I heard live at the OIWF parts of Susan Buffam‘s most recent book, The Irrationalist.
Some set me into my happy place of good poetry. I guess at the time Michael Lista’s Bloom impressed me more, because I remarked more about him. That was partly because I wanted to look into his method of writing and see how he constructed all that. The poems themselves were enjoyable and worthwhile. It’s a story I don’t want expunged from memory nor a refund for time spent. It was not opaque to me. Still, it surprises me the staying power of Buffam’s pieces.
Buffam remarked in April’s panel on how she never found writing fun but protracted pain and sweat, but one section of this book surprised her because she enjoyed making it. (I cheered for her internally. May it continue. Maybe that’s me being hedonist but if there is no pleasure, what is the gain? Life is short for ant-labour. Need some cricket time too. :))
Anyway, she described this section as scraps, cast offs. She tried to expand them into something larger or Make Them Into Something. That process kept failing until she realized they are complete in small lines. Interesting. It seemed a useful insight. How often do I try to twist the arm of ideas, shove the hostage this way or that, jump hoops instead of letting the poem be what it is.
Even 3 and 4 months after her reading, there were still poems I wanted to hear again. Such as this bit of page 13, in Death Toll Rises and Black Sea Thinking
And if it is desire I lack
I can sit down on a rock
And wait for my lack
To dissolve.
I can do so
And so I do so
“wait for my lack/To dissolve”. That’s the sort of phrase that makes a day’s reading worthwhile.
The concept of an absence dissipating until it becomes a thing, even an abstract thing like desire, tickled the brain then and still does. There’s something impossible and true-feeling in it.
I like the assumption of reconciliation with the future, assuredness that what is missing will come. There is no other option but cyclical. Each cycle is imperfect and diverging and yet there’s a calmness that overtime, things work and to make them work is a combination of waiting it out and waiting is a kind of active process. It is a choice to wait and a choice to not leave one set of options to do something else. Wait for it.