Abraham Burickson reading at at Orchard House Café. Photo © 2010 by David St.-Lascaux.
7 July 2010
by David St.-Lascaux
“An Explanation,” one of the poems in Adam Burickson’s new chapbook, Charlie (Codhill Press, 2010), is introduced with a line by Robert Pinsky: “Most of life is possession by the dead,” which Burickson immediately contradicts: “or by the living even, or ourselves, even.” This would be a fine, deserved rebuttal if those brought to life in Charlie were to demonstrate affirmation of life. But, as my philosophy professor once said, Alas – they don’t.
Burickson’s hour-long reading at Manhattan’s Orchard House Café was a serious trip across America with the book’s eponymous protagonist, convening in New York with his compadre (or maybe alter ego) Sal. The Out West, the Midwest, Katrinaville and Upstate New York stud Burickson’s contemplative travelog. Although he’s not as bleak as Cormac McCarthy, Burickson is focused on the sober – a word frequency calculator à là Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler would reveal a cornucopia of old, tears, rust, never, and “clouds and autumn light.” And that’s just the first page. Little is beautiful, ‘cepting windblown grasses, and the echoing sound you hear is that of people’s minds as they wander, lost, past doors overpainted with the letter X (“positively biblical”), marking the Pinskyan presence of dead dogs, or humans.
Burickson, currently an Artist-in-Residence at Cornell University, is a quintessentially American poet with the gift of being able to amplify his work through reading. His alliterative phraseology in “Charlie leaves Sal by the Hot Rocks at the Turkish Bath” –
Troubles sublime in sauna sweat
deep city cellar; watch’em shimmer
– lends itself to recitation, as does his sprung rhythm in “For a Thursday Afternoon,” evoking Marie Ponsot and her admired Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Oh, she’s fuller than her clothes; trace
the brown sweater, the freckled neck.
and some good lines, reflecting a sardonic sense of humor: “And why not a flat world?”; “And God so loved entropy that he made the world”; “… boarding a Greyhound bound for anywhere – toothbrush and underwear”; “… ships are sailing in the desert.”
Besides delivering the parallel monologs and laden repartee of hollow Charlie and mindlost Sal (Ego, perhaps, and Id, recalling Gertrude Stein’s read-it-now Ida), Burickson also contemplates the city architecturally, where we, he states, weren’t meant to live; nor perhaps to travel on reticulated concrete encased in rust-predestined steel, or exiled to the suburbs, or to wither in rural loneliness. For Burickson, the emptiness of the Great Plains is metaphoric. In the city, he excels, recalling Ginsberg and the sharp Brooklynite Puma Perl (knuckle tattoos, erbacce-press, 2009):
The city… particulate matter… apotheosis of human interaction
and
… cities were built
for rapture, his father had said, that tungsten light
and endless road cool mimickry
of the variations of heaven.
It’s also worth noting what Charlie isn’t: an operatic fantasy. The American School, by and large, documents the ravages of our predacious, wasteful ways. But G*d – whether penned by Wallace Stevens or C.K. Williams or Mr. Burickson – it can be sere. Although the lyrics of Bob Dylan aren’t considered by some to be poetry, Dylan’s gift, at last, seems to be this: in costume, parable and absurd juxtaposition – and set to music, he made the heartless inanity of modern America bearable, and laughable; the poets, in contrast, sincere and talented, lugubriously, repeatedly (perhaps needing to reiterate) repeat the old, damned lie: dulce et decorum est contemplari mortem.
Charlie, Burickson says, “is about trying to be human in a mass of humanity, and trying to be male, and to understand what that means inside trying to be human in a world of nesting uncertainty.” Based on personal experience, I daresay he’s going to need more paper.
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Charlie is available from Codhill Press at this link.
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