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.
___________________________________________________________________________
* 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