POETICKS

EXPERIODDICA                                      November/December 2014

Aftermaths
LeRoy Gorman
Puddle of Sky Press
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
www.puddlesofskypress.com

Truck
Publisher: Halvard Johnson, Guest Editor: Jerry McGuire
www.halvard-johnson.blogspot.com/2014­_08_­01_archive.html

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If the world were as I wish it were, I’d just have to quote this, the only thing on the back cover of LeRoy Gorman’s recent chapbook, Aftermaths:

And by the end of 2015, ten million copies of it would have been sold (and LeRoy would have sent me and Small Press Review a hundred grand each).  Or at least one visible critic of poetry in America would have informed his readers of the book.  Of course, I’m ridiculously biased toward it because it consists entirely of mathematical poems, as I define the term, and they are my specialty as a poet; because LeRoy has been a friend of mine through the mail (and cyberspace) for around a quarter of a century; because he is also a leading figure in North American haiku, one of the kinds of poetry I think the poetry establishment has for too long treated unfairly (outright stupidly, in fact); and because he has the same first name as my maternal grandfather and one of his sons.

Hey, if you doesn’t agree with my assessment of the equation above, get losted (to the power of five zillion)!  Seriously, dear readers, the equation is a wonderful poem—I’d call it a haiku although aficionados of that variety of poetry would consider it too thought-requiring to qualify as that (traditionally, the proportion of feeling to thinking a haiku should induce should be near infinity).  It’s wonderful because (1) “puddle of sky” is a charming expression of a pleasant image of nature beautifully “mis-expressed”—i.e., rendered in an interestingly “wrong” way (as two few mainstream poems are); (2) because the poem as a whole carries out two mathematical operations: simple addition and doing whatever it’s called (and I can’t recall or never knew) to increase a term’s value by multiplying it by itself a certain number of times (in this case, a “Sky” number of times); (3) ) because of the poem’s appropriate but entirely unexpected visual maneuver at its end; and, finally, (4) because the poem conveys something arrestingly true, if you think about it long enough.

Since more than a few of you may not immediately see why its unexpected upside-down exclamation mark is so cleverly, blessedly right, I guess I should say a bit more about it.  It is right because puddles that are exponentially expanded–ha, I remembered how to describe that operation, after all!  Now, as I was saying, exponentially expanded puddles will vividly reflect whatever sky they’re under . . . upside-down.  Am I right or am I not?!

I suppose I should explain why what the poem conveys is “arrestingly true,” too.  Actually it’s not that obvious.  I certainly took a while to get it.  What I find it to say is that by taking poetry, as represented by the quantity “puddles of” multiplied by itself a “Sky” number of times, which should produce a vast number of puddles with all kinds of different hues of sky, and cloud formations, and birds and other forms of sky-life, and earthlife fringing a sky, and adding it to a press, thus making it available to the public, you will get something Very Happy, like an upside-down exclamation point.

If you include what’s on its front and back covers, and I do, Aftermaths contains 19 poems.  They range widely in subject matter: one, for instance, is in homage to Basho, the famous composer of haiku; another has to do with Wile E. Coyote.  Then there’s the one that defines life as the quantity, “if”—squared.  It’s hard to pick out a favorite from so many good specimens, but mine might be the one whose title is “to die in one’s sleep”; it consists of just the letter z—to the power of z.  I’m certain I won’t encounter a poetry collection as good as  Aftermaths for a long, long time.

Meanwhile, mathematical poetry was recently making news elsewhere: at the cyberzine, Truck, where my latest specimen of it appeared on 15 August.  If the world were as I wish it were, you’d already know this because every newspaper in America would have mentioned it, and the best columnists would be arguing about whether or not it was my best mathematical poem ever or not.  But there would be those condemning it as rubbish, too, since I’d be bored if everybody agreed with everything I did or thought.  I gotta have knuckleheads to argue with!

Truck has been doing an excellent job making all kinds of poetries public since it occurred to Halvard Johnson, its publisher, to set it up in the spring of 2011.  His commendable idea was to ask various poets to guest edit an issue for a month.  Since he is sympathetic to just about every possible kind of poetry, the editors he has chosen have included Wendy Battin, Skip Fox, Lewis LaCook, Larissa Shmailo, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, David Graham, Mark Weiss, John M. Bennett (Mr. HyperNonWilshberian, himself, for Pete’s sake!) and Chris Lott, to give you an idea of the mix—what’s more, he has allowed them to drive Truck any which way they want to (which accounts for my getting into it).

The editor of the issue under discussion here, Jerry McGuire, has used his editorial freedom to greatly increase the value of his trip, in my view, by stuffing it (see below) with commentaries on each poet that jitter fascinatingly every which way out of his interest in mediation—which, he tells us, is “how the various stuff of our lives (a ten-year-old Romanian girl once told me that ‘stuff’ was her favorite English word) affects how we produce and consume things, especially works of art.”  Hence, his decision this month “to use Truck to present a variety of visual and verbal (sometimes both) works that address questions of mediation.”

One such work particularly took my seeing and reading eyes (and the two are different!), Chantel Langlinais Carlson’s “Aperture.”  This opens with rough drafts in charmingly individual cursive using a quill pen and two shades of blue ink.  Out of one medium and into standard black print the drafts flow and splash to form the following final draft:

Past thyme and rain on the window’s
stillness, a woman’s gaze
turns to blue. Quilled in blue seeped through
to vein the blood with ink
now gone dry.  A woman’s gaze turns
to her skin, Rorschach forms
islands and daggers and ships sail
across life lines once held
in a gypsy’s palm. The bourbon
moon never tasted so good.
A woman’s gaze turns to shut
ticks and stocks of time-crossed memory.
Drawn feathered. Drawn blue.

Or: a view of a woman, a view of her gaze through a window, a view of her memories coalescing as poetry, a view of the other views in “quilled” blue, a view of forever ongoing time . .