruption so much as continually linking forward and taking time. It doesn’t feel like a poet voice intoning unnatural breaks. Because there’s such interlocked enjambments it’s hard to excise a bit without removing some of the effect but in the title poem there’s this bit. p. 18

Plastic
drifts into hydrangeas
The pause before
one perception
extinguishes another,
extinguishes nostalgia.
Late winter waste
clumped shallow over grates.

With such attention to sound, it would be easy to become comfortable reading and yet there’s the idyllic disrupted by trash and yet that itself is offset by the word plays provoked in the last line, shallow grates suggesting shallow graves, the waste being a shallow layer over the greats, the greatness of the beauty that keeps breaking past whatever we as humans literally throw over the earth.
There’s a quietness, a mindfulness, and desire to embrace the transitory glints among a sort of roar of blind masses shuffling past all the messages of resurging earth. There’s an element of eye for the world and I against the world. An alienation, a making strange paired with an intimate familiarity with place, tetheredness to notice each egret and change from the sidewalk or hilltop. There’s a sort of fatigued hope. We impose so much artificial and yet nature keeps pressing past it. p. 14 in the Backdrop there’s the force of change turning even traditional church bells ringing to the hills into

Electronic church bells
peal past overlapped
crow calls —
one left
circling,
recircling
a car lot.

On one hand there’s straight observation. On the other there’s the suggestion that the crows will outlast the digital dings and like vulture’s they do circles over the cars, and perhaps the implied people.
I’ve heard his writing described as post-apocalyptic. I could see that. There is a grittiness and an absence of people. People are evidenced everywhere in broken remnants left behind but there are no conversations, no motion of people. The closest it comes to having a sense of being not one sentient soul in the universe is the poem on p. 28 in One Take where,

Even speech
sputters out
— an echo
fallen around us.

There isn’t the sense of complaint so much as a sort of acknowledgement of grief and beauty incongruously coinciding. And this collection isn’t entirely unpopulated. In Found there is the sound of children or dogs at the point where they play and are indistinguishable.

There’s also an irregularity in the uniformity of noticing grit where the landscape’s grandeur humbles. It and impulse to reach for a word, that feeling inside, is sufficient and satisfying by themselves. There’s a centred calm.
Some of the poetic meditations feel like disappointed nostalgia for a purity of natural world. There is longing and wistfulness and embracing of the beauty inclusive of all the graffiti and cigarette butts.
The sweeps of landscape are the focus but the garbage is included, unblinkingly. Pollution is never pulled out of the scene. Is it prettified or just allowing a different depth and nuance to the ache of land. There’s a suppressed or not so supressed distress as the eye gets pulled to each thing out of place in a place, foreclosure signs, plastic bags caught in flowers, broken bottles. It is a desolate sort of vision and yet there’s the sense of small elations within it. For example, p. 25, in Motion

Highway overpass —
tagged concrete,
trash-stitched fence —
anchors sky. White
and yellow limbs
lean in
traffic’s opposite direction.

Love the accuracy and beauty in ugliness of the trash-stitched fence. There’s the gang tagging set inside a nature walkabout. It isn’t excised but noted. The underpass is and isn’t set in opposition to nature. The built world that we can touch is a connector to the sky and pulls the sky down. It works whether visually speaking of the concrete as being like feet of the giant sky, or the highway being a producer of such exhaust fumes that it is the mechanism by which sky lowers itself to us, visible.
There’s a cross-stitching in sound and the places of pause seem to set pace of footsteps not jolt at messing with the meaning.
The last line scanned on its own stands on its own and yet wobbles.
The earlier poems with the smog haze’s yellow over landscape and sun has now transferred to the body of the speaker, become the body of the viewer and yet while it all internalized thru this suggestion of color, there’s a leaning against the momentum, of traffic, of perhaps of self.