There are ways to paint the mural of a city where it’s not just a city, its locations, its “people” represented by a handful of faces or bodies that we would have to assume are just like the people living there, or maybe these are the people who were famous at one time for living there. Murals do a lot of interesting, maybe kitschy work. And maybe the similarity between Tony Mancus’s book and a mural painted on the side of a building isn’t altogether matched. What I’m trying to catch in the comparison is the broad brush Mancus brings to his landscape. The book involves a city, presumably where he has lived, or he’s moved to with the “you” that appears in a familiar and affectionate light. Then that landscape is painted with the poet’s impression, what he sees in the landscape, or what he would imprint upon it so it better resembled what he would like to see. Like wildness, or ghosts, something poetically charged that does justice to the feelings he would like to maintain about this city even after its’ been dulled by what is eventually not new, only mundane.
The book is like an investment in wonder, when wonder need not be what makes everything sparkle, but instead meaningful and contented. Wonder as a leather basketball where some of the leather patches are wearing off. Is that even a thing?
And what’s striking to me is how Mancus marks the landscape. Like using my trope above about the mural, the poems often feel as though they shift back and forth between observation of the world and mental sensation of being a part of that world. And the shift from external observation to internal experience is like what happens when something passes through a cell membrane (or what I might be remembering from my high school teacher’s explanation about cell membranes). Like there’s this grace note of resistance that might account for the transition from external and then back. And with Mancus this grace note is a subtly experienced part of the mural. It reminds me of the surging subjectivity in Jorie Graham’s book, ‣. Where she observes the world and observes herself observing the world, and the self-awareness is both a containment on the wonder she experiences knowing both reality and meta-reality. But her discursive delivery moving between these two carries a momentum that registers that wonder in a different light.
In Mancus, bring that different light into the flâneur’s sensibility. But make it where the man has a home he returns to. A family he loves. His sense of isolation, independence, ennui, and persistent wonder at the world of the present moment is perforated by his domestic life—which grounds him. Which, yes, is so unlike the flâneur. But where I think comparing Mancus’s book to it is in his treatment of urban life. He brings a range of impressions so broad. And it feels to me like a geometric plane (which is why I like comparing it to a mural), a tonal accommodation where anything can be what it’s like to live a daily urban life.
I wrote a book review on Martha Ronk’s ‣, where I talked about her expansive take on domestic life, domestic objects, rooms of a house. For me, Mancus takes that impulse to city streets. And what makes that so appealing is its statement about the present moment. Anything can happen. Any sense of what this moment was like, or what it’s equivalent to, can appear in the poem. Like if the conventional take on the flâneur is the man detached from anything but the moment where he is present, and the city around him is present, then Mancus complicates that sensibility and also capitalizes on it. It constructs a frame of mind for seeing the world.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.