Field Work: Notes, Songs, Poems 1997-2010

by David Hadbawnik

In San Francisco,. Austin and Buffalo a chiel’s among ye taking notes. David Hadbawnik like James Boswell has a knack for capturing all the things we wish we had said, as well as the street talk which shows up our culture as indescribably banal and fertile. On his way to developing a unique poetic, Hadbawnik kept writing it down; these twelve years of flaneuring perform a voyage of their own, a powerful and mysterious walk towards unknowing. —Kevin Killian The notebooks of Kafka and the late meditations of Wittgenstein echo deep inside David Hadbawnik’s marvelous Field Work, whose investigations collect into something like a scrolling wunderkammer of anecdotal revelation. Or into a tour-de-force ostranenie of the quotidian, one might say... Which is to say, and more plainly, I suppose, that in these quasi-aphoristic sallies, daily moments are never quite what they first seem, always infolding much more than what we all almost always assume them to hold. So Hadbawnik looks carefully and insistently. And he does so again and again. And the mundane unfolds its mysteries. “One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is,” said Cezanne. That is the writer’s ethic here, and the result is nothing less than a strange, serial, and many-chambered gift. We haven’t had a truly great “poet’s daybook” for quite some time, one that enacts a poetics. Here you are. —Kent Johnson

Genres: Poetry

138 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 2011

Reviews

[John Hyland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this in airports, on planes. Making notes, myself. Watching passers by—and wondering how to capture a moment, how to record or, really, how to make world. Thinking about the daybook as form—about world as form—and leaving aside the shadow of Kafka and the echo of Wittgenstein, which Kent Johnson perceptively mentions in his blurb—but remembering, for instance, Creeley’s project of the late 60s/early 70s. Or the more recently released artifacts of Oppen. And thinking that, while Hadbawnik is certainly aware of these projects, taking cues here and there, his project is indeed his own. For instance, a sense of a hungry searching of or for the self shapes Creeley’s project. And in Oppen’s one feels a certain disenchantment. But with Hadbawnik’s one often encounters something quite different, if nearly opposite, as is suggested by a single word that weaves through these pages: /satisfied/. Early on, for example, we get a “recurring hockey fantasy” where the back of the net pops “satisfyingly behind the goalie” after the speaker (or his winger) “fires the puck into the back of the net.” Then years—pages—later we read of waves washing along the Golden Gate, “zipping up the graded brick wall, satisfying to watch and hear.” Language too has its pleasing-ness: “The Stolichnaya Vodka billboard that looms over 101 overpass. The almost Futurist, Rodchenko design of it, with white lettering in satisfyingly thick red bands . . .”

Hadbawnik’s sea, then, is not Arnoldian; his days, moreover, are not solely measured by a phenomenological inward turn; and his language—his relationship to it—is as metaphysical as it is material. Here is a world where the familiar can so easily become strange, where the quotidian—once made strange—can suddenly, with/in a Benjaminian flash, become magical. And it is the detail that suggestively fires, dilates, and reveals some larger totality. Hadbawnik knows this.

The gaze of these pages is fugitive. It is after that which slips past the usual trappings of the so-called signifier, past the usual street glances. And what usually slips past are those nearly undetectable threads that permit one moment to become another moment; that transfiguration of what was to what is—maybe exactly in Graves’s sense of a “White Goddess”: of the necessity of mythic language to poetic language. Myth is of course complex—and I don’t have the space to get into that here—suffice it to say that, myth in these pages is more of a web—that is there—to be sensed by the poet, then it is, in the Eliotic sense, an imposing of order and reason upon a world whose supposed center cannot hold. Take, for example, this passage: “Voices wake me up. An older man, his voice gravelly but softer than the young man’s. They banter. The old man sags in his skin, wearing an army coat and wielding a wooden cane. He mentions trying to hustle up money for smokes, at which he’d failed.” The world that wakes this poet is thus a human one, made so by the surreal that is in fact the real: it is a world whose scaffolds are determined by inherently strange—and for that reason, beautiful—desires. And desire has no center.

We also get songs, particularly in the later pages. Songs that remind us that, “Under cover of music/you can say/anything you want to say.” You can also say what might not otherwise get said. We get sonnets too. We get snippets, asides, aphorisms, even possible bar names. This is good to read in an airport, on a bus, in the library. In fact, it’s more than just a “good read” . . .

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never hear David Hadbawnik read without thinking of the wry, understated Steven Wright. The resemblance goes beyond voice to a shared capacity for close listening, and a gift for paring the overheard and often under-observed down to aphoristic vignettes tight with meaning and suggestion. No other poet I can think of has led me to consider “the astonishing shit of dogs. Rich red-brown … beaded, sculptural, coming out in little balls or ‘soft serve’ in one big bubbly lump, warm in my hand through the plastic bag.” But the everyday wakes up that way under David’s attention, even (especially) the unpleasant everyday of dog shit and waiting for buses and downbeat encounters with some of the people who ride them. But there’s also “the frank blank stare of a child,” or “Red, white, and blue balloons, rising against the sky dark and creased with rainclouds, quickly no more than pinheads of color against purple-gray”—not leading anywhere necessarily, but asking us to tune in, attend and look up.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The understated quality of this book, which is comprised of mainly short no nonsense first person micro-vignettes from 1st person POV--"A woman asks me outside the library what time it is--but again this happens--and even though I already know, I have to thrust my wrist out and glance at my watch, as though to legitimize my answer"--makes it slow acting. Faster than homeopathy, slower than speed. That is, the poems themselves forcefully refuse large, lyric moments and only swerve into overt musicality in the "songs" and the later sonnets--which, perhaps not coincidentally hold one of the best detachable lines "When we say love we mean to give a name / to something so secret we must keep it / even from ourselves" (68)--in favor of the accretion of quotidian stuff. It works because of the razor sharp accuracy of Hadbawnik's observations. I returned to the world, walking around the blocks new to me in Buffalo, feeling rotoscoped, sliding around in myself, and hyperaware of the interplay of public gazes and gestures. And that's the best thing a book can do: return you to the world.

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has really inspired me to be more observant when it comes to noticing the small & mundane things around me.

[Lili · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did really like these notes.