The imagery is fairly simple. Flowers recur in their powers of
cheerfulness. Cityscapes in their drabness. Elderly people in the
ebullient irony of their waning lives, with a couple of gritty
characters, Luther and Grover, providing particular history and
personality. Many conditions of light are represented in these
poems. And the weather generally, particularly bright sunlight and
the aftermaths of snow, finds its way into the various simplicities
and dull and lucid moments formulated here.
The "subjects" of the poems are something like modes of speaking
rather than conventional "ideas" or "plots." This is characteristic of
our present poetry. We are alerted early to watch how the words fit
together. In the second poem, "Ghost of Breath," the first three
stanzas provide a sharp image of a bus station, and the next five
analyze in mildly ironic terms (the speaker's allusions to Shelley
and Wordsworth reveal both his affinity for and his disdain of their
poetry and their commonplace sentimentality) how the choice of the
words "terminal," "to leave," and "are" in the opening stanzas were
arrived at. We're being told up front that the imagery is a
cross-reference to expose the nerves that wire the words together.
The theory behind this kind of poetry has Mallarme, Williams,
Creeley and Bernstein in its lineage. Poems are autonomous
whirling energies made of words. The words themselves generate
the "meaning" of the poetry, and need not refer to anything outside
themselves, or so the theory goes. And so the language especially
requires our reading attention. "Meaning" refers to something like
the actual experience of a context (of events or of words), or to the
immediate, sensed relation of an experience or an idea to a human
consciousness. The human context is verbal. Hence poetry.
From the words come, naturally, human voices, a number of them.
A very nearly objectivist voice emerges time and again to build up
exact details. Also a narrative voice: "Marty spent half/his adult
life/either writing short stories/or in 2nd hand book shops," begins:
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Contraband: A Recollection
Reading Forays home
The Mind Errant
A Long, Strange Trip
By Dana Wilde (1997)
Bruce Holsapple, Tourist. Odessa, Texas: Contraband
Press, 1994.
The poems in Tourist traveled from Odessa, Texas, where the
author by 1997 was living, to Orland, Maine, to be printed. They
came to Odessa from New Mexico, and to New Mexico from a
stopover in Buffalo, New York, where they made critical visits with
Robert Creeley and Charles Bernstein, among others. They got to
Buffalo via Burlington, Vermont and Seattle, Washington, after
visits to Paris and London. They embarked originally from
Portland, where most of them were, one way or another, born.
Bruce Holsapple is after all one of the creators of Contraband, the
first persistently serious and successful little magazine in Maine,
running from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s. Holsapple grew
up in Dexter, tended trap lines as a teenager, attended the University
of Maine in the late 1960s and hooked up there with mentors and
partners like Burt Hatlen and Jim Bishop. After preliminary
excursions out of state, he returned to Portland in about 1969, and
then with Bishop, Michael Barriault, Peter Kilgore and others,
started publishing saddle-stitched collections of poetry, Contraband.
Some early issues are worth money on the Stephen and Tabitha
King collectors market.
Contraband was, uncommonly, not a matter of two or three cheap
issues, then frustration, then oblivion. Holsapple from his nearly
windowless room in the attic of 85 Park Street, along with Bishop,
Kilgore, Scott Penney and others, read poems, set type, pasted up
and distributed the magazine and a number of books. It persisted.
Holsapple and Kilgore were instrumental in the founding of the
Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, which began in the
mid-1970s as a subcultural cooperative enterprise, much different
from the sort of comfy, suburban, quasi-prestigious society it is
now.
By the early 1980s much had changed, and it was time to light out.
And the trip that's documented, really, in the present book began.
By the mid-1980s Contraband Press seemed to have flickered out.
By 1992 we lost Peter Kilgore.
The groundwork of the poetics that characterizes Tourist was
slashed, burned and nurtured in Portland across the 12 or 13 years of
Contraband. Even a superficial reading of the title suggests the
poems will show us sights from along the way. And anyone who
knows Holsapple or his poetry will know what kind of a trip it has
been, will be: exhaustively personal, intensely considered, and
suddenly punctuated with large and gratifying appreciation. The
overlying metaphor leads us across the high and low moments of
any kind of travel, and occurs in the American poetic idiom of the
last 30 or so years. In other words, this is a narrative poem--or a
series of poems which form a personal narrative--turned inside out.
The poems are composed of discrete events that make whole
thematic sense, which is to say, verbal sense.
The themes are constituted by a matrix of "subjects" (to use a
conventional term), modes of diction, and imagery. Since my
purpose here is to urge attention for the book and give a sort of
makeshift guide to reading it, I'll just touch on the main themes, as
markers toward the more thorough readings that this book really
deserves.