COMMON TIME by CHRIS PUSATERI

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Common Time by Chris Pusateri

(Steerage Press, Boulder, CO & Normal, IL, 2012)

Part of my subjectivity as a reader of poems relates to how I also am (or try to be) a poet.  Thus, it’s inevitable that when I read poems I’m also looking closely at technique—I’m deeply interested in how another poet might accomplish our mutual goal (a poem) differently.  And when I see a poet do something fresh, O MOI GAWD: I CELEBRATE!  Because, Reader, most poems I read—even the lovelies—don’t necessarily do something fresh with this most ancient art of poetry.

Again, I’m sensitized (as a practitioner) to technique and while it may not be the most important aspect of this book, what I glean most from Chris Pusateri’s Common Time is how it expands how a poet might approach the title.  Yep, the title—the titling (let’s make it a verb)—of a poem.

There are no notes in this collection so there’s a possibility I misconstrued the insertion of bold-faced phrases within the bodies of the poems.  I read these bold-faced words as titles, a reading somewhat encouraged by how the Contents page uses these same bold-faced words as titular reference points. 

This means, indeed, that the poems’ titles are not placed atop the pages but are within the poems’ bodies.  And as I read the poems, I am struck by how this technique deepens the poems’ approaches.  For example, here is a poem in its entirety where the bold-faced title is in the middle of the poem:

while thy errand is journeyed on

an illuminated skyline

we remember color only

seatbacks of red leather

free wi-fi and it’s warm

[movies are better than cinema]

We’re getting settled

as the program begins

as the program begins

clouds disappear

two empty specimen cups

as I cross the street

as I cross the street

the siren expands

the siren expands

in other words: dead

in other words:

what makes a brain a mind?

a mind a brain made plural

a crowd of breathing t-shirts

[there’s no accounting for memory]

Now, compare the above with a version below created by simply starting the poem where the bold-faced phrase begins:

as the program begins

as the program begins

clouds disappear

two empty specimen cups

as I cross the street

as I cross the street

the siren expands

the siren expands

in other words: dead

in other words:

what makes a brain a mind?

a mind a brain made plural

a crowd of breathing t-shirts

[there’s no accounting for memory]

The latter version is actually a legitimate poem.  But isn’t the former version—the version Pusateri offers—better for being more complex and inserting a layer of activity prior to the (expected) beginning of a poem marked by a title?  And, as a poetics, this is of course natural and perhaps aphorism-as-form: does not the poet experience something before the poet attempts to articulate it into a poem? (Imagination, after all, has to surface from something/someone, right?)  Here’s another example, just the excerpt of another poem that contains its bold-faced title:

An ethics, voluminous

The siren expands

Doesn’t the placement of “An ethics,” before “voluminous” attach a pleasing (well, it’s pleasing to me) mystery?  What’s the meaning or significance of voluminous ethics?  I don’t know, but I can go on a (welcome) mental riff for hours thinking about such … and that’s a gift from the poet.  It’s that “An ethics,” that enervates the notion of a voluminous siren or an expanding siren.  Somehow, it makes sense, too, that a siren could be a symbol for ethics—it could be a warning of something about to be unethical?  In any event, the whole situation has just moved from something expected (an expanding siren) to something unexpected and certainly lacking a stable fixity (how ethical matters might sound a siren).

Poetry’s power, after all, is not just in singing and making its audience sing along.  Poetry might also cause us to think…

Based on the two blurbs by Catherine Wagner and Sarah Mangold, it seems that what Pusateri did to create Common Time is to make notes (?) from everyday living, which he then subsequently used as the basis for creating new poems.  (I could be wrong but that’s neither here or there…)  What’s interesting is that the Contents page is also a poem by itself.  The text here are the (non-bold faced) phrases that “title” the poems in the book.  Then, as Mangold notes, Pusateri took “his cue from Glenn Gould’s ‘two take’ recording process” to “score[] and splice[] the linguistic year.”

If so, the non-bold faced texts of the poems are Pusateri’s riffs, too, from the bold-faced phrases.  Therein can we see the poet’s concerns (“There is a grid within / what we utter.”)  While personal obviously to Pusateri, these concerns also concern and/or interest us.  For instance:

There was a time, at dinner, when her mother

                                                asked if I was gay.

‘But I’m dating your daughter,’ I said.

But there’s that pause again, the one that reminds us

at three removes, that nothing

can be explained, nothing

can be vicarious.

Beyond that strata

there can be only

fiction.

That’s some expansion of “dinner, when”, isn’t it?  Also, here’s

Only when I abandon ethics, do I become

                the inventor I might be? And that’s only

                                about twenty minutes a day. I can

retroactively activate my ethics

                                   by erasing the text

                                   I wrote during the forty minutes

                                a day when I was twice the inventor but

half the man I was born to be.

                                                I think all

                                sentences

    should end in

                                infinities. It lends

                this whole nasty enterprise a note

of hope, like

                leaving one window of your home

                                unboarded

as the hurricane approaches.

As with the prior excerpt, isn’t this an impressive expansion of the title, “infinities. It lends”?  Okay, one more excerpt:

We can see why, lacking an answer,

one might scupper language

in favor or something more gestural.

I lapse to discussing content because I don’t want to be narrow with my enthusiasm over Pusateri’s mode of titling.  “Mode of titling”—doesn’t that sound boring?  And boring is NOT what these poems are.  The poems are smart, engaging, a worthwhile read—Wagner aptly puts it as “observations tighten into aphorism.”  It’s just that Pusateri’s way of presenting them highlights how these poems are smart, engaging, and worthwhile reads.   

Form supports content supports form—while many poets use fragments, Pusateri’s location of unexpected worlds from such fragments is more evocative of deep meditation than a skimming of life’s vicissitudes.  Well done!

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects because she's its editor.  But she is pleased to point you elsewhere to recent reviews of her books. the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA, a collaboration with j/j hastain, is reviewed by Joey Madia at New Mystics Review; Edric Mesmer at Yellow Field 6; and Zvi A. Sesling at Boston Area Small Press & Poetry Scene.  She also just released a new poetry collection, 5 Shades of Gray (i.e. press, Florida, 2012).