THE POETICS OF
EVERYDAY LIFE
Join the Planets: New and
Selected Poemsby Reed Bye
(United Artist Books 2005).
With the publication of Reed Bye’s Join the Planets: New and Selected
Poems, United Artist Books has made available in one handsome edition
three decades’work from an important poet and professor at Naropa
University in Boulder, Colorado.
In the second poem of the book—“Some Magic at the Dump”—the reader is introduced to one of the foundations of Bye’s poetic practice: the 24/7 act of paying close attention to one’s surroundings. Like Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the writers of the New York School, Bye draws our attention to the shoved-aside and overlooked aspects of daily life, honoring them with a gentle and playful awareness. He forgoes the easy comforts of the conventionally poetic in favor of a sharp-eyed look at the small events that compose our works and days:
Late September
gulls flying in
low sun, I’m driving
red International
Charley’s ahead in brown van
We reach Marshall landfill
at the same moment
swing in parallel arcs
& back in
It is instances like this—a simple trip to the dump to drop off some “ash, hackberry, plum and Chinese elm trimmings” reported with casual intimacy and precise detail—that ground Bye’s poetry in the ordinary. Names of friends, family, pets and favorite haunts populate many of the poems imbuing them with a homey, lived-in air. As a result, we as readers get the sense that our lives too deserve the same appreciation Bye invests in even the most mundane of tasks. Indeed, by titling his poem “Some Magic at the Dump” Bye suggests that all we need to transform a hum-drum daily chore from dead-time into an authentic experience is to literally come to our senses.
Another remarkable aspect of Bye’s work is its formal variety and inclusivity. There is a ceaselessly inquiring intelligence at work in these poems that manifests as an unwillingness to content itself with mastery of a single mode. For mastery implies an end to curiosity and the settling into stale, by-wrote routine—the very antithesis of Bye’s habit-smashing poetics.
Seeing through the trap of all fixed positions and placing his trust in a poetics of ubiquitous variation, Bye moves fluidly from form to form including: wide-eyed, talky bird walks (“May Ramble”); tightly-crafted yet radically disjunctive word-by-word short-lined poems where materials are chosen as much by eye and ear as by any conventional sense; a “Scratchy Perkins” ballad that sounds a lot like Yankee Doodle on the set of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; surrealistic dream outtakes; straight-ahead Brainardesque memory snippets (“Three Times”); and even an hilarious three scene play in verse starring It-ball, A lowered dowager, O by the way woman, and Barrette reminiscent of Kenneth Koch’s 1000 Avant Garde Plays and Gertrude Stein’s wacky forays into drama. Thus, Bye accounts for, in a tender-hearted, inclusive, and intensely musical way, the welter of linguistic textures that manifest moment-to-moment, giving each its due.
Reading these works, one gets the feeling that Bye doesn’t write so much to put down what he already knows as to find out where he is right now in a wide-awake (and often slap-stick) grappling with that most intangible of artistic materials—language. Instead of the sure-footed expert trotting through a few of his well-rehearsed moves, we get a lively, inquisitive, Steinian “beginning again and again” always attentive to the absolutely unique poem under hand: think Suzuki-roshi’s “beginner’s mind” done poetry-style.
However, Bye’s inclusivity is not restricted merely to the level of form; he also borrows from a wide array of contemporary avant-garde poetic practices. He is just as likely to delve into the disjunctive, and non-linear as he is to recount a tale from the Wild West (albeit in a mode more akin to Max Jacob than Zane Grey).
In his poem “Spark”, Bye takes this eclectic approach to composition as his subject matter. Beginning with a tongue-in-cheek traditional apostrophe to morning—“Break, morning, in your fashion”—the poem quickly and humorously moves to the matter-at-hand: “fix the plunger.” After another brief look at the local environs—“Now a haze-in blazes sky’s/new blouse of filtered light/on Flatiron paws…”—and a dash of personal reportage—“a simple drink of coffee and a/violent series/of sneezes/the dishes done in mid-December,/dog-sprint after squirrels”—the poem begins a series of negations centered around what might be called the Who’s Who of the New American Poetry, its predecessors and inheritors: Objectivism, Personism, Shaman Bard’s Prophetic Funnel (a friendly elbow- to-the-ribs for Naropa’s own Ginsberg!), Projectivism and Language School poetics. Here, for example, are two stanzas where he weighs the practices of the Objectivist and New York Schools:
Not simply an objectivism
or the late empirical
poem: a spider bails
down the air before the
wall onto a book lying in
the lap of him or me
Not only that personism
that weaves a see-through web
to keep from lifting off from
human feeling, speak the best
of worlds we know, the ones with
people on its corners in their skins
Besides the to-a-tee thumbnail sketches of these different approaches, notice how Bye characteristically doesn’t dismiss either “objectivism” or “personism” out of hand; he is too considerate and careful a thinker for that. The adverbs “simply” and “only” gesture towards a pluralistic stance that refuses to be confined to any single aesthetic program. Thus, through a kind of via negativa, Bye absorbs the insights, advances and critiques of each school, but ultimately refuses to become a card-carrying member of any one of them.
Near its end, the poem takes an interesting turn as the reader encounters Manjusri Bodhisattva, the embodiment of Wisdom often portrayed with a flaming sword and frequently paired on an altar with Avalokiteshvara, the ten thousand armed Bodhisattva of Compassion:
Not one but all of these in
Manjusri’s lovely face, his sword
and vessel gleaming in
the light of all such traces
Bye seems to claim that real wisdom—poetic and otherwise—arises from not solidifying into a predictable stance that might blind one to the world’s dazzling unpredictability. And since wisdom and compassion are flip sides of the same coin in buddhism, we see that Bye’s push towards inclusivity also enacts a democratic ethics where each person, poem and particular is given its place at the table.
Again and again, these poems warn us (though through exemplification and not hectoring finger-wagging) against getting stuck in old comforts and making too much of oneself or one’s silly little ideas. At a moment in literary history when die-hard allegiances to schools, credos and adamantine aesthetic codes seem an increasingly antiquated, macho and grandiose preoccupation, Bye’s transgressive, communitarian stance prods us, as readers and writers alike, to step across apparently contradictory aesthetic terrains and embrace/employ them allas potentially interesting “Things to Do”.
It is important to note as well that Bye’s poetry is often laugh-out-loud hilarious. Indeed, with the keen-eyed attention to the daily mentioned above, humor is another key binding ingredient in this delightful, many-flavored poetic gumbo. Take the following passage from the fifteen page narrative poem “Border Theme” that tells the rollicking story of failed cowboy-prospector Dan Dolan, the would-be matchless cigar lighter inven-
tor Caesar Romero and the seductive Ruby Braff:
Then something made a sound in the trees and he turned
and froze in stark terror! He dropped the gun and ran
yelping into the night, his hands over his ears.
He had seen the face of the Grinning Mule
and heard its horrible abbreviated laugh
like a stuck goose with hiccups.
Or the following lines from an early poem “Indiana”
In the coffee shop now
nothing sexual but
the Declaration of Independence
placemat.
What an excellent
taut nippled document—
governments are instituted
to secure individual rights for their peoples.
When they fuck up, they’re out.
I, for one, will never think of the Founding Fathers the same way again! Bye’s humor extends to himself and his writerly persona. In the poem titled “Loop Of The Mastery Runs Out When The Masking Tape Runs Out”, (a piece that pokes fun at the very idea of mastering anythingmost of all poetry), Bye even goes so far as to call himself “the dilettante/clearly singing/in backwater channels.” Undoubtedly a reference to his geographic location between the East and West coast poetry scenes, these lines also point to a self-deprecating humility that comes through in spades. Like other buddhist poets before him (Philip Whalen comes immediately to mind), Bye’s work demonstrates a light-heartedness born of a decades-long practice of watching the mind and ego get up to their usual tricks. From time-to-time, the reader is permitted a real-time glimpse into Bye’s bemused—“There you go again!”—registering of the mind’s play of habitual patterns. One final aspect of Bye’s poetry deserves mention, and that is his poems’ability to boggle the rational mind and nudge the reader into a receptive state of not-knowing. Time and again, Bye’s work “resists the intelligence almost successfully” as Stevens would have it, continually unmaking the world as we know it. But Bye doesn’t dissolve our ordinary world out of nihilistic spite, or mere fancy. No, he takes us out of the world to “join the planets” so that we might return all the more available to what Dr. Williams calls the “close to the nose.” This is strangeness and abstraction in the service of defamiliarization whose purpose is to shock us out of our mechanical and automatic perceptions and into a fresh appreciation of what is. Or as Bye writes in “Poetics”:
It never was
the beauty of the thing
but the fact of it
being seen
then penned
before thought-wiring
doubled the pump
and allowed space
cushion time
to fire its conventional
guns
In a way, these more abstract pieces like “Before Rain Collapsed the Patch” and “Shop Talk” are embodiments of the simple fact of flux and change. Lesson A #1 of buddhism is that there’s nothing permanent, least of all what we term a self. And it is here that poetry and buddhism dovetail. Poetry—if it’s not busy winning Pulitzers or inaugurating Presidents—is change enacted at the level of language. Three hundred and fifty years ago, the Japanese poet Basho issued the following warning in his haiku:
How fortunate the man
who sees a flash of lightning
and does not think ’How brief life is!’
And Bye’s exquisite poems do exactly this hard work of pushing insights into contingency beyond mere contentto the level of actual process. Reading these slippery poems, one has the exhilarating sense of coming undone, of being unzipped. So read him to be renewed, refreshed and, if you’re lucky, to discover that space where, in the words of “What I’ve
Learned” that closes the book:
What is lasting
never died, never lied
never fell through.
—TYLER DOHERTY
