Two from the Magnificent Field

I have a lot of respect for, and often get pleasure from, coincidence. One of my favorite word coinages is coincidensity, for when multiple connections appear. (I highly recommend the Simon & Schuster book Fluke, by Brian Klaas, about the role of coincidence in historical events and daily life.)

I received S/2004 N1 from James Yeary soon after it came out (2018); it got lost on the bookshelves. Rone Shavers’ Ten Crônicas had been sent to Unlikely Stories in 2021, before I was staff reviewer. The two books met when I was cleaning up book shelves a little, and I started thinking about reviewing them together—in part due to their, 5 x 6½ size—when I noticed they were from the same publisher—The Magnificent Field.

The poems in James Yeary’s s/2004 N1 (I have no idea what the title means) were written for a soundtrack, with titles provided by another source. So I try to ignore the titles—though they’re charming and I’m a firm believer in coincidence—and realize the poems with the sound would be a different experience that simply the book, On these small pages the poems are around ½ a page wide and no more than 24 lines.

But there’s a lot in here—humor, mystery, sudden multi-dimensional turns and science. The book begins with

Storms culled by mathematicians
mantle mirror blood and eyelash
ionic waters sometimes called
diamond dandruff

[12/./17]

Okay, using scientific terms with stellar imagination, or is this surrealism (a term I’ve never fully understood but have often been accused of writing):

prawns guide sailors to shore
with whips that mimic acoustic
 
radiation and laughs that collapse
early butane colonies strung along
 
the edge of the continent.

[panda BLUEmiere]

I get giddy with this language as well as the fun of speculation and concepts:

Orbiter, spacetime adjusts to conform
to the prevailing political paradigm.
 
In this universe,
Beethoven lacked patience,
You can’t blow thru a wall
Of frozen ammonia with a canoe

[Dummy Pool]

So many sparkles, a-has, head-scratches and laughs in just 16 poems.

The coldest part of space
with our number in it
a logarithmic scale
of incomprehensible distance
ending in twisting staircases
we’ve somehow managed to ascend

[Social Rosewater]

There are only 10 poems in Rone Shaver’s Ten Crônicas, but they spread over 36 pages. Wikipedia says “Crônica is a literary genre that combines journalistic reporting with a literary flair.” And: “Defining crônica is difficult and contentious, as the genre is flexible, malleable, and mutating.”

Or as Shavers says himself in “On the Form”:

To ask what is a crônica is similar to asking what is form? A crônica is both ligament and foundation, that which simultaneously connects and exposes the fissures between connections. In short, the cronica is not so much a transcription as it is a construction, the language of true cohesion.

While Yeary’s poems effervesce off the page, with eyes into space and time, Shavers’ work tends to look inward, to the components and expectations of poetry and language. And these are prose poems.

Is a text still a text if it’s not meant to be understood?” begins the poem “Aphro-Poesis,” which ends: “So then maybe the aphorism is the point? But who would ever want to/ structure so much chaos? Who thought it a good idea to plan spontaneity?

A stone, a reed, a horse on fire, afraid of the stream.

Is the subject here self-referentiality? Is the book just one crônica? The deception of labels can be used self-consciously, provocatively. When you hold one mirror against another there can be many different results, from infinite repetition to out of focus darkness.

This is how it ends again. In a wave of referential excess, post-mortem. The doldrums, a fear of feeling anything.

[Journal des Debates]

The discussion/exploration does often take voice, as speech is itself many different forms. From the same poem:

I mean, I coulda stayed in jail. At least there I would have learned how to cut hair—/ and I prolly woulda got swole. But y’all out here acting like something wrong/with having literary ambition. Form is form; form is life!

Speech is relationship, identity, impression. There is so much going on in this book, a full array of rhetorical devices, tongue in cheek, an ouroboros in the brain, echoing as it sheds alleys and replicants. The closing piece “On the Aesthetic” (“On the Form” starts the book) is such a swirl onto itself. Here are three snips, including the opening:

I use direct address because there are some things that must be addressed directly.

On the confessional aspects: Yes, there’s a confessional aspect to the crônica .but the confessions are not at all personal. Instead, the crônica highlights a persona, a winking avatar in place of the whole of the writer.

As verdant as an oil slick, as metaphorical as cheese. The cat, gazing out the window, softly singing her prayers and swatting at things outside her grasp.

The Magnificent Field, which published both these books, subtitles itself “An occasional vehicle for text practice and ritual.” Both James Yeary and Rone Shavers are skilled beyond practice, and confident in their writing where the ritual is involved in every word, so it doesn’t stand out as ritual. They aren’t grasping but releasing, radiating, their words drawing diagrams in the air of our brains as the words unpack and rest.

While both writers enthusiastically use a full of array of languages tools and capabilities, they tend to walk in different fields, that I won’t try to summarize in a few words each. Yeary writes in short lines, allowing quicker sharp turns, while Shaver’s long lines get us conversationally involved, and then comes the sudden turn of a new stanza. Different rides and territories but both worth visiting and re-visiting, as they affect how we see the world around us, how we think of the words that saturate us.