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Brad Modlin

The Core of Discovery

The linked prose poems in Jim Goar's The Louisiana Purchase mention William Clark only once and Meriwether Lewis not at all. Because this book is no travelogue of the Corps of Discovery's journey. It is instead an expedition into the charming unknown. The only Sacajawea stand-in to guide us through Goar's imaginative landscape is a speaker dually confident and as surprised as we are by what he finds.

In the book's first section, the speaker climbs onto William Clark's map and falls into Iowa—not any Iowa but "Iowa 1806," a place that tethers the floating moon with a ribbon. When President Jefferson orders the speaker to cut the moon loose, a month of darkness ensues while the moon throws fish at the speaker and attends movies. Open-minded readers will delight in how Goar zips among impossibilities.

Anticipating some readers' initial disappointment at the lack of history and/or hesitation about all the surrealism, Goar explains in

his author's note that "The gathered pieces of Louisiana Purchase do not attempt to describe anything beyond their borders and instead use the Louisiana Purchase, with its impossible vastness and mythical promise, as a framework in which new exploration can occur" (xii). Such a note gives him permission to make President Jefferson a baseball player who forces the moon to fall from the sky and "[bite] off the lower half of Texas."

The author's note hints at a central artistic tension of the work—expansiveness and freedom versus claustrophobia and containment. This tension reveals itself in the book's subsequent sections; for example, a tire spins off its car and asks to borrow eggs, and then the speaker and his elephant friend are slammed into a police car. "The Louisiana Purchase, so long denied, then contained . . . trickle[s] in" as does a virus; because the speaker describes this as an "epidemic," he is incarcerated (in an unlocked cell). By these deft poetic moves, Goar reminds readers that while the Louisiana Purchase covered a huge and mysterious territory, that territory had a border.

Goar's imagination is supported by his surprisingly simple syntax. Almost all his sentences make declarative statements without asides, parentheticals, or even introductory clauses. Risking flattening a poem's music, he chooses a syntax that creates the authoritative tone needed to make us believe in his musical ideas. One poem begins, "A tree sprouted from my penis."

Despite this confidence, some readers may feel left out. In the reading experience, it is as if Goar lets us sit behind him on his horse and peak over his shoulder, but he keeps shifting in his saddle

and obscuring our view before we take it all in. Some sections end abruptly just when we grow accustomed to their unique world of imagery. This technique elicits either frustration or page-flipping curiosity. Or both, as is the case for the museum tourists Goar writes about. They've come to snap pictures of the Louisiana Purchase, but the guard forbids them from approaching the glass box that somehow contains it.