A busy day at the computer today—also am making a stracotto (Italian pot roast) for a party tomorrow—also have to wait for a phone repairperson because my landline won’t work when it rains (if you’re reading, Verizon, although you keep doubting me: yes, I’m absolutely sure of this connection)—luckily I have this blog to pull me back to reality (poetry), so let me grab a book or journal off the pile and see what I find.
A year or two ago, someone posted on the Buffalo listserv about Joe Francis Doerr, who I’d never heard of. Never having heard of Doerr was actually the subject of the original post, which was to the effect that the poster had come across this book Order of the Ordinary which was one of the best books he’d read in a while and who the hell was this guy?
I ordered the book and was impressed. Doerr is American but his poems seem to have British (specifically Irish) influences, and are at their best in long sequences like “Futhark2K” and “Corrigenda.” His range encompasses rhymed sonnets, borrowings from myth, history, science, and “experiments in meta-translation.” The subjects of his questioning are historical, biographical, memoiristic, epiphanic, epistemological. I think it’s this range that I find most exciting: how many poets, even some of the best, find a chord and keep playing it? Doerr seems determined to re-invent form, content, mode, tone, diction with each poem, to exploit every resource of language and graphic. A jacket quote from John Kinsella says that the book “disturbs all the codes.”
I think that the Buffalo list-server was intrigued partly by the terseness of the paraphernalia surrounding Doerr’s work: there are few acknowledgements of journal publications in his book, and those pretty obscure; no end notes, where some of the work begs for explication; no work that I could find dated from after the book’s publication, by Salt, in 2003.
It’s hard to know what to quote here, since no one piece could be representative and the wonder of the invention comes in the accumulation. But coming up in the next post are a few sections from “Furthark2K.”
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