It should be clear when reading poetry of an entirely inconsequential nature you’re sure to find facts, and waste, and sympathy as an affect, an atmosphere that’s equivalent to comparing the air inside a balloon with the air outside it, and then comparing that to the air ten feet away. And in careful readings of inconsequence, you’re likely to respond, “Really.” Which is the refrain for Callie Garnett’s Shit Hike, which is similar to what she had done in her previous book, Wings in Time. The poems are like meditating, and you come out of it with whatever the emotion is when you say “Really.” Denotatively, “really” is the word that comes between inconsequence and reality. A really poetry that’s like looking out the picture window while you’re stirring your tea. It’s like a School of Quietude that’s breathing fresh air through its nose. Sorry how peaceful that sounds, Ron Silliman. When reading this book, I might recommend reclining on a lounge chair, and asking your spouse what time it is before you start reading.
I am a big fan of inconsequence in poetry. I am a big fan of Rachel Cusk in fiction. I’m not sure yet whether that makes me a critic, an obsequieant, or a philanderer with the concept of personhood. I’m pretty sure, though, it’s really inconsequential. Like flat cherry cola is not very tasty. But it exists as a fact. I’m hopeful that in Callie Garnett’s next book, she’ll have a poem titled, “Flat Cherry Cola,” because she wants to observe the wood grain of the table where someone had left it. It matters whether the couch in the next room was recently upholstered or not. I’m hopefully communicating that Callie Garnett is an ease of thinking. An undertaking for triviality’s sake. It’s like noticing the dimensions of the station’s sign announcing the price of gas. Who cares? “Callie Garnett cares!!” I want to yell in a mannered and subtle and observationally intended exclamation point (two of them to be exact).
Gas price signs about 2 ft high, 12 ft up. I think about all this in the morning.
Lead them on Then spin them around John Berryman said Or that was the general sense of it
(from “Bone & Joint Center Poem”)
I’m conditionally interested in people who say things like “Nothing matters” On one hand, I appreciate the sad certainty to it. On the other hand, I’m a little wary when cynicism serves as a period to thinking. I think it’s possible that the inconsequence of gas signs relates to inevitable traffic relates to the global crisis of climate change lived everywhere. And I understand there can be days when climate change feels inconsequential, and it’s because it’s so big, it’s hard to know whether anyone can do anything about it anyway. So why bother, the giant Cynicism blob says “dispassionately.” But where cynicism can serve as a sturdy wall for leaning your certainty against, Garnett looks at it like a gateway thinking process. From gas sign dimensions come a quote John Berryman said, and Garnett makes the quote feel like garnish to the moment. Like maybe Berryman alwyas knew how people would behave on seeing a gas sign. That man was prescient!!
Garnett’s poems are the softness of standing water. They’re the tactile pleasure picking up an old Erasermate pen you used in the 1980s. They’re a poetry gesturing to the poetic catalog of vast trivial inventories. I’ve always loved John Ashbery’s “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” because it makes seeing rivers feel a little silly (if not futile) What’s the difference, really? Everything can look a little differently, really. Garnett’s poems are what it feels like to sit with a notebook and journal for a little while, thinking about a few rivers you’ve seen. And the act of writing meanders you away from rivers to being in nature, and, in the end, you have a poem about someone in front of you on a shit hike. Maybe you’ll see a river by the end of this thing.
It’s like Christine Sun Kim using hand drawn letter P’s to describe “being resigned” (which, as the strike through indicates, is decidedly not “resignation”). In fact, I don’t know whether to say Kim’s drawing is about why the difference between those “resign” and “resignation” is important, or if the drawing is about the sound of a “P” getting darker, under the pressures of a human hand. When I’m reading a Garnett poem, though, what I feel are these slightly shifting subtleties constantly commenting on one another. And not really concluding what comment is most full of commenting. Like, REALLY, I say to myself in the end. And what emotion is that?
The Sound of Being Resigned, by Christine Sun Kim
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.