Michael Flatt, I Can Focus If I Try

 

Lost in the full stop offascination, I see a fly land on the window screen and choose not to attack it.My own screen at present a darkened android face. Is this a failed lyric or afuse? Please don’t show me how big the future child is with your fingers. A dustingof snow brings out the detail in a treeline, as driving through the mountainsdistorts our perspective, cinematically.

Iwas curious about the latest by American poet, critic and publisher Michael Flatt, his full-length I Can Focus If I Try (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book,2023). Currently a PhD candidate in the Poetics Program at the University ofBuffalo, Flatt is also the author of Absent Receiver (SpringGun Press,2013) and, with derrick mund, Chlorosis (The Operating System, 2018). Entirelya collection around seeing, looking and the limitations and possibilities ofperception, the lyrics that accumulate into I Can Focus If I Try work upto a boundary of perception. The book is built as a quartet, a progression, of fourindividual sequence-sections; the collection begins with prose sentences andprose blocks, focusing on the body of the text, that eventually evolve, acrossthis quartet, into a literal outline, articulating an absence. Flatt offers aself-description of his poetry on his website, writing: “My work seeks toexamine the formal boundaries of traditions involving the codex and the lyric.Themes include fraught relationships with the environment, the digital, and theother.” And yet, this is very much a book on the combined elements of seeing,looking and perception itself. “What do we do with these gaps in our beauty?” Flattasks in its opening piece, set at the top of an otherwise empty page. The poemsseek, and seek out beauty, seeing the gaps that exist between and amideverything else. His four numbered sections offer structural shifts from thecore of the lyric prose sentence into text clusters, pulling the words andphrases apart and, finally, setting his text as that literal outlinesurrounding the empty page, focusing the gaze, perhaps, on that absent,outlined middle. “And now a scene from something like nature,” he writes, aspart of the opening section, “unabstracted, providing an unobstructed view / ofdeer grazing by graves.” There is almost something theatrical in his structures,something of the performative gesture across the arc of this collection;something that wishes both attention and participation.