Pitching Woo
Karen Weiser
CyPress 2006

A new Lake District has been incorporated around the Poetry Project. With the release of Souvenir Winner four years ago as noted [scroll to May 13, 2003] Macgregor Card spelled out a postlanguage lyric that has its way with decoration and sensibility from the XIXth Century. Over the last few seasons one can measure the sprawl (or revival) in offshoots of like-minded discipline and ambition, self-study as other-gazing, sublime body worship, archaic circumlocutions, striding rhymes, and other shamelessly romantic strategies toward an ideal that constitutes the fog-drenched infancy of a poetics -- at once songbook-metaphysic, de Quinceyesque, and churchy-ornamental. The Lake, in other words, flows over in a breakneck schizoid inundation of high atonality that can also appear meta-languid and lounge-y, poetry as if plucked by pouting cherubim and know-it-all puti in almost-serious throes of Orlando furioso. Among the smallish crowd of whizzes in and of the Lake, consider Anselm Berrigan: gravitas to besmirch turn a / chiseled phrase into unstable air in which I delight acuity; Greg Fuchs: Path train drooling night's / anesthesia algorithm, generating / necklaces of knees against the torso; Eddie Berrigan: I caught a stranger in my house, and I busted his head with a club / Some say it's just a matter of time, but I think it's a matter of love; John Coletti: Podunk state of stubborn day glow long buffed lashes swollen pinkies; Corina Copp: how I make the country this childlike again / harp round one pal as he monitors his.

A novel reasoning to go under dreams, a "wind carrying," steady-as-she-flows articulation of romance now emanates from Karen Weiser's Pitching Woo. The near-reverie Karen views is "a kind of think orchestration / indelible dark signals / we felt..." The senses scramble so that what's seen is felt, the out of sight sighted, wind, a fugue, the "subtext" we hardly know and don't know we have, "the antidote to dreaming." It's an important advance in Lake Poetics to build a logic upon ambitious narrative ("I want to see you settle in the story") and fiercely surreal song ("the story / a cloth thing, a quilted presence"). Karen's construct shoots up as thought experiments with the mind's underpinnings: "inside the accident prone dolls / we are just surface that can be pulled away."

The density of info throughout Pitching Woo transforms word clumps and line after line into the English language equivalent of ideogram, a graphical tool to bore thought and image into the brain. Like ideograms, these clumps and lines can be rearranged to make new and further sense. Here are a few, at random, almost:

the fugue appears through the unlocked window
a world of almost situations
croco-qualities
sunlight itself...must be opened

my outstretched goat
moorland turned lavender for display
stream of merchildren
emptiness is mobile [...] the momentum goes dark

like an animal stuffer shapes death into life
you can almost inter the fog
the gaudiest peacock / would be the one without color

Close to the glacier use the word "carefully"

Karen keeps uncovering collective complicity in poetry, reading it, writing it, until what shows up is at bottom "crumbling to be remembered." In the poem whose title dislodges set categories, merging locus with being, "they were hard to kill, those places," Karen again illustrates what's percolating below in "the natural history of the island of sleep":

each word is a room built around us
an organ underneath the river
of skin that lives to be incidental
another spotted face in the crowd

Danger, but of course, lurks in poetry this wry, this seductive, danger stripped down to its smooth surfaces and polished metaphor. This is woo. It doesn't shout. At one level of readership one can expect a flaccid response from another poet who's overanxious to be confirmed in her commonplace politics or antic methodology. Another poet might ask, Do we have enough time and esthetic place for laboring over the niceties of mortality; and frankly, isn't that what poetry has always been about, old hat? Within such a predictable critique, Karen is bound to disappoint. In "now then" she writes against the avant grain, "time held out in small delicate etchings / still warm though rapidly aging." I'm excited by Pitching Woo's post-surreal physicality, the smallness and warmth. Another might brush past that. Who among us, still, could give short shrift to how the dead-alive conundrum plays out in this last stanza of solid argument that again orchestrates its coincidence with creation and poetry.

On the Mississippi Audubon killed the birds then drew them
time held out in small delicate etchings
still warm though rapidly aging
in his hands, the paper's a trigger
big enough to walk inside
the chapel of a bird's body
is any body
breathing with ink