by Garry Thomas Morse

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
     —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, ‘cause it doth remove
     The thing which elemented it.

-John Donne

The continuous work of Gil McElroy contains poems that are more suggestive of physical matter and processes than some other poems, in the sense they cannot really be defined by any one of his respective books, but more by what George Bowering might call “particular accidents” over time. Four of his titles with Talonbooks, including his most recent book of poetry Ordinary Time (August, 2011) offer the reader a building process for poetry that inquires into the finite elements of our origins and reaches outward toward a world of cosmology and quantum physics that is unfamiliar to many.

For this reason, I feel that a short retrospective of his books is timely, with the consideration of giving reviewers an entry point for what may at first glance appear mystifying.


In Dream Pool Essays (2001), McElroy’s “Sublunary” section is couched in a geological near-narrative that sounds out its terrain, of which “The potatoes of such lives / are terrible & overheated”. By his “Tenth Echolocation”, an abstruse creation myth of things in the world has drowned out the sound of any singular poetic voice:

      & our usual inclusions?
      That crowd, mysterious & standing together,
      could do only the work of twig
      & stone, & for the want
      of just some esoteric doctrine,
      dinners & shoes settled into the world
      obsessing about the dental position of nasal twangs
      & the pimples there were
      of matter.

Then, in a Dantean twist, the second section “Some Julian Days” attempts to apply a concept of astronomical measure to the movement of these poems, which are reinforced not merely by their presence but by their irresistible cohesion catalyzed by future poems in other books that are to follow. McElroy hints at this (or is it merely another particular accident of beauty?) in “2449375”:

      It was all part
      of an etiquette you could
      really feel

      a kind of a
      twinge worked out right
      through history

                           & run aground
      before remarks

In “2449600”, McElroy shifts quite abruptly from a familiar communal experience to some, from being a kid at a Woolworth’s lunch counter to worries about stoppages to the Heraclitean flux of time:

      Sipping & swallowing
      I couldn’t stop
                        afraid
      the flow once begun would go on
      without me

                  lost
                        some-
      where in the gravity of the argument
      afraid the flow
                        the logic once begun
      would go on without me

      & me quite incapable
      of the physics

Then in the title section “Dream Pool Essays”, McElroy provides decontextualized anti-similes that echo the language games of Jack Spicer. His series of Carbon poems utilizes Capital letters against the left hand margin to stress the existence of a poetic verge instead of a speaker and the inexorable link between each line and its origin. In poems like “Carbon 5”, is the story about the beginning of all life or perhaps all language or anything at all:

      Pronounce “a little fire.”
      The tooth alphabets, they are as sputters.
      Some brains are all glottis.
      The world skips & frolics with such noises,
                  but I hurry beyond my ears.
      Perceptions happen, chummy fulfilments.
      Hence the ecstasy of limbs.
      Retracing my presence constricts the meanness.
      The mouth, though, likes the slap (a habit words possess),
                  & not the thin, rhomboidal silences.

In NonZero Definitions (2004), McElroy really hits his stride in a similar vein, using Jack Spicer’s technique of introducing footnotes in order to obfuscate and further poeticize rather than clarify anything:

      A


      Narrative is everywhere an apparent.^a Chains
      of command. A shrieking cascade in terms
      of certain friction.

      Decay.

      Go to the threshold & listen there. The
      low murmur you hear has a fabled resonance. The
      ghostly plot of a particular strangeness.

      It has a story to tell.

      ^a  Consider the
         beast cold-
         blooded, viscously
         specific. Hell
         Is a point somewhere
         sudden.

In the newer poems appended to “Some Julian Days”, Ezra Pound might have pointed out they will not cohere. That is to say, there is a wonderful fragmentation of the form used in Dream Pool Essays. This appears to be the place McElroy was aspiring to build/tear down in his previous book, with stellar echoes of everything from the last of Pound’s Cantos to Phyllis Webb‘s Naked Poems. Even as it narrows in form, this is charting astronomical changes in an expanding ‘verse, whether there are corresponding twins in the heavens or no.

McElroy provides a definition from A Dictionary of Astronomy with his additions to “Some Julian Days”:

The consecutive number of days makes
the system independent of the length of
month or year and the J[ulian] D[ate] is
thus used to calculate the frequency of
occurrence of the periodicity of phenomena
over long periods.

This statement is important, if McElroy is indeed hinting at how the more precise we become in our measurements of phenomena, there more we find ourselves dealing with abstractions. To generalize the quantum approach to poetry, the more we focus here, the more we are missing over there. One particularizes, and in the attempt of examination, inexorably alters the phenomena in question, as can be observed in “2445250”:

                The speed of light is
      invariable

      or not
                                                            something
                                                in the same manner as
                                                                          the one

            which sums up this
                        cotton
                          edge             in the metaphor

Beyond the fragmentation, the poems also return to a more lyrical mode with rhythms that remind one of Pound’s Lustra, as in “2452293”:

      A lapse,
      & the good feet
      ply products.

      We remember
      the laundry, its motives, examples,
      & patiently radical tasks.

      Bitterness comes.
      Bitterness would be different,
      deflected like the impossible grass
      morning makes throughout
      the day.

Moving on to the section “Meteor Showers: A Descriptive Catalogue”, there is a concomitant parallelism between the top and bottom sections on either side of a solid line across the page, as in this excerpt from “Geminids December 6-19”:

      The shore
      is like paving stone, the water
      some condensed form of recreation

      We have little skill in falling

      ————————————————————————————————————-

      average (radiants
                                           daylight streams
                                                                              nodal passages)
                                                                                                                  strong (returns

Last Scattering Surfaces (2007) presumably derives its name from a state of transition of our nascent universe, if we are to appreciate a poetic with a colour temperature that continues to diminish as the universe expands, and as we measure the radiation from a spherical surface called the surface of last scattering.

Applying this theory to McElroy’s book, we may take into account we are observing residual evidence of poems than once existed, the light of which has only just reached our eyes.The start of the book does suggest remainders of what once existed over “fossilized durations”. Any sense of structure is briskly overtaken by the expressed possibility of transition and loss:

      The house
      has a generated size,
      mollifying space.

      We withdraw
      upon dreams
      in one short
      being.

      Exploit this picture.

McElroy’s section “(The Work of Art) In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” brings to mind continuous assembly lines of verse, with a parallel interruptive narrative, the thoughts like those of works lost or crushed by the lines that never cease. While the lyrical form of a single first person speaker is a process that may seem mechanical, the stray thoughts justified to the left of the page act like spanners in the work(s):

      Given                                                                                                          art
      that the
      apparent occurred,
      I should’ve been periodic
      in the face
      & tendency, but I,
      I fell                                                                                                            Catastrophes,
      in, instead, upon a circle become
      invisible during
      it, forgetting summer, the
      liquids left behind, &                                                                                  of course,
      the startling atmosphere.
      This was an                                                                                              both
      all-sky matter,                                                                                           main
      & the glaucous horizon
      may’ve called to me, but nothing interrupted
      my point.

As in McElroy’s other books, the most vibrant and stirring section is the continuation of his ongoing long poem, “Some Julian Days”:

      Stars circle.

      It is all brightness & spirits.

                                                     & water, the curving
      path of.

——————————————————————————————————————
Past Hangman’s Beach, walking a long arc looking for the path thru to the far side of
the island, past sea-driven wood & the intermittent tumble of loose stone.

After the beach there were blackberries, staining my hands so that later, fighting thru
the thick brush choking the path, I tore my lip & touching it couldn’t see the blood.

These poems also shift from pre-established forms to a minimalist style akin to Robert Creeley’s later work, once again giving the reader the sense of residual language, or linguistic structures breaking down in the middle of talking (and breathing), as in “2452896”:

      The last is,
      in fact, fore-
      stalled by
      concern.

      Whatever it is
      get it
      off.

The next section “Ecumenical Maps” is quite a curiosity. The word ecumenical derives from the Greek word oikoumene (“the inhabited world” or “the whole world). Yet the word has a context associated with churches and religions, which is perhaps to say my universal and not your universal. In this case, the maps pertain to letters and the alphabet, defining phylums and categories of classification.

      A face acquiring fluidity. A fantasy for many years alluded to. A fate never dissipated.
       A ffair. A fervent cult of more & more. A ffirm. A fine baritone. A fixed key. A fflux.
               A fford. A ffray. A ffront. A field. A fire. A flame. A float. A fore. A fresh.

                     A gain. A gape. A gaze. A given. A go. A gog. A ground. A glow.

       A happiness convinced. A head. A heavy melting of blue. A hem. A highly interferred
                                         comet. A horizon forced by heat. A hoy.

It was highly amusing to look up Dreyer Descriptions (from Johann Dreyer’s New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, circa 1888) and to find a pseudo-Romantic language of abbreviations to describe objects in the sky. McElroy’s use of these codes in a poem look to the untrained eye like either the dumped contents of poorly encoded text or spacial debris or a finely crafted sound poem. Perhaps these would be tedious to a devoted stargazer, but in the purely aesthetic sense, in textual or sonic formation, they are quite extraordinary:

              Andromeda
      !, vvB, L, R, psmbMN

which unless I am misreading translates into a construction of mostly adjectival and adverbial modifiers:

      remarkable, very very bright, large, round,
      pretty suddenly much brighter toward middle of nucleus

Finally, in the title sequence, McElroy returns to those nascent surfaces, to these glimpses of the most transient observations, although it is the fleeting reality of language that is being scattered:

      Before
      the what I’m
      talking about, a
      universe of
      a few seconds
      with at least
      a few sunlights to be
      answered, numbers
      that were
      banged into
      helium, collapsing
      in reverse, a third of the way between
      evers.

      There are
      so many letters.

McElroy’s books are intriguing, partly because although they attempt to adopt scientific systems of classification, they never wholly surrender to their potential monotony or to the tendencies of pedants or dogmatic avant-garde poets to offer the reader perfectly formed yet airless structures to occupy, without taking into consideration the full possibilities for exploration of the poetic form in question. In other words, the allowance for human errance and emotion. In addition, the nature of the continuous thread in his books is really what defines a poet writing a lifelong poem, and the magnetism that is sparked by this continuity renders them rather irresistible, even with an impermanence subject to ordinary time.


Gil McElroy’s upcoming memoir is Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War.