Dan Kaplan, 2.4.18

 

VISITORS ON A CLEAR DAY

a visitor can imaginespring,
the arcades discolored
and sun-roasted, somebread
and a mushroom, heavy andround,
birdsong a hole in themiddle
where dampness came,
whispered and curled
atop a spare tire,
a table set with thickplates
and a chalky white bone.
I stuck a point in time
to a gum drop and otherbits,
one mysterious form offaith
tucked against the other.

Iwas curious to see Portland, Oregon writer Dan Kaplan’s latest, 2.4.18 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), following the bilingual chapbook SKIN (Red HydraPress, 2005), and full-length collections Bill’s Formal Complaint (TheNational Poetry Review Press, 2008) and Instant Killer Wig (SpuytenDuyvil, 2018). 2.4.18 is an erasure of the February 4, 2018 issue of TheNew York Times, a conceptual framework reminiscent, somewhat, of Derek Beaulieu’s conceptual project painting a day’s newspaper via “The Newspaper,”but Kaplan’s project seeks lyric meaning out of a particular flavour ofnarrative reportage. Instead of seeking a kind of randomness for his poems, he selectsnarratives out of a wide selection of found language, attempting to answer, ina roundabout way, the question of what might emerge from a single day’s editionof that particular newspaper. As the poem “Every Act” ends: “changing thelocation at least, / expanded yards and irises // in composite, small andperfected, / a kitchen smoking on the grounds, // sweeping other parts incircles and soft steps, / the children vibrant and shaky in a long line // hardto separate, the sketch narrowing, / clear sequence nudged ahead.”

Incertain ways, these are poems untethered from their source (ie: a book of “just”lyric first-person narrative poems), composed as poems by Dan Kaplan. Whereas theymay contain a language that shifts from his previous published work (which I amunfamiliar with), but otherwise, a project that advertises itself thusly on theopening page as a conceptual project makes me immediately wonder: how has thisproject changed or altered Kaplan’s lyric, if at all? What has the languageoffered or made possible that wouldn’t have emerged otherwise? Otherwise, why advertisethe project as such a strong header? Either way, the results make for a worthy collectionof poems, striking in their use of silence, shape, hesitations and presence. Beyondthe conceptual framework, these are poems that appear composed from withinmoments, attending to pure attention, meditative calm and a curiosity about theworld. Certainly, poems can be excised, created, found or built from just aboutany language, but there seems little reference to the source material that I candiscern. There are certainly, as Suzanne Buffam writes on the back cover, “glimmersof hope among the ruins,” but this lovely and sharp collection of immediatelyrics doesn’t require the distraction of its compositional framework to bethoroughly enjoyed.

REHEARSING FOR PEOPLE

standing barefoot
parts the language.

emotion is outsize,
the kind of primer

a love song roughly
doubled from the tumult.

it would not be

the first time
a line shrugged

and stumbled
from the stereo,

listening for
the others.