There is a dilemma to the lyric present. Like where does it exist? Does it belong anywhere? Who in the poem is the who experiencing it? Whose presence is most present. What circumstance? Michael Joseph Walsh’s A Season is conscious of all these questions. With special attention to the poetic structure that could might offer access. Is the lyric most effectively expressed in the episodic? Yes. Would there be an additional lyric layer uncovered if the episodes were to arrest their forward momentum? Yes. Is there lyric possibility in a sentence’s ambiguous phrasing, further unsettled by ambiguous lineation? Yes. In many ways Walsh is a poet urging his reader to stay the moment, pause it, even as the language he uses to make the moment pushes that moment past itself. The language in A Season is an unrelenting , overwhelmingly subtle dilemma.
Consider what happens when you’re reading Laynie Browne, who I would call an advocate for the forward momentum in language. Even to the point where its forward moment could cause it to slip right out of the moment. Attend to what you will, language, is the theme Browne embraces in some books. I’ll always love ‣ because it gives space to that humble, mundane language used for a todo list. What if that language were allowed the freedom of a healthy writing process. The imagination can be anywhere. Indulge it! Let itemizing be a synthesizing! Oh, Laynie Browne. If I see you at another reading, let me be brave enough to offer a bouquet of exclamation points, because writing anything about your poems percolates a long series of exclamations in my chest! Laynie Browne’s poems are a manifesto to slippery attentions, the freedom of attentions going everywhere, and the inherent irony it registers about poetic attention. That could fix itself so easily on the new, and relinquish its hold on what had been new just before that.
Walsh’s “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner” (one of two longer poems that make the entirety of A Season) is almost an anti-Browne poetics, but not quite. Because both Browne and Walsh acknowledge writing substantiates a self deserving of an independent status. Writing creates an Other whose creativity animates or destabilizes what’s supposed to happen in language, making the poems true to their thinking activity. For “Toccata” Walsh establishes two sides to this activity, using two modes of lyric writing. On the recto side of things (like, literally, the poem on the left of the page spread, using italics) stands the voice of a “Foreigner,” making his way through the world. He’s a person. He participates in being and doing and thinking about what his doing does to his being. This side of the poetry is tonally muted, and it’s continually referencing an end that just keeps moving towards an ending. But an ending framed in that way implies a narrative movement forward. It’s the recto side, printed in non-italic font that pulls the forward momentum back, so it can be viewed by the lyric gaze.
This recto-side structural impediment takes a little bit of getting used to. I heard him read at Riffraff, and the shift from italic to non-italic felt more integrated. On the page, the italics use of narrative is both alluring and immersive. Not that the lyric speaker is struggling with a particular set of circumstances, or he’s in an interesting locale. It’s more how the gestures to “struggle” and “daily encumbrance” rhetorically engage with a subjective drama, and it’s performed well.
And ultimately it’s Walsh’s implication of struggle or reconciliation or wonder, his gestures to these sentiments without necessarily giving a precise reason for why the poet is experiencing them that is foundational to the book. The recto-side, non-italic portions in “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner” are adapted from other sources. The italic portions are pulled directly from notebooks dating back ten years. It’s like reading Brian Teare’s Poem Bitten by a Man only to discover in the notes that the book was never supposed to be a book, but a notebook. And you realize you would have read the book differently if you’d known. But you have to wonder why? What does this new barrier to poetry writing do to your reading? Walsh’s book is in a constant dance with these kinds of barriers.
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.