Zachary Schomburg, Scary No Scary (Black Ocean, 2009)«
Scary, No Scary, the follow-up to Zachary Schomburg’s acclaimed first collection of poems
The Man Suit, is a book of skeleton gloves and skeleton keys—at once dark and playful. With loneliness and levity Schomburg takes the reader on a tour through a liminal world of dream-logic, informed by its own myth and folklore. Here there are new kinds of trees and new ways of naming the ages; jaguars and an abandoned hotel on the horizon. This book will crawl inside your chest and pump lava through your blood.»
«Schomburg is possibly the man who will save poetry for all of those readers who are about to give up on the genre.
Scary No Scary is both funny and ridiculously original. A playful, mournful, and sometimes sweet collection full of fantastic images and odd dialogue.»
- Kevin Sampsell«The last great book I read was the very recent
Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg, released from Black Ocean Press in August. I was a big fan of the previous collection from Schomburg,
The Man Suit, and was hoping that
Scary, No Scary would be equivalent. It is not.
Scary, No Scary is far better, much sharper and more drawn from images, shaking through the reader in its short and livid sentences.
Divided into sections, the overall text is still somehow connected by word associations: trees, hummingbirds, bones, empty houses, hauntings. And this is what made it so great for me, because it didn’t read like a collection but instead like fractures of an epic poem, fragments of a (prose) poem novel(la). I dove through once as soon as the mail came because the cover is vibrant and torturously teasing, but then the close of the text, ending with a new version of
The Pond, one of my favorite releases from Greying Ghost, it begs you back through, asks you to wander again, electrified by its words.
Zachary Schomburg understands how to tilt a board filled with language up and towards his mouth. He rolls you down like that, to the teeth, staring at a black throat threatening everything. Scary, No Scary made me love poetry again, made me understand how it can fit together, how a collection can be a book, and how a book can stir and pour over me, ruffling all my feathers into new flight.» -
J. A. Tyler«There is an index at the back of Zachary Schomburg's second book of poetry,
Scary, No Scary. Many books of poetry contain an index, usually an alphabetical list of the poems' titles. Schomburg's index, however, lists 84 themes that appear throughout the poems; for instance, “Birthday, or the idea of apologizing for missing one's party” can be found on pages 24 and 62, poems about “Leaving (and never returning)” can be found on 10 different pages, while “Sawing in half, or the idea of division” can be found on 6 pages, though you might want to also look at the poems listed under “Part-species, or hybrid species (see also Sawing in half).” Schomburg's poems, gracefully arranged across 79 pages, are just as strange and unorthodox as the index of themes, but the book's uncanny beauty isn't limited to these numerical games: this is a cohesive and (successfully) daring collection of poems, often reading like the diary of a delusional child-prodigy, with an absurd yet compelling narrative strung throughout.
As the title suggests,
Scary, No Scary attempts to find the thin line (if it even exists) between terror and pleasure. What better way to do this than by relying on an adolescent's perspective, albeit a highly intelligent, highly promiscuous youth, living in a seemingly post-apocalyptic universe. The landscape of
Scary, No Scary is unchartered literary territory: chandeliers made from broken dishes, nameless men and women transforming into trees, boys becoming hummingbirds, and twins named “Invisible” and “Not Invisible.” As frightening as all this might sound, Schomburg’s tone remains hilarious throughout:
“Either way, let’s not just stand here/with our fingers up our butts.”If Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road is this generation’s great somber novel about the post-apocalyptic world,
Scary, No Scary makes the end of modern civilization look a bit more fun, and much more psychedelic. Like
The Road, Schomburg’s future universe is devoid of personal identity:
“Neither of us have names / especially you.” Life is rather abundant as well, especially trees. We can all rest assured that the youth of the post-world will still be afraid of entering the woods late at night, not fearful of wild animals or witches, but fearful of finding what is “half-buried” beneath dead leaves, be it a bodiless woman or one’s own beating heart. Becoming part of the woods, too, is of great concern:
Soon you’ll be more tree than person.You’ll go camping in the woods and never come back.Animal life is also abundant, especially insects and hummingbirds, both of which humans can randomly turn into:
How do you tell someone their family is tiny insects?How do you tell someone their boy is a hummingbird?Jaguars, too:
“You were becoming more and more jaguar.”But even with all this anthropomorphic action, the post-apocalyptic teenager still retains teenage desires. Unlike today’s youths, who are really only concerned with accidental pregnancy and unwelcomed transmitted diseases (if they are concerned about anything), the sexually adventurous kids of Schomburg’s future have bigger concerns, such as choosing “between floating eternally in a buoyant cage of hummingbird bones down a river of lava or a river of blood.” Break-ups, too, will take on a different form, as seen in the prose poem “Goodbye Lessons”:
“I have to say goodbye... I will know that goodbyes are when you eat yourself to death.” In
The Road, we had to be concerned with cannibalistic wanderers eating our children; in
Scary, No Scary, we need to be concerned about our kids eating themselves. All concerns aside, these kids are still looking for a good place to make out:
I know a place where we can escape the dead hummingbird problem, a pond no one knows about, cold and clean. It is fed by a mountain stream. We can take off all our clothes there and maybe have sex.Scary, No Scary is organized into four sections. The first is mainly comprised of short, wonderfully sonic lyrics, reminiscent of Robert Creeley (in the midst of a bad LSD trip) or, more recently, Graham Foust (if Foust was an evil clown). These poems introduce the narrator and his views on the scarce world in which he lives. The second section consists mainly of prose poems, surreal yet darkly beautiful, like a horror-core band (comprised of musicians who really know how to play their instruments) interpreting James Tate. The final two sections are sequences, the first being “The Histories” and the second “The Pond.” “The Histories” tells a story of the narrator in his dining room (which doesn’t actually exist) setting a table with dishes beneath a chandelier (none of which exist, either) in a dark, floorless and ceiling-less house. All that exists, it seems, is the narrator, who simply describes this non-existent scene. “The Pond” may be referring to the pond where the narrator takes his lover earlier in the book, but we will never know for sure, since the narrator is unsure of everything:
At the edge of the pond someone who looks like me is holding hands with someone who looks like you. I begin to wonder who I am because I don’t look like me.So what are we to make of Zachary Schomburg’s universe in
Scary, No Scary? Should we be fearful of what is to come after the apocalypse? Of course, but instead of being afraid of cannibals and violence, we should be afraid of morphing into hummingbirds and having to apologize for missing a friend’s birthday party. Will the end of the world bring just the “scary” or the “no scary” as well? As far as we can tell, there will be a combination of both. One of the only moments where the narrator actually tells us he is fearful of something comes from “The Black Hole”:
“I’m afraid of myself.” Considering this could be said about most people today, things might not be too different. Hopefully, each day that comes after the apocalypse will flow into the next as perfectly as the movements of these poems.» -
Timothy Henry
Zachary Schomburg, The Man Suit (Black Ocean, 2007)«
The Man Suit, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelgangers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow.»
«The often funny yet haunting prose and verse poems of this eagerly anticipated debut deal with the subtle and unexpected ways things can transform, usually just beneath an observer's awareness. In "Postcard from the Arctic Ocean" the speaker can
"make smoke signals/ by burning/ these postcards/ by the handful." With similarly flippant but persistent gestures, Schomburg pushes at the boundaries of logic. He asks for a willing suspension of disbelief and of order. Non sequitur and clever opposition govern this world: a homicidal monster- cum-TV celebrity is fired in favor of a "gorilla dressed in people clothes"; in "I'm Not Carlos," "tree machines" dial up the poem's speaker, calling him Carlos and demanding he hand over "the Man Suit." A poem called
"I've Since Folded This Poem into an Airplane" admits Schomburg's comfort with the self-conscious and reflexive in poetry. If a few of these poems are slight, the best of them imbue whimsy with high emotional stakes, suggesting this collection's casualness has been carefully wrought. Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around.» -
Publishers Weekly"Zachary Schomburg is a wildly imaginative poet who will take you many places you've never been or even dreamed of, always with grace and quirky humor. Whether you are caught in Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene or the Sea of Japan, you are certain to enjoy the original vision of this highly entertaining poet. It's a book like no other." -
James Tate"It is a rare and fine thing when a poet momentarily affiliates his words and his cadences with the entirety of a world, thus freeing his poem from all burden of mediation, all transgression. In our own era, Rene Char and Pablo Neruda come most vividly to mind in this regard. With
The Man Suit, Zachary Schomburg, quietly but with deep conviction, begins to join their company. His book is a blessing." -
Donald Revell"Zachary Schomburg's
The Man Suit comes to us from the past but it is a thoroughly new book. It comes to us out of the familiar and it strikes us in the face with its novelty. You will recognize your own history, the history of our nation, the influence of
Mad Magazine and Benjamin Peret. And underneath it all, and what holds it all together, however unlikely, is the deep and abiding love of the little things that make up our days." -
Matthew Rohrer«Delightfully bewildering,
The Man Suit is less a book of poems and more an unlikely conglomeration of images and ideas that manage to function beautifully as one cohesive unit. These poems and paragraphs demand to be read aloud - both performance and text are indispensable to achieving the full effect.
The book does not waste time churning up the succession of poems before it. These poems spring forward or, when that’s not feasible, sideways. Do expect self-consciousness - the book buzzes with solipsism, paralysis, confusion and isolation. Yet somehow the dark undercurrent that fuels this collection never extinguishes the glow of its playfulness.
Take a look at the first three poems and try to keep a straight face. In just three pages Schomburg introduces a monster that’s supposed to be telling jokes, a gorilla dressed in people clothes, a pirate, a girl wearing a large, wooden wedding cake, and a man dressed as an avocado. The tone wavers between weird, hilarious, insightful, and subtly devious.
In the first poem, “The Monster Hour,” we see a monster on stage who keeps on trying to kill the audience instead of telling jokes. The monster doesn’t seem able to control himself, so the producers replace him with a gorilla and a Wurlitzer. It’s silly, slightly baffling, yet manages to edge itself up to something very familiar and vaguely haunting.
The second poem seems serious at first. It creates a possibly artistic scene in which a man and a naked women are trying to interpret the black square painted on her stomach. Then, where another poet might have written an oblique but mysterious aphorism, Schomburg writes simply, “A pirate enters.” The message is clear. Take off the black beret and put down the expensive pinot noir. You probably couldn’t tell it apart from boxed merlot anyway.
At this point one wonders if the book is going to be spitefully irreverent, but Schomburg dispels any fears with the third poem,
“The Center of Worthwhile Things,” perhaps the thesis of the entire book. A girl dressed as a wedding cake and a guy dressed as an avocado make love on a cliff over a lake, and the speaker wonders at the lack of theatrical accompaniment to life’s quiet, but unusual moments,
“It was a night of being backstage I thought, where nothing held its illusion, where everything was exposed as an actor.”The Man Suit never fully lets down its guard though. That’s its charm. It deals in oceans and islands, opera singers and owls, axe-murderers and action figures. It is a collection of inquiries into how we are supposed to deal with this man suit once we’ve put it on. When we stand in the spotlight, whether on stage or at a party full of sadists and murderers, how are we supposed to handle ourselves?
Amidst the many clever, funny, and sometimes confusing poems are a few themed chunks. One is titled only pictorially: a black telephone beside a white telephone. It is oblique, sometimes funny, sometimes vaguely satirical. By the end of the twelve pages, though, it manages to create the sensation that maybe there are mysteries patterned in the banalities and common objects of everyday life.
Another chunk of the book, “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene,” was previously published as a chapbook. Its sixteen paragraphs read like the script for an experimental movie made by a director who was completely unconscious of the extent to which pop culture had scrambled his creative faculties. Expect sexy legs in fishnet stockings, Siamese triplets, religious symbols, splattered blood, flames engulfing practically everything, and far too many smoking guns.
The Man Suit is more than a collection of witty poems and off-beat jokes. Schomburg has encapsulated modern life in just one hundred or so pages. The bizarre imagination that spirals through the poems wonders, creates, and feeds upon itself. By the end of the book, as the things that haunt the space between consciousness and daydream take shape, the image in
“A Voice Box With Words Still In It” will bring tears to your eyes, and even if you’ve read this review, you won’t know what hit you.» -
D. Richard Scannell«
The Man Suit [is] really good—full of surreal images and dream logic
Here’s an image that stuck with me: a voicebox—removed from its throat—still full of words. A person can pick up said word-filled voicebox, and blow through it to hear what was left unsaid when the voicebox belonged to a body.
I am fairly certain that some time in the future, I will forget that I read about this voicebox in
The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg, and I will use it in a story, thinking I came up with it. I’m sorry, Zachary. Eventually I will remember, and then I will feel bad for stealing from you.
(This has happened before. I have an as-yet-unpublished story that features a character named Boy. I stole this from a Peter Markus piece I read on
elimae. I thought it had been my idea. There are other examples.)
(Actually, I wonder if this post will serve to stop this from happening. If it will immunize me from the Schomburg voicebox image that could some day infect my writing.)
Is this a bad thing? I’m not sure it is a great crime for artists to steal from one another in this way. Art bubbles up from a subconscious place, and it shouldn’t shock anyone that the things that bubble up are dropped into the stew of the subconscious mind by other artists.
Are you familiar with the concept of sperm trains? Some animals create sperm cells that hook themselves onto one another. They drag one another toward their goal. And move faster. The voicebox, I’m pretty sure, will one day find another idea hooking itself onto it, and they will both swim out onto a page of my writing.
Because I feel bad that I will steal from you, Mr. Schomburg, I would like to at least pay you the royalty you should’ve gotten for the book I purchased used. If you would like, I don’t know, five dollars, you should write to me at giantblinditems at gmail dot com.
Please use the comments section of this post to cop to things you have stolen.» -
Matthew Simmons«In March of last year, I was one of a few editors who organized an off-site reading at AWP (The Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference) in Austin, TX. One of the readers that evening was Zachary Schomburg. His surreal, insightful, hilarious, heartfelt poems won me over immediately, and I have been keeping track of his work ever since. Luckily, Janaka Stucky of Black Ocean Press was also taken with Schomburg’s poetry that same night. After being a finalist for several major contests over the course of four years, The Man Suit was finally published by Black Ocean Press, and while it feels like this book could be on any number of larger, more decorated presses, the object that is
The Man Suit could not contain Schomburg’s poetry any better. From the ominous cover by Lincoln, NE-based artist Denny Schmickle, to the prose poem-friendly trim size, to the black and white telephone icons that mark The Man Suit’s second section, the actual book makes me grateful that it ended up at Black Ocean.
I emphasize ‘contain’ because
The Man Suit , as the title implies, is a book largely about costumes and what those costumes contain. The book is dotted with humans in costumes: an avocado and a wedding cake, a lung and a haircut, etc. And even when they are not in costumes per se, people are wearing log cabins and even whole ecosystems. One woman turns out to be an owl. In the section called Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene , the backdrop is of course a theater, so costumes abound.
In fact, costumes are so prevalent that they become the norm, and it is the human form that becomes, in effect, the other. What Schomburg successfully manipulates in general is the reader’s perception of what is banal versus what is exotic and powerful—a regular opera singer, a tree, or a telephone becomes as unique as an opera singer filled with trees, a tree filled with inappropriately dressed women, or a telephone housing a family of tiny spiders. A regular human head becomes just as shocking as one that is blood-spattered.
True to form, The Man Suit ’s title poem, “I’m Not Carlos,” begins with a costume:
“There is a whole forest of tree machines outside Saginaw / that have been programmed to turn on me.” Here, machines are dressed as trees. But this is not the only Schomburgian trope these lines employ. The use of Saginaw is another.
The locales in
The Man Suit have an almost folksy myth-like quality to them (Johannes Göransson, on his blog Exoskeleton, points out that much of Schomburg’s tone may very well come from the American tall tale tradition). Pulled from either standard jokes or pranks—Lake Titicaca for example—or perhaps from Schomburg’s personal mythology, or simply from his vast imagination, places like the Electric Mole, Canada, the Sea of Japan, any number of Great Lakes or Prince-named islands, are appropriated from their world of origin and placed into the world of this book. His characters, when dressed up, have two identities: the costumed and the uncostumed. The same holds true for Schomburg’s locales. Like the Magritte painting in which we are confronted with both our cultural notion of a train and the surrealist image of a train barreling out of a fireplace, “I’m Not Carlos” forces us to oscillate between the Saginaw in Michigan and the Saginaw in The Man Suit . Between some guy named Carlos in the world and some guy named Carlos in a poem called “I’m Not Carlos:”
“Sometimes they call me on the telephone and whisper / things. Give us the man suit, Carlos. Just give us the man suit .”This is another Schomburg trademark: violence. Or in this particular case, the threat of violence. These tree machines are programmed to do the speaker in, especially, as it turns out, if they aren’t given the man suit. While it is shadowed by real-world violence, much like the places and characters of
The Man Suit are shadowed by their real-world counterparts, this violence is not grotesque or worrisome. In one of the prose blocks in {Opera Singer}, Schomburg makes this explicit:
“Let’s hear {opera singer} while the forests collapse in on themselves, while the fire takes the swans. Things quickly get out of hand. Just as quickly, things are restored.”One gets the sense that most of the damage done by the violence throughout the book can just as easily be undone. I can imagine some readers pointing out this discrepancy between the actual thing and the thing in the book as a flaw—the neutering of such things as violence. It seems to me, however, that
The Man Suit successfully negotiates a deal with the reader via the democratic surrealism with which all of its subject matter is treated, rendering such objections moot. The places in
The Man Suit will only remind you of places, humans will only remind you of humans, and hemorrhaging will only remind you of hemorrhaging. By decontextualizing violence, much like he does his places and characters, Schomburg puts the impetus on the reader to note the resonance between the violence of their world, and the violence of his.
As the title implores us to believe, the speaker of “I’m Not Carlos” isn’t Carlos. But Carlos does appear and/or is mentioned, according to the handy index in the back of
The Man Suit , seven times, and repetition like this is par for the course. Abraham Lincoln, or “Abe,” appears throughout the book, not just in Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene . Even his famous log cabin is featured multiple times. Marlene appears and reappears in several poems, and then an “M” factors heavily in Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene . The list of repetitive characters, themes, and places (even Saginaw is brought up again) is endless. My first instinct was to be critical of such arcs—it seemed that the now fashionable idea of a book as a unified whole and not simply a collection of poems got the best of Schomburg. I asked myself what the index might look like if the arcs were less manipulated and instead were organic results of an artist’s obsessions. But invariably, these arcs feel necessary, sewing the book together like a repetitive strain of melody played in various songs on a concept album. Perhaps the arcs could be more organic. Perhaps Schomburg’s fingerprints are a bit too prevalent in the creation of those arcs. But part of the book’s inherent music is its self-consciousness—a self-consciousness, in addition to the repetition, that may well be an organic aesthetic, one that has a lineage outside of poetry. David Letterman comes to mind, as if Schomburg is about to say,
“Did you hear that, Paul… inappropriately dressed!”For me, this self-conscious repetition is another extension of the costume idea, but instead of an actual disguise, the subject is denatured either by seeing it in a variety of contexts or through shear overexposure (like saying a word over and over again to make it sound weird). For Carlos, this repetition seems to haunt the speaker at times, making him question his own identity. In the third poem of the black telephone/white telephone section, not-Carlos is at a loss:
“The white telephone is still ringing. It is a call for / somebody named Carlos—I’m sure of it. It is the only call I / seem to get anymore.” The tone here is one of exasperation, as if the speaker, himself disoriented by the repetitious phone calls, might be ready to concede that maybe they’re right… maybe he is Carlos.
Schomburg expertly defamiliarizes familiar things—for his readers and characters alike—so that the man suit, this thing that defines our human form, is itself a disguise, one that renders us a bit confused as to our own identity. Sort of the ultimate costume. What this allows us to do is view ourselves with rare objectivity. This, along with its breadthless imagination and its dueling undercurrents of despair and humor makes Zachary Schomburg’s
The Man Suit an indispensable first book.» -
Chris Tonelli«Zachary Schomburg’s debut collection of poetry,
The Man Suit, features a mysterious coffin floating through the night sky. The cover captures the essence of the poetry. In the collection, whales are able to talk, monsters have human qualities, and a lung and haircut have a relationship. Schomburg’s mixture of everyday meditations and bizarre occurrences will grip readers' attention. In
“Policy for Whales,” Schomburg presents readers with the bizarre idea that,
“There was a whale singing a sincere and flawless rendition of The Thrill is Gone in a nightclub.” As the poem demonstrates, Schomburg exercises admirable control over his juxtapositions, and thus leaves the reader amused and satisfied.
For a debut collection of poetry, it is a longer book at 105 pages, but Schomburg has divided it into several sections. The sections are little chapbooks that intensify the strangeness of the world he has created. The first of these chapbooks tells the story of two phones. In one poem the speaker says,
“There is a man around here somewhere, in the woods behind my house, who has a white telephone for a head. He has loud buzzing chainsaws for arms.” Audiences will find enjoyment in the uncanny, and be reminded of the weird things they might have imagined as children, when the world was still fresh and unexplored.
“What Everyone Started Wearing” is one of the strangest poems of the collection. It begins,
“Everyone started wearing small log cabins on their heads. They opened the windows so they could see each other, and they opened the front doors so they could speak to each other.” The idea seems unreal to a reader, yet it is delivered in such a matter-of-fact manner that we may want to acquire log cabins for our own heads, becoming the newest victims of contagious fashion.
Schomburg shifts from prose poems to free verse through the collection. The first poem, “The Monster Hour,” is a prose poem, while other poems like “Letter to the Late Baron” demand line breaks in order to dramatize the narrative of the story. The shifting of styles allows the reader to simply absorb the stories and laugh at the bizarre humor. This shift in format is quite effective, as the poems never become daunting to the reader, despite the risks taken throughout.
The other chapbook sections also tell stories of the strange, with titles like “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene” and “[Opera Singer].” The strange becomes expected and the normal unexpected with
The Man Suit, to the extent that we may begin viewing our surroundings differently, perhaps with a more suspicious eye. The phone ringing on our desk may not be a phone after all.» -
Frank DePoole «It would be fair to say surrealism in American poetry had a late start. Probably delayed by the Moderns. Probably, as Dana Gioia asserts, the need for a meaningful dreamscape in art was met in other ways, like animated cartoons. So it seems that in the seventies, in American poetry, Edson, Tate, Simic and even Donald Justice tried out surrealism to release verse from its fences and prose poetry from its dull labor. Simic perhaps had atavism for surrealism by virtue of being Eastern European and having grown up in the middle of a war. Edson came to it most likely as the best vehicle for his everyman scenarios. Tate endured in that vein, turning out material that felt cut quite from its own cloth. But the need for automatic writing that has been crafted to represent something with the burning intensity of childhood’s mind — as Breton defines surrealism — persists into today’s aesthetics.
Zachary Schomburg’s debut collection of poetry
The Man Suit takes surreal and meaningful stances, a few approaching disorder and chaos. The volume layers its themes and recurring figures the way music can double back to make sure your heart grows heavy: a sweetheart named Marlene, an ominous Everyman, Carlos, parables about the woods, myths about women like hollowed out trees later balanced by myths about men like hollowed out trees, macabre and giddy reinterpretations of history. The latter include not only the poems from Schomburg’s chapbook Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene but sophisticated, abstracted cosmologies reminiscent of Edson or Simic or Tate, well-anchored in sadness and bright with touches of disarming humor.
The poems deploy weights and counterweight pairs like the civilized and the brutal; the real and the uncanny, or an almost grotesque sweetness trying to mask loneliness. These counteractive forces allow Schomburg to write poems about ontological absurdities already gestured at in American poetry. His poems distinguish themselves with a particular kind of humor, and by underscoring the fabricated qualities of history, and the sad finality of our destruction of nature.
There is in Schomburg’s surrealism a combination of the civilized and the brutal that insists on the extinguishable quality of humanness. Like Tate, Schomburg records a twisted, neighborly hope, or, like Edson, violent, dreary complications of the everyday. Some examples like “Far From Marlene” start out with the crowd viewing the magically afflicted, in this case, a man with birds nesting in his “messed up” hair. Soon the poem matches delicacy like,
“Birds are in it/laying eggs” with
“He’s heard this shit before/and he gets in full/karate stance.” The diction of the latter quote could seem sophomorically set against the quiet of the first lines except that the poem shifts point of view (or reveals a hidden point of view). The poem ends with the “I” writing the ubiquitous Marlene a letter about the guy with birds in his hair and ends with the understatement,
“I go on to tell her/about the birds/and the cake/using some pretty/good cursive.” That “pretty good” emotionally removes the angry karate guy as a phenomenon, not an easy joke. All the objects in the poem, chocolate cake, a large knife, the cursive, Marlene, feel like a meta-message about automatic communication and numbness in the face of the brutal.
This pairing of the surreal and the plain – and the askew jump in point of view – removes reality and humanity from the poem, the way the idea of motion seems sucked out of a painting by Hopper. The effect has as much “joke” in the tone as surrealist predecessors, but the joke is not in the people and objects Schomburg sets before us. A similar paralysis occurs in many poems, like “I’ve Since Folded This Poem into an Airplane” in which Marlene, it turns out, is made of snow. In “Halloween” the speaker actually makes his own emblem of false feeling, a sock puppet – a move critic Frederick Karl would ascribe a Southern feeling for its combination of the grotesque and the formal – then uses it to rein in the unruly beard on the real face of the speaker. The speaker’s personality, feelings, self-constructed happiness, the body’s needs, become a process held at an eerie remove. When aliens in “I’m Not Carlos” ask the speaker
“(g)ive us the man suit, Carlos,” Schomburg delivers a pleasurably spooky emphasis to haphazard, vulnerable existence.
What also feels new is Schomburg’s use of the historical in the portion of the book, “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene, “ also a chapbook by Horse Less Press. André Breton said, “(Surrealism) is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.” Yet, the long series of poems about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination allow the frame of history to appear.
The sequence starts with about five lines that seem a straightforward account of the 16th president’s assassination. Then the “angelic face” of M., the reader might think, is the recurring figure of Marlene suddenly gone back in time. Though the poem refers to the killer Booth and his expressions, wild figures tear logic apart: daggers in the ceiling, a sexy legged accomplice and a “blood-spattered St. Bernard”. The borders of this reproduction diorama have fallen down and randomness proceeds to cyclone anything through its winds. The attachment to the recurring, human characters is constantly torn apart. The reader has to reassemble the juxtaposed times, realities and objects over and over – including
Lincoln killing “a few audience members… before turning the revolver on himself”.Freud used to argue that the surreal didn’t really come from the unconscious, that surrealism was a quite an ego-dominated and shaped surface. Many parts of the Lincoln section seem to have rustic realistic edges and in others the speaker seems to wink at the audience,
“M. thinks this is entirely untrue, but I have my suspicions.”. The outrageousness becomes broad, scrambled, and hard to engage with as in Japanese noise music, even for long passages. Then, suddenly, it seems the unconscious (or is it the conscious mind leading the unconscious) waves a little hand toward an end: In a cogent, sad, litany of flames shaped like various objects, the reader detects how Lincoln himself becomes meaningless and ephemeral as our history’s own insistent violence continues:
“A woman-shaped flame. A whale-shaped flame. An ocean-shaped flame. The woman-shaped flame is inside the whale-shaped flame. The whale-shaped flame is inside the ocean-shaped flame...A breach-shaped flame...A Lincoln-shaped flame directly behind Lincoln. It is his soul on fire. It has already left his body...A Lincoln-shaped flame. A Lincoln-shaped flame”.
By the end of the sequence, Schomburg’s speaker and his M. are back at home by a fire, and American insouciance and comfort in the form of the couple once again frame and keep at arm’s length an infernal, bloody, nonsensical history – the fire. The poem adds up to a performance piece, dotted with a humor and violence that could seem irrelevant except that the ignored lessons of history seem to be the undeniably urgent message set forth.
If Schomburg insists – with a kind of airy, goofy humor’s help – that human existence is ephemeral and numbed, and that history is a monster piece of chaos subsumed by self-interest, Schomburg’s surrealism seems ultimately to remind the reader that pure nature is ending. Early in the book, the poem “What Everyone is Wearing” uses ecosystems and trees on an absurd scale to permit a scolding chaos to whip up. The potentially environmental message is drowned by a deeply subjective, at-root cynical equation of nature and human existence:
“The tiny canaries cleared some space in the trees on their heads to wear small apartment complexes there. The tiny rabbits: supermarkets. The tiny elk cleared space to wear small churches on their heads and even tinier people started worshipping there”.These last lines of the poem critiques our hubris in the face of all of nature, and the changeable nature of our livelihood, sustainability, etc. This vulnerability to shape-shifting makes a particularly hilarious turn in
“A Band of Owls Moved into Town”. The invasion of a small town by owls is discussed in the tsk-ing manner we save for urban sprawl or darker attitudes usually masking racism,
“A band of owls moved into town. They shopped for groceries and ran for office, that kind of thing.” This satire of fears, rendered as xenophobia of owls, ends with an exchange between the speaker and Julia, a
“daughter of new and prosperous socialites...”. She agrees that she and the speaker are the only two “who... who...” That’s the end of the poem. The reader is helpless before this kind of goofy punning that also implies the inescapable likeness between all – owls and townies: find your own parallels in real life.
Sometimes the fabulous chaos of
The Man Suit makes a funny, absurd, strident sound that it also critiques, but other times the poems are in such focus at the joining point of the humorously surreal and the painful, that you can’t help but want to know what this young poet’s work will become in the next decades. I would bet Schomburg’s work will be truly frightening, and I would hope that it remains a bit moral and devastating, as in another of the poems that indicate an end to nature. In “A Voice Box with Words Still in It,” the last poem of the collection, our old friend, the somewhat ironically human Carlos finds a voice box “inside the throat of a dead sheep”. If you “blow just right” into the voice box, it reveals the bucolic and wholesome secrets only a human would think a sheep contemplates:
“where the best and worst grass is” and
“how to blend it”. An unknown speaker tests Carlos’ hypothesis and the true voice of the sheep blisters in this terror-filled line:
Me: {I take a shallow breath and blow}. I am dying, so cold without wool, and afraid.» -
Cynthia Arrieu-King
Zachary Schomburg, Pond (Greying Ghost Press, 2009 )[also the final section of Scary, No Scary]«Ponds serve as a marker. A marker of wealth. A marker of geography. A marker of personal history. But in the case of Zachary Schomburg's
The Pond, it is a marker of a clear, but subtle shift in one of contemporary poetry's most exciting voices. Where Schomburg's first full length collection,
The Man Suit, reappropriated James Tate for the wandering and curious,
The Pond reads more like a discovery, albeit one you'd only share with your best friend/lover. There are moments in this book that are so bold and yet so innocent your face blushes as a sense of embarrassment creeps into your toes;
I'll show you the cavewhere all the bats come from.You'll show me that placebetween your kneeswhere my hand goes.The single most amazing aspect of this book though, is Schomburg's awareness of that fact...and his subsequent use of this awareness to turn you from voyeur to active participant.
Where many other poems by many other poets would place the audience in their usual role as onlooker, Schomburg's poems pull out the chair for you, invite you to sit, and the invitation is so cordial that every time he mentions "you" or "we" the reader is almost made to squeal with excitement. You are the one chosen to hear all these secrets, you are the one he loves, we are going to have quite the adventure figuring this world out. And though it has never been Schomburg's tenor to alienate the reader with dense language and general poet's trickery, the simpleness of these poems increases your need to connect with them... their eagerness to speak to you demands an equal eagerness to listen attentively, caringly.
It's in this way that
The Pond becomes more like a reflecting pool. This collection is decidedly Zachary Schomburg and yet, it is decidedly me, decidedly you. The magic of these poems doesn't necessarily take place within the printed words, but in the space between what those words are meant to symbolize and how those symbols are acknowledged in the brain. Meaning, when Schomburg mentions "the pond," I envision a specific pond (it's the one in front of my aunt's house), as do you, and Schomburg does nothing to stop it, in fact, these poems only work when you imagine that pond, at which point, you are no longer being asked to play in Zachary Schomburg's world, rather, you unknowingly invite him to play in yours.
You spend most of the day in the pond.Every time you blink your eyelashes fall outand then quickly grow back.I spend all day collecting them.They're what I make boats out of.We like to ride bikes and fly kites together.It's in these spaces where our brains infuse Schomburg's lines into our actual memories, like a lie you've told one too many times, and though it might feel a little creepy to admit, isn't this what we all really desire in our poetry? To have it be lived by someone? To be a marker of some kind somewhere? Jack Spicer used to mention magic everytime he talked about poetry, and "The Pond" is as close to a magical experience as I've ever had reading poems. To be honest, it is the book that made me reconsider my stance on both magic and poetry...
Congratuations Zach, James Tate might be the master illusionist, but I'll take the wonder of a good coin-in-the-ear any day. Besides, you can only see illusions so many times before you figure them out, but done right, when a magician holds that coin to your eyes, your first instinct will always be to reach back into your ear.» -
BJ Love
Zachary Schomburg, I Am a Small Boy (Factory Hollow Press, 2009)«
I Am a Small Boy is a small chapbook.
I Am a Small Boy is full of small poems.
I Am a Small Boy is a small snippet of a great poet.
Ten poems accompanied by drawings from Ben Estes,
I Am a Small Boy is another grand and stellar collection by the venerable Zachary Schomburg.
What I find most interesting about this book is how much volume Schomburg is fashions from so few poems, so few lines, so few pages. Here, as in both
The Man Suit and
Scary, No Scary, the evidence that language needs little to expand, that it can in fact be the grain and the world all at once, rivers of meaning informed by simple drops collecting.
This is a boy who is lost. This is a boy who is longing. This is a boy who is dead. This is a boy who doesn’t know what he wants or is or does or will be. This is a small boy.
When you diea secret is revealed to you.This happens to everyone.But I think I already knowwhat the secret is.Probably I am dead.Maybe birth is the real death.Maybe living is the secret.I Am a Small Boy is another way of saying poetry can be small.I Am a Small Boy is how language molds into drifts.I Am a Small Boy is another round of Schomburg that is fascinating and sprite.» -
J. A. Tyler
Matthew Simmons, A Jello Horse (Publishing Genius Press, 2009)
