Poetry

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William Dockery's New Poems To The Magic Store, just released by William Dockery, is a publication of modest proportions, consisting of a cover illustration followed by seven pages of poetry. At that, there is something aesthetically effective about this simple minibook design. Having issued a series of similar books over the last several years, the author undoubtedly has aquired a certain proficicency with them. It is probably a question, since one is not sure how else to explain it, of /fitting/ or /filling/ - yet not overfilling - a book of this size with an appropriate amount of material, such that one might experience in it a satisfying ampleness, notwithstanding the smallness of its format; at the same time expression must reach completion in the allotted number of pages, and not leave the impression of having been aborted, or that necessary articulations were left out. Judicious resort to ellipsis may indeed be helpful in this regard only providing it does not signify impoverishment. [Which is not the same thing, really.] It is indicitive that the book proceeds at what seems, at once, a comfortable, unhurried pace; at the same time it is more than the negligible sort of labor which one might expect in the everyday course of things to have done in fifteen minutes or so. In style and temperment, William Dockery's poetry is a little like that of John Berryman - cf., The Dreamsongs. A basically sensitive but slightly discombobulated awareness wending its way through hazes of intoxication; the neighborhood milieu. [..when I was staying/ at the boarding house/ across from the park,/ I hated those bells/ and I hated that place./ At the same time I loved it. In essence the theme is search for self. Now, self, in the way in which a poet like William Dockery understands it, is essentially a myth; in other words, a kind of story in which self is revealed and delinated to itself. In fact self cannot appear except through the mediation of external places and people. But the important thing is that these must be interpreted as having transcendental implications which might not be apparent at the level of quotidean experience. So this is what is meant by the poet entering his neighborhood or social milieu in search of self. Myth of origin [how self first learns to recognize itself]; golden age, debacle. These are some of the typical mythic components in life. To keep this on a simple, general level. Of course much subtler comprehensions are also possible. For example, a typical mythification involves a division of life into periods. When I lived on such-and-such street, life had a certain quality; I had these experiences, was aquainted with these people, et cetera. Then I moved somewhere else and it wasn't the same; a period of life came to an end. Thus life may be seen as a succession of /periods/ of greater or shorter duration; each more or less distinguished by objective referents [dates, addresses, names of people], each revealing distinctive mythological demensions as well. In To The Magic Store the poet is viewing such a period retrospectively. It is a Proustian /rememberance of things past/ in a way; things are remembered together with their psychological associations, producing a sensation of mythological awareness. [It is not necessary to spell it out with elaborate detail. The point is simply to intuit how a set of associated names and images creates the effect of milieu or era.] Viewed retrospectively, there is of course an emphasis on dissolution. People drift away, some die, and eventually the milieu dissolves. The tone of the book is predominantly one of loss and mourning. In one case the poet later revisits one of his main friends - the speed junkie musician Hugo - and finds he'd been burned in a terrible disaster,/ in a wheelchair and speechless. With its emphasis on the downside of the cycle, To The Magic Store corresponds [mythically speaking] with a decline and fall - maybe not of a /golden age/, since more or less there is only one full-blown golden age in a lifetime, but of some lesser epicycle which never the less exhibits analogous phases of flourishing and decline. Curiously enough, there is no magic store explicitly mentioned in this book. Given the preoccupation with loss and mortality, a suitable title might have been To The Cemetery. Indeed, the climactic verses tell of taking a girl to a graveyard - to see the grave of the guy who died./ We sat there in this graveyard park,/ with a six-pack of beer./ he looked fragile/ as she drunkenly cried./ She looked open/ to my sensibility... But then, as the poem concludes:
 * I can still remember
 * her laughing at my poetry
 * didn't feel so good to me
 * after I'd been up all night
 * pouring out my feelings.
 * I thought she was interesting,
 * she turned out
 * she was just a little female fool.
 * Was not able to put all the components
 * of my life in place...
 * my mythology was incomplete.

But the title might have a different and more Proustian meaning. The mythology of self, unfulfilled in initial experience [where to be sure such mythologies inevitably represent inconclusive aspirations], might be prolonged through acts of memory; where by poetic magic they may be perfected and ternalized - notwithstanding their preliminary frustration in mere circumstances. Perhaps this might shed some light on the mystic quality of a poem like The Ballad of James Collier. A line like I hope some of them are left is perhaps best taken at face value, that is, in its natural sense. Other parts of the poem allude to ghostly reunions - perhaps in some transcendental world where the past continues as a permanent reality - In tiny detail. -Rick Howe, Topical Studies #5, January 1 1993. Used by permission.

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