Ongoing notes: Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks: J-T Kelly + Mark Statman,

I’vebeen seeing these Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks that Jordan Davis has beenproducing out of Brooklyn for a while now—see my review of Buck Downs’ GREEDYMAN: selected poems (2023) here and Nada Gordon’s The Swing of Things(2022) here—so I’m pleased to see copies of J-T Kelly’s LIKE NOW (2023)and Mark Statman’s CHICATANAS: SELECTED POEMS (2023) appear at my door.

Thechapbook debut by Indianapolis poet and innkeeper J-T Kelly, LIKE NOW, offersan assemblage of short lyric first-person narrative and layered accumulations thatsway and play, such as the short poem “Plunder”: “Pomegranate—ripe, / Unbroken—// I, too, hide my heart— / Fruitlessly.” There’s something of a disjointedlyric reminiscent of Canadian poets Stuart Ross, Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick,each composing poems that lean into disconnections, connections and surrealthreads and sly humour across the short lyric. I’m curious in how Kelly’s poemsform across such narrative disjoints and jumbles, and how these pieces shape themselvesnot simply through a completed thought run all the way to the end, but one thatrests somewhere in the middle, allowing the reader the space through which tocomplete on their own. I am intrigued by these poems of J-T Kelly.

West

What I said when I wasleaving.
Your friends and theirboots.
I left it there on thekey stand.
The road is dry. But I stillthink about
standing on the on-rampoutside of Bismarck.
At the mercy of. Sometimesforty-five miles
from a pay phone. I wentnorth because
Zach didn’t listen andhad gone south.
He had been picked up andtaken to some field.
They tried to set him onfire, but the gasoline
dissolved the adhesiveand he broke free.
The wheat so near toharvest must have swayed majestically
as he ran, pain in hiseyes, suffocating,
And deciding to finishgrad school, which he did.
You, it turns out,consider me to be.
The headlights extendsideways out of the low stalks of winter
    wheat.
The passenger seat holdsmy fur-lined leather mittens
and your anthology ofpoetry from The New York school which I
    will not give back.
You can go to hell. I’m goingto Seattle.

Ihadn’t actually heard of New York-based American writer, poet and translator Mark Statman before seeing this new title, although the acknowledgments of CHICATANAS:SELECTED POEMS offers that he is the author of six poetry collections, twoworks of prose and has translated collections by Federico García Lorca (withPablo Medina), José María Hinojosa and Martín Barea Mattos. I’m fascinated bythe idea of the chapbook-length selected poems, something Davis has beenexploring for some time (there was also the chapbook-length Stuart Ross bilingual Spanish/English ‘selected’ I reviewed recently, published in Argentina), and I would almost think that putting together a chapbook-lengthselected would be far more challenging than attempting one book-length, even beyondthe consideration of weighing the possibility of ‘best’ against potential ‘representativeof this author’s work,’ etcetera. I’m curious as to how the poems in thiscollection might be representative of Statman’s larger canvas of writing,offering first-person lyric musings via hesitation, soft and slow unfolding ofnarration. There’s a slowness here his lines and breaks require, both firm andthoughtful, never in any particular hurry, because you’ll get there in the end,either way, whether losing a poem through a young woman’s accent (“the disappearanceof the poem”) or a piece on the death of Kenneth Koch, that opens thecollection, “Kenneth’s Death,” that begins: “he’s dead and / I still don’tbelieve: / years later / I’m walking someplace / and I’ll think / this issomething / I’ll tell him / when he gets back / when he gets back / as thoughwhere Kenneth’s gone / is simply too far away / to telephone or / send apostcard [.]”

chicatanas

some mysteries have
to be that way
Alma asked me yesterday
if I was going to
the casita today
was I going to harvest
our chicatanas
giant ants from
whose toasted bodies
legs and heads removed
Alma makes a
sharp spicy salsa
the chicatanas onlycome out
once a year and everyyear
since we bought the
casita we’ve had them
they emerge before dawn
the ground wet it’seither
on the 24th or25th of
every June St. John’s Day
I ask Alma
but how do you know
which day 24, 25 and she
smiles and says because
the morning after
the dawn fills with
small white butterflies