Ryan Eckes, Wrong Heaven Again

 

injury music

here i am documentingnothing
inside the defiance ofbrick
everyone cheats like atrain
broken into photographs
rowhomes are a belief
sighed into knees
a bottle in front of me
is finally you as you
i’m afraid of
an empty baseball field
where i grew up
wanting to hit
tell me you’re sorry
and i’ll move on
like a moth
in the stands
the infinite line oftrees
makes one fan
pull me out
of the car

Thelatest from Philadelphia poet Ryan Eckes, author of the full-length collectionsOld News (Furniture Press 2011), Valu-Plus (Furniture Press,2014) [see my review of such here] and General Motors (Split Lip Press,2018) [see my review of such here], as well as several chapbooks, is Wrong Heaven Again (Raleigh NC: Birds, LLC, 2024), a collection self-described as“songs of solidarity and struggle for and about workers and the working class—defiantand hopeful, absurd and alive.” “the dean showed us a picture of hisgrandchildren right before the labor- / management committee meeting on jobsecurity,” he writes, as part of the opening poem, “under the table,” “mostpeople have a name and address, it’s true // you can buy lottery tickets foreveryone in your family // you can read the sunday paper to your dog [.]” Dividedby images, and as suggested through the table of contents, the collection isorganized with opening and closing poems—“under the table” and “deep cuts,” respectively—andfour untitled cluster-sections into an accumulated book-length suite. Also, atthe rough mid-point, the collection opens to two lines in larger font, that spreadacross both pages:

“revolutionbegins with change in the individual,” said the
english departmentas it disappeared

Eckes’work over the years has become thicker, heftier, more nuanced; there’s anincreased weight to the poems in Wrong Heaven Again, one that clearlyshowcases a writer becoming more capable with his tools. “the choir got boredenough the windbags collapsed into soft balloons / found years later in adrawer,” he writes, to open the poem”wrong heaven,” “wrong heaven again,said the rabbit, returning to the dance floor // i accepted a position overthere, on the dance floor, which is a field // a ranger leers at me // only icould prevent forest fires [.]” His blend of surreal humour and straightforwardnarratives allow for a kind of collage-collection, each poem another smallpiece of the larger book-length construction. As part of his 2018 interviewover at Touch the Donkey, referencing the beginnings of what would becomethis collection, he writes:

After finishing GeneralMotors, I started writing poems called “injury music” and “for what wewill,” not entirely sure where I’m going. I’m thinking about pain, trauma andmore questions around work. “For what we will” comes from the old labor unionslogan, “8 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, 8 hours for what we will.” It’ssad that 8 hours of work/40 hours a week is still considered normal, consideredactually natural by many people, a century after it was established as a*protection*. Why aren’t we at 4 hours by now? Why is the minimum wage still solow? Why do Americans worship the rich? I could go on. But these are the kindsof questions that I let propel my writing at the same time that I am trying tounderstand myself as a living thing made of relations.

Ifind it interesting that I can’t think of too many poets approaching workingclass poetics so directly, offering shades of the late Vancouver poet Peter Culley (1958-2015) and other elements of The Kootenay School of Writing. Thereare poets engaged in elements of working class poetics, certainly, whether Vancouver writer Michael Turner, Philadelphia poet Gina Myers or Chicago poet Andrew Cantrell, among others, but Eckes seems one of the more overt, swirling betweenstraight commentary and language flourish, and even offering an echo of theclassic poetry title on cross-cultural poetics by Toronto poet Stephen Cain, AmericanStandard/Canada Dry (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2005), as Eckes’ poem “independenceday” begins: “who made you einstein, monday-face // american standard is abrand of toilet // so i just start walking on water // out of respect for pangea// trash gets picked up // i mean if you’re gonna be a nobody // have someclass about it [.]” Eckes works his working-class politics from the groundlevel, from the foundation of language itself, allowing the paired foundationof working-class ethos and fluid language to mix together into something uniquelyhis own, while informed by a wealth of poets, observations and social politics.

HOV

i keep getting ads to bean uber driver, which reminds me of a term i learned in chile for adjunctprocessors—los processors taxis—and a poem by russell edson in which ataxi driver turs into canaries as his car flies thru a wall and back out again.that’s where i’m at, jobwise, a cluster of canaries flying toward you. inchile, students started evading subway fares and it turned into a rebellion. nowtheir government has to re-write the constitution. in the u.s., fascists arewearing t-shirts that way “pinochet did nothing wrong.” republicans and democratshave long agreed. so has the ny times: capitalism is the only way, they say,and some apples are bad. so the government keeps killing black people andjailing those who fight back. every employer encourages you to vote. Your employeris running against your employer. they’ll never pay enough. how are you gettinghome tonight?