THIS HERE by JIM McCRARY (1)

CREED SHEPARD Reviews

THIS HERE by Jim McCrary

(theenk Books, Palmyra, N.Y., 2015)

           

            Jim McCrary’s work has always been minimalist, the tone of his poems always unconceited and cautious against any self-importance, but at the same time fiercely subjective and scrutinizing of the act of seeing.  Not as a question of objects perceived, but the semantic weight of them (Ed Dorn and Robert Duncan fans should particularly take note).  At the end of the book, he states that it is “a memoir and it is autobiographic and you can believe or not believe its content”, so punctuates the “this or not” quandary of thought that almost every poem in this collection lays out, starting with “Listen to Me While I Die”:

            Listen to me while I die or do not listen to me no different

            Since all will come before this finds the final rhyme

            Or not

            It is a stubborn path he carves for himself, I tell myself, if only because I find myself a little more light heartedly intrigued by the “poetry (and poetics) community of the attention seekers, the conceptualists (especially conceptualists) and other tricksters who are given an aura of importance generated  by much hype in the interwebs—whom McCrary has no patience for. 

            The already airtight conversation called import by

            The participants and commanders who seem to spend

            Countless hours scouring all letter in both known and

            Unknown alphabets just to find something to say.

            Like any of this matters.  Matters.

He continues writing these gorgeous lines as if to qualify his pessismism without raising an actual question to it.  Very likewise to what Stephen Ellis once wrote about Jim’s poetry, “talking about one thing while meaning another in order to register time’s passage”.

            And the end is near(er) than you think it might be

            Just around a corner left to this

            When begun again then the end comes closer to hearing footsteps

            And when you can hear the feet it’s time to beat

            [old tune titles best used as fill to craft]

Then there is his choice of pagination. His poems are moderately long but give so much space inbetween, often resuming at the top of the next page, almost as serialization without numbers. You could say he gives us the freedom to choose if it is serialized, or not. Not.

While it is a poetry accutely aware of mortality, it’s not burdened with telling you how it feels.  It’s as if he’s warming up to the idea of perceptions of the work being recklessly out of his control.  And that’s just fine, because Jim is usually at his best when at his funniest:

            Emily D said

            To me over a beer

            Recently my girlfriend

            Tastes like Watermelon

            And I thought

            What Might that be

            Emily D said to me

            Over a beer

            Recently did you ever

            Just name it

            And I said

            No not me

Part of me wants to argue that the memoir itself as a form is questioned in these poems —I, still dazzled by Hejinian’s My Life, don’t think I’m going to take that line until I do a rigorous survey of memoir poems,This Here’s attempt at memoir stands up most at intervals of those said pieces.  He is partly responding with a skepticism to a lot of the many published memoirs in poetry forms out there.  But let someone more interested in poetry gossip to take that (brightly colored) thread.  But clearly, there is a literary life here that is cheerished, which comes more to the fore in his prose pieces of his life and times with friends Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, and his time working for William S. Bourroughs Communications.  Like his poems they are (doing away with pronouns and prepositions whenever vernaculary {?} possible), soberly precise and sincere. 

            “…[Hunter S.] Thompson was most happy to suggest something new that was needed.  In the midst of all that, he somehow managed to let slip off his lap a Skoal tin half full of exceptional cocaine onto the concrete floor.  I imediately joined him under the table in a valiant attempt to help clean up the mess best we could using the doubled v credit card method.  Quickly done and actually applauded by one of the co-ed servers.”

           

The poem “(Unveiled)” incorporates more of this overt memoir, but employing montage.  In one scene he recalls a moment that itself involves a recall of an even older event, the narrator’s presence of with may have a doubt, but easily discard it: 

            A beautiful lookin man sits next to me on the bench.

            I hunch over even more and gather my skirts.

            My Juliette arrives and sits on the other side of the man.

            He does not yet know that he is finished as a politician

            Janis [Joplin, I’m pretty sure] is sitting in the back booth eating a bagel

Then, again in “(unveiled)”, the pagination. It seems a way of acknowledging the pretense and/but unavoidable desire for closure, likewise the inevitable compulsion  towards a likely disappointed expectation, the forehand knowledge thereof doing nothing to stop you from continuing (read Jim’s previous 2012 chapbook of from Hank’s Original Loose gravel press to see more of what I mean):

            This poem is about my mother’s mother.

            She left most of her charm in Germany.

            Came to Peru.

            Became veiled, as was the way.

Instead of opening the poem to more possibility, the narrator’s skepticism steps in just after the characters are given an historical therefore not just private life.

            Note: just because it is fake doesn’t mean it’s good or not.  Not.

            The whole story is never written as much as some 

            Would hope

            And in fact the mess is made thinking something writ

            is writ with meaning.

The wonderful somehow restrained bluntness in lineation of McCrary’s poems put on upon us is not just a reaction to the blown up world of events that get shoved into out senses, but a series of low key recollections that nevertheless strive for giving remembered experiences their due.  It’s not that life has no meaning or that the text is undecipherable, nor is it the typical veneration of the “everyday” (that certainly gets thrown around, deservedly or not, when talking about 90% of anthologized poets of his generation,).  It’s the acknowledgement that once a narrator writes their act of witness it is already impossible to allow them to be enshrined, amidst the very largeness of a public that a mere single subject properly gets lost in, amidst the imperfection of human memory

            Many things don’t matter now

            Me or not me taken into account

            Not me more than me

            Not me this time more than

            Go ahead

            Celebrate this when finished

            That is one way to “receive”

            Or not

            Always

            Or not

And the expectation that a reader can accept (or not!) a poem of having on him/her to finishish the tale.  What’s to keep the reader from deciding not?  That’s not a question in these poems, but as sugggested in “Cis Boom Ba”, the reader is almost flirtatiously encouraged:

            And didn’t I expect all this

            So long coming and then not here

            Yet turning around to find

            Soemthing left

            Just something

            In case anyeone wanted to

           

[poem pauses long before the next page:] 

           

            Continue

            Always continue

            The list of things

            I am not referring to 

            Is endless

            There are no comments

            Just fill in your own blanks

            Use them up

Tag/file/mark/ This Here under #Deictic Sublime (another thread that should be taken up in talking about his work) and get to reading.

*****


Creed Shepard writes, makes music, art, politically organizes, makes house with his partner, lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas. He's the founding editor and chief producer of Enduring Puberty Press (EPP), a literary and visual art press that specializes in correspondence and epistolary art.  Through EPP he advocates for a strengthening of residential art and literary performances that build interpersonal relationships completely or near completely independent of the given economic infrastructure of local arts communities.