Different Darknesses (The Page Poets Series)
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Different Darknesses (The Page Poets Series) [Morris, Jason] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Different Darknesses (The Page Poets Series) Review: The Poet as Benthos - Jason Morris’s darknesses exist at a more fundamental level than the political or psychological depredations of Joseph Conrad, much less the old friend greeted in Paul Simon’s “The Sound of Silence.” They haunt language itself. Before writing today can aspire to engage essentialisms, as the modernists did, it must acknowledge its own impoverishment, uncovered famously by the likes of Wittgenstein and Derrida but no less insidiously by the often elided implications of quantum physics. (In Morris’s previous work, including his last book, Levon Helm, allusions of this sort were explicit; here, readers have to be more attuned to key words.) In the wake of these philosophical and scientific challenges, it’s hard or even impossible for poets to know what it is that’s being named. Morris catches the dilemma in distortions that recall Heisenberg as well as Wittgenstein: “I have got into / the habit / of pointing out / the case that to which / when it’s pointed / disappears.” Tellingly, the poems find it hard to say “light” without qualification or metaphor: like everything else, light is never itself but “striped” or “unleaded” or “remnant” or, appropriately, “stoplight.” It’s an understatement to call this inability to name a “different darkness”: it’s really an abyss most readers ignore at their peril but Morris will not let us forget. He likens himself to a “benthos,” a tiny organism living at the ocean’s edge but also inhabiting its deepest, most lightless depth. A benthos so situated can sustain itself only by virtue of random organic detritus that may happen to drift down to it; this exigency leads Morris to gravitate toward his cityscape’s bare minimum—a “seedling in grate,” “lichen forms” and “mushrooms sprouting.” I write “Morris” as if the speaker of these poems were some continuous, unitary “self” with a “voice,” the chimera taught and sought in so many MFA programs. But any “Morris” to be inferred here consists of only the unpredictable irruptions of unreferenced pronouns, or what linguists call “deixis” (see the poem “Temples”). Readers might have guessed as much from the poems’ position inside contradictory representations of their author: on the front cover, a painting of male in a back hat, wearing sun glasses, and apparently reading; inside, after the last poem, we see an allegedly “truer” photographic representation, also in black hat and sun glasses, proffering a watermelon—the outcome or Augustinian “fruit” of reading here self-mocked as thin nutrition, disappointment. The (literally wraparound) sun glasses imply that darkness was always already there, enfolding the poems, in simulacra equidistant from any fragmentary personae we might imagine cohere inside. (A warning detail: on the back cover is a cross like those painted on ambulances. It’s as if a reading that begins hopefully, in some expectation of sustenance, eventually becomes a certainty-rattling emergency.) Maybe instead of figuring the Socratic and Renaissance West as Enlightenments we should have all along distinguished them as varying shades of dark. Nevertheless, within this never-recanted concession to chaos, there’s also a vindicating, Whitmanesque commitment to the ordinary (49er headphones, a pack of Newports, Acid Eaters, GMO corn) accompanied by a countervailing determination to shape these darknesses—evident in revelatory line endings, as well as the use of blank space, slant rhymes, and barely discernible rhythms. These devices mark Morris’s openness to the influences of Creeley, Coolidge, O’Hara and Whalen. The hegemony of the dark may be put on notice most forcefully by the title poem’s attraction “to something with no name,” by a willingness to think love as a speech act (”Stay Live”), and by echoes of Buddhism (“& mind is a form of relation / like the relation of rain to ocean”). Even more life-affirming are Morris’s homages to writers (Kafka and Chuang Tzu [“An Exchange”]) and visual artists (Agnes Martin, Nicole Eisenman, Alicia McCarthy). In Morris’s San Francisco, these tutelary spirits are his Virgil, collaborators who guide his encounters with every newly articulated darkness. The result is a poetry of uncompromising intellectual discipline in perpetual conflict with pride in art’s high calling, which will not be overruled by it. —Jim Nottingham, New Orleans, LA
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A**R
The Poet as Benthos
Jason Morris’s darknesses exist at a more fundamental level than the political or psychological depredations of Joseph Conrad, much less the old friend greeted in Paul Simon’s “The Sound of Silence.” They haunt language itself. Before writing today can aspire to engage essentialisms, as the modernists did, it must acknowledge its own impoverishment, uncovered famously by the likes of Wittgenstein and Derrida but no less insidiously by the often elided implications of quantum physics. (In Morris’s previous work, including his last book, Levon Helm, allusions of this sort were explicit; here, readers have to be more attuned to key words.) In the wake of these philosophical and scientific challenges, it’s hard or even impossible for poets to know what it is that’s being named. Morris catches the dilemma in distortions that recall Heisenberg as well as Wittgenstein: “I have got into / the habit / of pointing out / the case that to which / when it’s pointed / disappears.” Tellingly, the poems find it hard to say “light” without qualification or metaphor: like everything else, light is never itself but “striped” or “unleaded” or “remnant” or, appropriately, “stoplight.” It’s an understatement to call this inability to name a “different darkness”: it’s really an abyss most readers ignore at their peril but Morris will not let us forget. He likens himself to a “benthos,” a tiny organism living at the ocean’s edge but also inhabiting its deepest, most lightless depth. A benthos so situated can sustain itself only by virtue of random organic detritus that may happen to drift down to it; this exigency leads Morris to gravitate toward his cityscape’s bare minimum—a “seedling in grate,” “lichen forms” and “mushrooms sprouting.” I write “Morris” as if the speaker of these poems were some continuous, unitary “self” with a “voice,” the chimera taught and sought in so many MFA programs. But any “Morris” to be inferred here consists of only the unpredictable irruptions of unreferenced pronouns, or what linguists call “deixis” (see the poem “Temples”). Readers might have guessed as much from the poems’ position inside contradictory representations of their author: on the front cover, a painting of male in a back hat, wearing sun glasses, and apparently reading; inside, after the last poem, we see an allegedly “truer” photographic representation, also in black hat and sun glasses, proffering a watermelon—the outcome or Augustinian “fruit” of reading here self-mocked as thin nutrition, disappointment. The (literally wraparound) sun glasses imply that darkness was always already there, enfolding the poems, in simulacra equidistant from any fragmentary personae we might imagine cohere inside. (A warning detail: on the back cover is a cross like those painted on ambulances. It’s as if a reading that begins hopefully, in some expectation of sustenance, eventually becomes a certainty-rattling emergency.) Maybe instead of figuring the Socratic and Renaissance West as Enlightenments we should have all along distinguished them as varying shades of dark. Nevertheless, within this never-recanted concession to chaos, there’s also a vindicating, Whitmanesque commitment to the ordinary (49er headphones, a pack of Newports, Acid Eaters, GMO corn) accompanied by a countervailing determination to shape these darknesses—evident in revelatory line endings, as well as the use of blank space, slant rhymes, and barely discernible rhythms. These devices mark Morris’s openness to the influences of Creeley, Coolidge, O’Hara and Whalen. The hegemony of the dark may be put on notice most forcefully by the title poem’s attraction “to something with no name,” by a willingness to think love as a speech act (”Stay Live”), and by echoes of Buddhism (“& mind is a form of relation / like the relation of rain to ocean”). Even more life-affirming are Morris’s homages to writers (Kafka and Chuang Tzu [“An Exchange”]) and visual artists (Agnes Martin, Nicole Eisenman, Alicia McCarthy). In Morris’s San Francisco, these tutelary spirits are his Virgil, collaborators who guide his encounters with every newly articulated darkness. The result is a poetry of uncompromising intellectual discipline in perpetual conflict with pride in art’s high calling, which will not be overruled by it. —Jim Nottingham, New Orleans, LA
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