Literature: Two local (and brilliant) poets you probably haven't heard of

JAMES BELFLOWER

James Belflower’s work appears or is forthcoming in: Jacket, 580 Split, EOAGH, LIT, First Intensity, Coconut, and Abovo, among others. And Also a Fountain, his collaborative chapbook with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez, is forthcoming from NeOPepper Press. He was a finalist for the 2008 Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the National Poetry Series Competition, a 2007 Pushcart nominee and winner of the 2007 Juked Magazine poetry prize. He runs PotLatch Poetry, a site dedicated to the free exchange of poetry books, journals, chapbooks and ephemera.

A year ago, I described James’s work as criminal: indecent, thieving and composed of a linguistic momentum comparable to a getaway. Today, I would like to describe James’s work in the specific terms of another criminal act (depending on what country you’re in), called Parkour.

Parkour is defined as An athletic discipline or performance art in which practitioners traverse any environment in the most efficient way possible using their physical abilities, and which commonly involves running, jumping, vaulting, rolling and other similar physical movements.

James’s two most recent projects, The Pregnancy of Contour and Commuter, explore the questions of movement. And if poetry is language charged to the smallest unit, then these works are composed of the most efficient, disciplined movement, a temporary symmetry of a few seconds, an explosion of verbs. But disinclined to closure, this language of motion also short-circuits, dips into hideaways, detours, separates, pauses. These words invade, even to the point of instructing, rather explicitly, to the reader/performer how to express the work. It is this juxtaposition of violent invasiveness, a poetry that asks us read with the body poised, and a sense of forgiveness, a music of empathy, that asks us to listen to the history of ourselves, that these pieces project off the page.

text below from The Pregnancy of Contour

To Address Inviscid Flow:

It will be a much different pregnancy than we are accustomed to. If I cannot boundary a fief can it remain a fife, if I remain in ignorance throughout, can it remain a fief, if I use language other than from stones on a tablet can it remain a fief, if I read it as if it is as drone at least one other language underneath can it remain a fief, if I remove that language and place it on top can it remain if or if I remove the remains of it can if become it and therefore if I…

a formula of negligence…

a formula for ignorance…

a formula for fascination…

It does equal, does not equal. (is there an almost equals, or almost does not equal?) The majority of readers will breeze past this formula, as I have for lack of comprehension. I’ll attempt to address what it means to me, send it on its way…

“Part of any endeavor is ignorance. Part of it is an attempt to repose with fascination, what we might momentarily label the “tourist phase/flow.” Let’s argue that p in the equation is the p which begins both previous sentences. So, in some ways it means part in other senses it establishes the context of the entire sentence. So some letters/words are much more important than others?

I don’t know hoWho). Both address and address. My attempt to address viscous. One and the same. It is to letter, which isn’t similar to address. To speak in the correct direction, to address address. This is that. For our purposes that will be from this point forward. Until we change directions. That is all…

…perhaps. Or perhaps, how is also who, at least when addressed, or is it addressed?

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ANNE HEIDE

Anne Heide is the author of a forthcoming book of poems, Echo Robin (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and two chapbooks, Specimen, Specimens (Etherdome), and Residuum::Against (Woodland Editions). Her work has appeared in various journals including New American Writing, Notre Dame Review, New Orleans Review, and Court Green, among others.

The past has the voice of each imprint, each caress or wound we left around, in the ground, or in a creature. A room is filled with various noises, which silence puts in order. You listen to them the moment they approach the lamp to be burned like a swarm of voluptuous moths. Your body, as mine, responds with a thousand invisible marks whose history we are the only ones to know and not tell. –Edmund Jabes
Anne’s collection, Echo, Robin takes the narrative of a murder event as it’s subject but resists a process of total decomposition. Rather, she begins with the residue, imprint, aftershock of disaster. Her language operates through the shape of memory, loaded like a gun, fragile like an egg, edgy with the cannibal relationship between silence and noise. “I am the hazard of one person,” she writes and so an ethereal “I” echoes “I” becomes lost without becoming loss, bends over a body of water much like the original tale of Echo and Narcissus then swallows a palm. Our narrator is human, a thief, and anonymous, an encasement of language that bears witness without bearing judgment. What perhaps makes the work most restlessly beautiful, is that although organized around multi-perspectival language, the voice has the architecture of an undeniable singularity, an “I” that cannot escape from itself, cannot escape from the swarm of thoughts, obsessions and histories that speak it.

text below from Echo, Robin

In the long span of event, there is a present that is hollow
by necessity,

a hollow creek that wraps the present. A home for
creek: I’ll be home.

Because this has been unable to escape me. I am alone for all my
storied selves,

for all my wooded fables. By speaking the
creek

Am I possible. Am

I gentle

Found the others.

Though: I am the hazard of one person.