What follows is from the column I’m working on for the January/February issue of  Small Press Review.  I knocked it out a little while ago.

Guy Beining, a frequent contributor to ZYX is represented by an intriguing poem called, “Spheres of Clouds and Skulls,” which alone puts the zine at the forefront of experioddica.  A passage to give the flavor of his “Sphere of Clouds and Skulls: “Prior to heat there is worship.//barely audible one hears- who is the guest of/ the dead bird? Who holds a hanger as grail/ upside down in water?/ the corpse in all of us moves out/ a bit & on spigot we watch a form rotate/ spawn clouds between legs and along tongue.// Direction is a hazard that makes us move.// beyond cloud cover there is the public dance.” What is most wondrous-fine to me about the poem, though, is what Beining does in it with clouds (particularly “cloud cover”), constantly, weirdfully renewingly riffing off them, under-deepening the poem with their presence even when unmentioned, and ending the poem with a moon’s view of them.

I was all set to put off work on the column until this afternoon. (It is now around ten a.m.) To pretend I was serious about working on it, though, I put what I’d so far written up on my computer screen. Then, uncharacteristically for me–at least now–I thought I’d put in a line about the importance of clouds in the poem. Once I’d done that, I kept going and got the whole paragraph done in two minutes or less. Not a great accomplishment, as I had previously typed the extract from Guy’s poem. I’d already come up with my slant on the clouds and been mulling it over, too. What was new was that I saw a way to organize my take on the whole poem around it–after staying away from the column for a week or more because I couldn’t think how to deal with the poem. I knew I didn’t have room to say much about it but wanted to at least be interestingly informative about it.

The paragraph made me Very Happy for several reasons. It got me finally back into the essay. It took care of the only part I thought it’d be difficult, so am confident I’ll finish a near-final draft of it today. It gave me something write about here. Most of all, it made me feel good about my writing skill–I’d had fun and said a few good things about something important. Two things tend to make me feel that way about something I’ve written about a poem : a solution to the poem that has been giving me trouble that I believe in, and chances to play with the language with stuff like “weirdfully renewingly” and “underdeepening.” The latter is self-indulgent, but what’s the point of doing anything if you can’t indulge yourself, at least a little? Aside from that, there have to be people around for whom such words are fun, too.

* * * * *

It’s now four in the afternoon.  I was hoping to have heard back from Poets House so I could pass it on, but I haven’t, so I’m posting this now.

What follows is from the column I’m working on for the January/February issue of  Small Press Review.  I knocked it out a little while ago.

Guy Beining, a frequent contributor to ZYX is represented by an intriguing poem called, “Spheres of Clouds and Skulls,” which alone puts the zine at the forefront of experioddica.  A passage to give the flavor of his “Sphere of Clouds and Skulls: “Prior to heat there is worship.//barely audible one hears- who is the guest of/ the dead bird? Who holds a hanger as grail/ upside down in water?/ the corpse in all of us moves out/ a bit & on spigot we watch a form rotate/ spawn clouds between legs and along tongue.// Direction is a hazard that makes us move.// beyond cloud cover there is the public dance.” What is most wondrous-fine to me about the poem, though, is what Beining does in it with clouds (particularly “cloud cover”), constantly, weirdfully renewingly riffing off them, under-deepening the poem with their presence even when unmentioned, and ending the poem with a moon’s view of them.

I was all set to put off work on the column until this afternoon. (It is now around ten a.m.) To pretend I was serious about working on it, though, I put what I’d so far written up on my computer screen. Then, uncharacteristically for me–at least now–I thought I’d put in a line about the importance of clouds in the poem. Once I’d done that, I kept going and got the whole paragraph done in two minutes or less. Not a great accomplishment, as I had previously typed the extract from Guy’s poem. I’d already come up with my slant on the clouds and been mulling it over, too. What was new was that I saw a way to organize my take on the whole poem around it–after staying away from the column for a week or more because I couldn’t think how to deal with the poem. I knew I didn’t have room to say much about it but wanted to at least be interestingly informative about it.

The paragraph made me Very Happy for several reasons. It got me finally back into the essay. It took care of the only part I thought it’d be difficult, so am confident I’ll finish a near-final draft of it today. It gave me something write about here. Most of all, it made me feel good about my writing skill–I’d had fun and said a few good things about something important. Two things tend to make me feel that way about something I’ve written about a poem : a solution to the poem that has been giving me trouble that I believe in, and chances to play with the language with stuff like “weirdfully renewingly” and “underdeepening.” The latter is self-indulgent, but what’s the point of doing anything if you can’t indulge yourself, at least a little? Aside from that, there have to be people around for whom such words are fun, too.

* * * * *

It’s now four in the afternoon.  I was hoping to have heard back from Poets House so I could pass it on, but I haven’t, so I’m posting this now.

Tags: Small Press Review

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Guy R. Beining, Literary Criticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.