Urgency

Jones Very, Michael D. Snediker (Ornithopter Press, 2024)

Coincidentally, I began reading Michael D. Snediker’s poetry collection Jones Very on the morning after the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, within hours of learning the outcome that the Socrates of Plato’s Republic had foretold 2,500 years ago.  The state of mind induced in me by that circumstance no doubt influenced the idiosyncratic form my alertness to the poems took.  I read Snediker’s book with an urgency not unrelated to that with which some religious devotees read John’s Apocalypse. When I encountered, early in the prose poem that opens the book, the sentence “The ravine catastrophe misunderstood as a comedizing mist,” I did not so much interpret it in relation to its immediate context (the other sentences in that poem, the poems that follow in the book) or to any intention I could plausibly attribute to the poet, as identify it with my own fraught state of mind and associate it with an event that will alter for the worse my life, the lives of those I love, and the lives of those I live among. I took the sentence, in other words, as a description of the political, and perhaps the cosmic, state of affairs in which I am immersed, and to which that morning I was especially alert.

I did not first read Jones Very “on its own terms,” then, as, in “normal” circumstances I feel responsible in my role as reviewer to do.  Instead of producing a critical evaluation of the book from that first reading, I composed a lament, in the form a cento that gleans sentences from the book.  The lament assumed the form of a prose poem, after the manner of several poems in the book, though taking that form entailed one change to the quoted material: line breaks have been removed.  The sentences retain in the cento the same order in which they appear in Jones Very itself.

The ravine catastrophe misunderstood as a comedizing mist.

Hesitantly the future returns as temperament quailed in distant entropy.  & this is a transferential undertow snagging both sides of the batten.  There will be no more eclogues today.  Of disputed buffoonish brightness, who wheezes binnacle & frequents listening thicket.  Ruck maker held dotingly to the air’s surprise.  False tinder polypore, the bugbear of his arms about my neck.  In the twig work dream he cuts my throat.  Forgive me the arrogance, he told me.  Filigree centurion.  The change came about this way: a depleted tutelary lozenged in concentration.  All the squandered estrangements more or less restored.  My mob grown smaller & his words gone hazarding.  We were strongly built, but this.  & so the dream of a vast intimacy begins to vanish, taken into the wane.  Forgive this charlatan his green glass grain for eyes, leaving their paste on everything we claimed to see.  Dull to temper advice.  At length a theory a tarn of plunder stirring devotional crosshatch.  An architrave we, devoured twice.  The coping of his noddled head.  Our clinkered bird’s inharmonium.  My emerald dynamo of error.  Having taken that liberty, our black hole euphemism.  Despondency scattered in the crowd, lifting along.  The morning in question.  I woke full of ice. 

The irony of my first reading the book so perversely is that it does actually reveal something important about Snediker’s work: my reading itself is very narrow and closed, but Jones Very’s making my reading available to me testifies to the book’s breadth and openness.

Jones Very draws on poetry’s potential to test and extend the limits of sense.  I don’t often think I can state what a given sentence in the book says, but I always perceive myself as awake to what it suggests.  Here, for instance, is the entire section of a poem from which one of the sentences above was taken.

So we were being
borne in mind.

Seven trials conducted
the results of which left us shaken.  I am
shaken now stranded

in the Jupiter wrack
of a plumb line’s plush.

We become the tarot for better
visualizing the trouble fast
approaching.

Having taken that liberty,
our black hole euphemism.

If a friend — over a pint, say — happened on the book and pointed to that passage, asking “What’s that about?” or “What does that even mean?” I’d be hard-pressed to say.  But when I encounter the passage as a reader, I feel what it feels like, no questions asked. 

Snediker’s Jones Very could serve as a proof-text for Lyn Hejinian’s observation that “The desire to tell within the conditions of a discontinuous consciousness seems to constitute the original situation of the poem.”  Its sentences accumulate the way David Markson’s sentences accumulate in Wittgenstein’s Mistress.  I experience them according to the curious epigraph to the “Notes” section of the book, attributed there to Hopkins: “I do not believe school is from schola viz. σχολή, but the Teuton word meaning assemblage, collection, as shoal, a school of whales shell (in a school of form).”  Just so do Snediker’s sentences school; just so do they school me.

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H.L. Hix

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