Mixed Frequencies: New & Selected Poems by Peter Michelson (reviewed by Mark Spitzer)

Peter Michelson’s Posthumous Legacy Nails the Line & Much More.

The collection Mixed Frequencies is a selected overview of a poet whose work can be counted among “three significant efforts to deal with the American West in contemporary poetry: Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, and Peter Michelson’s Pacific Plainsong” (Anania, vii). Michelson, however, will most likely be remembered as one hell of a teacher, colleague, and character with a big, hardy personality and a robust, ursine physicality. His sense of humor will also be memorialized, and his sense of poetic play (which is when he is at his best) is evident in this diverse collection of mixed frequencies containing styles ranging from prose pantoums (an innovation distinctly Michelsonian) to a mashup take on investigative verse (complete with his own postmodern method of installing parenthetical asides that work for both meter and multiple levels of narration) to voices based in unique erotic and enviro tones with inspirations stemming from Stein (having too much fun with repetition) to Pound (omniscient visionary qualities) to Olson (except Michelson pleasingly closes his parentheticals rather than leaving them dangling open in the air) to forms of Barrymore (ie, “Dakotah Dreamsong”).

Two poems, in particular, combine Michelson’s sense of play and sense of humor, thereby creating a notable alchemy:

The first is “Advertisement,” which kicks off with a tongue-in-cheek reality challenge that “You’re / standing by the pomeshelf / in one—no more than two—of the twenty bookstores that / sell poems across this great / land,” setting the tenor of what to expect. A boldly ludicrous mock-patriotism is then employed for persona purposes as he returns to the second person, placing you (Reader) in mode of deciding who you’re gonna buy: Gary Snyder, Ferlinghetti? Nope! “They are freaks!” who do not love their country,which is why you, Reader, should buy this book and support a “small and dwindling group who / loves our mothers” and “despise drugs.” (93) To pump up the ridiculousness, Michelson then plays an over-the-top, made-in-America card, stating this book was published “for your protection” by “American printers, who will not / print lies, slander or filth” (94) before ending with a quicky statement on Capitalism and some more overblown patriotism.

The second poem that highlights Michelson’s mixing of wordplay and comedy is “The Chair,” which goofs avec pretentious language to comment upon the duties of a genderless administrator. Michelson has a blast playing with this metaphor, which “switches from the catbird to the hot seat” with a disposition that “smacks of Nazis.”* The linguistic carnival continues on, singsonging in a symphonic way, until, finally, the connection is made between the “grand and gorgeously / embellished” position occupied by a “sui generis” generic chair (department head) charged with ruling “unruly factions” in “churlish times” and one charged with electricity: “Nonetheless, we’re proud / we’re free to sit selective culprits in the chair” (10).

What sticks out, though, in this poem and the brunt of the earlier verse compiled herein, is an overkill skill at end-rhyming during a century-plus decrying said crime. One gets the impression that Michelson embraces ye olde scheme as a classical act of protest, which is the direction his poetry eventually takes. That is, in this chronology, you can see the evolution of his corpus go from lyrical laughter of self-amusement to a much more serious free verse that gets real, reflecting on the politics of revolution and the massacrist erasure of Native American cultures, which forged and informed his final voice. In “Preface to The Works of H. H. Bancraft,” “Plainsong at Lapush,” and “Bestride the Mighty and Heretofore Deemed Endless Missouri,” we witness the chrysalises of Michelson’s most empathetic and scholarly voice from the pre-Woke POV of the historically dispossessed (poetics infused with a dire drumbeat instilling the cardinal sin this country is still dealing with, which makes his words burn into consciousness) because this is serious business, People!

Meanwhile, along the way, there are extreme moments of poetic profundity. Ie:

And questions of art are, we say

these days all too unwittingly, questions

of execution. So, we find, are those

of life. Questions of art, then, are questions

of life—matters, that is, of execution (217)

and

Though children call us father we are children

until the ones that we call father die (183)

and

Shit, a place that breeds indigenous queers can’t be all bad (118)

All this to say that there is more than just something worth studying in Mixed Frequencies that can be useful for contemporary poets—because this is the work of a poet’s poet. I would not recommend it for readers in general (they will be amused, but they will not always see the tricks), but I would recommend it for any twenty-first-century versifier who gives a damn about nailing the line with exquisite exactitude to arrive at a series of messages that resonate with elegance in an ever-expanding void of decency and verve.

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* Btw, rhyming “hot seat” with “Nazis” is not an easy thing to do, but Michelson pulls it off with a craftsman’s flair. His eye for rhyming also goes way beyond the pat practitioner’s knack for hack when he fuses dialectically opposed elements for contrasting tensions such as “Indicate the absence of a ‘Noble Heart’? / Oh circumstance sharper than a pastor’s fart!” (151).

Mixed Frequencies: New & Selected Poems

Peter Michelson, MadHat Press

paperback, 275 pages

Mark Spitzer is the author of 30-plus books, some about "monster fish," another about writing pedagogy, plus novels, memoirs, poetry collections and literary translations. As Editor in Chief of the poetry series Toad Suck Editions (an evolution of the legendary Toad Suck Review), he has been a creative writing professor at the University of Central Arkansas and Truman State University, but now spends the brunt of his time in New York's Hudson Valley walking his dog, hunting wild fungi, and renovating a 322-year-old farm house. More info at sptzr.net.

the book of smaller, by Rob Mclennan (reviewed by Mark Spitzer)

From the start, we know this collection of postmodern prose poetry (none exceeding a dozen lines) is quirky. Like all the poems in the book of smaller, the first one, “Beware the failure of imagination,” deliberately confounds its audience by kicking off with “Civilization is neither prose.” This prompts a WTF moment in most readers, stopping us in our paths. We then mull this over, move on to questions lacking question marks, and after a few intentional ambiguities, we get to something specific on ants. The moral of the story: “We are never at rest.”

This, of course, is a sentiment we can all agree on, along with the fact that these poems have a way of ending satisfactorily. You get a bunch of mysteries (i.e., “Stardust, atoms, Barcalounger”), and the last lines put things into perspective (i.e., “What needs not be written”).

Collectively, we can’t help trying to make sense of what this verse is striving to do. Hence, we see this work as the poet journaling his day-to-day activities while plugging in sporadic thoughtservations (meaning a cross between “thoughts” and “observations”). Mclennan does this whimsically, while employing “gaps” (or “erasures”) in the popular style of the lyric essay.

For example, in the poem “Postcard for Gil McElroy,” there’s something purposefully missing between the penultimate lines of “If this should be hand-delivered. By you, to you. Posted” and the quintessential line “But the stars.” Such juxtapositions take us out of the familiar, the local, the micro (or “smaller”), and out and into the Macroverse, where human insignificance becomes even more apparent. Thus, by boiling various scenarios down to their essentials and by leaving standard transitions out along with piddly points that tend to meddle, the poetry becomes omnipotently Olympian in a quasi-Whitmanesque way, thereby arriving at “A wicked truth that does no harm” (another last line), which can assist us (or at least the poet) “To know more than nothing” (also a last line).

The result is that the book of smaller operates like a concept album in which readers “Smell the ink through the page.” That is, we’re asked to employ our sensory abilities to decode metaphors and cryptic language, because girlfriend, this Canadian ain’t giving it away for free.

Perhaps this is Mclennan’s objective, to toss out clues, then guide us to a definitive message. But maybe that’s me trying to find an equation to explain the logic of how these poems function—when actually, whatever’s driving this solid, experimental bus is something simply natural.

As Mclennan notes in one of his multiple poems entitled “journal entry,” “My thinking is all out of order.” But that’s not unusual; his thinking is basically a reflection of our own since we all meditate in bursts and bytes, moving forward and then back in time. That’s how we create order from disorder. The only difference is Mclennan does it on the page as practice, whereas most of us say whatever pops into our heads. Or we don’t.

The poem “Failed senryū” provides an appropriate segue for getting at what I’m talking about when it asks, “Is this, or is this not, about the appropriation of forms.” To which I reply: Nope, this is not entirely about appropriating forms. What it’s about is mutating forms while deviating from and innovating on appropriations in order to get to instances like “The sidewalk has no taste for anecdote,” “Privilege: the luxury to ignore,” and other zinger dismemberments.

Meanwhile, Mclennan reflects on his process: “Every work a hymn. A set of amputated limbs.” This is the method he employs for designing a selection of sacredly profane yet truncated thoughtservations in which readers decipher “A series of commentaries on muteness.” Because we’re small.

This answers my main question of why Mclennan did what he did in the way he did, but I’m a bit miffed at the publisher for not providing any framework for understanding the poet’s aesthetic. This could’ve been accomplished through a preface or a note or a blurb or whatever, but Calgary UP just went ahead and published the book without trying to place the poetics into context; they just shoveled it onto our plates and said, “Hey you, figure this out.”

This not-so-user-friendly approach is also reflected on the book’s epigraph page, where minor errors in the capitalization and lowercasing of book titles are easily missed. Typically, things like these are added last minute, and it’s not uncommon for such snafus to escape the eyes of editors. Still, it’s always a bummer when this happens because it comes off as disinterest. However, as Mclennan discerningly states in the only one-line poem in the collection (entitled “Policy”) this is “The cost of our language.”

University of Calgary Press, paperback, 114 pages, 2022

Mark Spitzer is the author of 30-plus books, some about "monster fish," another about writing pedagogy, plus novels, memoirs, poetry collections and literary translations. As Editor in Chief of the poetry series Toad Suck Editions (an evolution of the legendary Toad Suck Review), he has been a creative writing professor at the University of Central Arkansas and Truman State University, but now spends the brunt of his time in New York's Hudson Valley walking his dog, hunting wild fungi, and renovating a 322-year-old farm house. More info at sptzr.net.