My panic whenever reviewing poetry can be explained with a story once told to an interviewer by Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins. For an unauthorized lyric sheet, the band’s Japanese label had transcribed her indecipherable singing into English lines like, “Hit me with your airplane / I don’t mend no fence / Yeah, baby, I’m a mud dancer.” Poetry criticism’s failure, I’ve always thought, is that it runs at a similar interpretive deficit as Japanese music industry interns pitted against Scottish post-punks singing in doggerel.
Since modernism, one answer to that failure has been to attempt a poetry that criticizes itself. But 80 years on, blatant self-reflexivity can be a dour affair — after all, haven’t (grad) students learned everything they can from (mis)using parentheses? And doing the reader’s reading for them is never a sign of confident writing. Avoiding many of those traps, but setting a few of his own, Kyle Buckley’s debut book ends up as playful as it is intellectually stringent.
Framed around a long confrontation with a Laundromat owner, Buckley’s essay-novel format is copped from the Surrealists and incorporates loose strands of poems and dense blocks of prose and criticism. I may have just used the S-word but don’t expect shadow-draped palazzos and bird-headed woodcut people. Buckley only has an interest in banal and everyday horrors, as in his never-ending confrontation: “When I present myself in front of the Laundromat, I’m met by the Laundromat owner. I find myself trying to implore him to let me into the Laundromat to get my clothes. Instead, his figure blocks the door entirely […] the owner himself refuses me entrance back into the Laundromat unless I answer his questions about whether or not I might know where his son, Hoopy, might be. They’d had a falling out over the business.”
There are occasional descents into jargon that seem such pure hogwash a smirk is barely visible as punctuation. As well, Buckley’s asides about poetry’s structural contradictions are made much more palpable by the fact that his poems are so damn good, even when they’re presented as mere footnotes: “I am very sullen about it. / And I will not / eat any of the breakfast my grandmother has / made for me. ‘Well I don’t care, you’re not going / out to hunt those animals again today. T-u-f-f.’ / That’s not how you spell tough I mutter, and go / upstairs to stalk the pictures in magazines.” Or in the book’s best paragraph: “That year old Tigerman had a vague cancer. A kind that causes crying. Reduces to the appetite of a house cat. He died after that but we still see him. He said he had California inside him the size of his heart.”
Why does that work so well? All I can say is that at his best Buckley seems to be hitting us with an airplane, while refusing to mend our fence and, come to think of it, he may very well be a mud dancer, given his interest in Laundromats. The poet’s guess is as good as mine.