Hawaiian Sunrise, Ken Norris
above/ground
press, 2021
Stray Dog Café, Ken Norris
above/ground
press, 2021
THE TRAVELING WILBURYS COLLECTION, Ken Norris
above/ground
press, 2021
When I saw that above/ground press had published three books by poet Ken Norris in 2021, I was compelled to read what the man had managed to do during one of the most difficult years for art and production in the last 100 years. Full disclosure, I was working on an interview with Ken about his three new chapbooks, and I was floored to read the new books, now knowing some of Ken’s work and reputation.
The chapbooks that form what I have dubbed the “Ken Norris Pandemic Trilogy” include Hawaiian Sunrise, The Traveling Wilburys Collection, and Stray Dog Café, comprising an inviting, colourful, insightful, funny, and very personal collection, all characteristics I desperately needed in the poetry I was reading over the course of the pandemic. I have chosen to think of these three books as a trilogy, though I have it on good authority that isn’t at all how these books were produced. My moniker isn’t some ill-conceived marketing ploy, I promise you, I just think that because I read all three books in quick succession and because of the lethargy foisted upon my mind by the pandemic I was looking for something purposefully epic in its construction, and so I forced that blueprint onto this collection, and I think it fits.
Fitting, then, that Hawaiian Sunrise, the first book in the trilogy, begins with an epigraph from the Raymond Chandler detective novel The Big Sleep:
“Does Norris know?”
“He’ll never tell.”
“I thought he knew.”
The thing is, Norris does tell in his work, quite a lot. This is a book about escapism, among other things, though the conditions under which Norris feels the need to escape here are murky, which is evident from the first poem in the book “December In The Desert”:
December in the desert
isn’t fooling anyone. It’s a stopover on the way
to anything else.
I suppose when there’s an international pandemic, and when one is an artist who thrives on travel as Norris is, escape is a tool of the trade, is as crucial as notebook and pen. In his poem “Early Morning Waves”, Norris explains this itch in a way that I found very relatable as a working writer in Ontario:
You can’t expect everyone to write at the
Ontario cottage
and come up with something different. I
travel―
to places where the white birds swoop and
soar.
There’s a tin roof waiting for me, there’s
a tropic heart
waiting to be born.
When Norris tells us that he “isn’t fooling anyone” in “December In The Desert”, that line could easily be one of the working hypotheses for the book. Norris, like many of us during the pandemic, is starting out lost but observing his way back into the world. Hawaiian Sunrise and Stray Dog Café in particular are masterclasses in observational poetry, as Norris observes those ineffable moments that poets then do their best to render effable, always failing, of course, but doing so in such a way that makes space for the reader to think about the ineffable thing too, which is the best any poet can do. Like any observational poet of power, Norris follows up his observations with revealing connections to his own experience.
In the poem “Hawaiian Sunrise 2 (The Sequel)”, Norris gives us an image of what feeds his “tropic heart”:
Artie never disappointed. I love him
to this day. The Hawaiian kids surfing
would amuse him. He liked drugs more than
anybody.
I could almost keep up with his speed
rants, though
at 3 A.M. I was starting to lose my place
in existence.
I think that last line also speaks to the spirit of Hawaiian Sunrise, in that the “tropic heart” that Norris finds with each trip to such a locale, loses when he leaves, and finds again upon returning, in the images of the boys in the surf, the bobbing boats, the hot rain, the perfect wave, allow him to revisit himself, to revitalize his memory, to keep what’s important but since passed by close at hand.
My favorite poem of this book is “Measuring Distance”, which is a memoir of a poem. Here is an excerpt:
The whole middle of life was lived
in the moments between, the inventory
of children, marriage, house, job taken.
It all took up so much space
and now it’s all gone:
the children grown, the marriage put out
of its misery, the house sold, the job
retired from.
I feel shaky in the absence of it all.
I feel shaky in the face of the morning,
sitting here on a picnic bench in the
shade,
measuring distance.
And isn’t that last line exactly what Norris is doing here? (How many hypotheses for these books will I come up with by the end of this review? Buckle up!) The poet is measuring the distance between himself and those he has left behind on this current trip, the distance between himself and the birds fidgeting near him in the book’s penultimate poem “Moment”, and the distance between a person’s past and their current moment… a million small distances that are ever-amounting.
I could go on and on (and I usually do) about this book, but lastly, this book is encased in a bright yellow cover, which makes sense of the title but also speaks to the vivid use of colour here by Norris. After escaping the physical and psychological desert of his Las Vegas layover, the poet emerges into “clouds drifting idly, aimlessly, collecting colour”, a Hawaiian scene where the boats out on the water are “bobbing and rolling in the blue”, painting such a calming and idyllic scene that one forgets the international germ in the air. These are poems of mercurial and deep observation, as Norris absorbs his rich surroundings and then rebroadcasts, to act as a kind of escapist cypher and report back to us the beauty of the outside world that we are missing by being physically and existentially locked down.
These are the kinds of poems that I like to read; observational, and concise, interrogating the need for something miraculous or epiphanic to happen when one sees something beautiful, moving, or just plain brilliant in its colour, shape, or way. Of this type of reporting, Norris is an expert.
I’m
reminded of a story I heard in a recent podcast I was listening to in which the
reporter was out for a walk with an avid birder who was relating to the
reporter a moment of epiphany he had when observing with a high-powered
microphone a Stellar Jay on a far away branch. The birder was able to pick up
the Jay whistling to itself, making such a sound at such a low volume that the
birder realized the Jay was making this sound for no bird other than itself,
and he was not aware that this was something birds did at all. Norris is doing
the same here, but is doing us a favor by letting us in on the whistling and
the recording.
The book is called The Traveling Wilburys Collection, and it is indeed just that. Norris takes each song from The Traveling Wilburys catalogue that consists of only two albums, Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 and Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, and makes a poem after each song, using the song titles from both records as the titles for his poems, and using lyrics or images from each song to construct his own responses to their work.
For me, the conceit here is summed up in a line from Norris’ poem after the song “Last Night” from Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1:
Every night’s last night.
Your money or your life.
A tradition of cut-ups.
Get the glue.
These poems are riffs, Norris riffing on the lyrics from the songs by adding his own particular humour, flavour, and insight. Norris is employing a kind of poetic cut-up method in this book, pulling lyrics or versions of the lyrics from the Wilburys catalog to pay unique tribute to the band in his own way.
There is a distinct playfulness here that I appreciate, which is evidenced in the epigraphs for this collection:
“Your poetry’s bad, and you blame the news.”
―Lana Del Rey, “Norman Fucking Rockwell”
“Well, it’s all right…”
―The Traveling Wilburys, “The End of The Line”
Norris is having fun here, or trying to, as the pandemic rages in the outside world. Like many of us during this time, I picture Norris revisiting his record collection during the pandemic and using the words and feeling and chords he is revisiting in these two records to make something new, to move his mind, but also to create inroads into writing about the pandemic. This is certainly his most pandemic book of the three, but, as I said, there is an inherent humour in his approach to doing so, like in the poem “Like A Ship”, which starts with the lines:
I shoot up bleach in my spare time.
And it is all spare time now.
Or in the poem “Inside Out”:
I love this song beyond measure.
Look out your window.
What do you see?
All the sad, sorry world of Pandemic.
Or in “The Devil’s Been Busy”:
Great sitar solo.
All the ills of humanity―
toxic spills, toxic waste.
Agent Orange in the orange juice.
I guess I stayed indoors too long.
Now I’m addicted to ventriloquism.
This book reads like a poet deep in the pandemic and looking for a way to write something, anything that might entertain; not to necessarily entertain the masses, as Norris referred to in the private email that I just so brashly published here, but to entertain himself. It just so happens that by doing so, he entertains us too.
My favourite poem of the collection is “New Blue Moon”, a portion of which goes a little something like this:
I was your Ken doll,
and you played with me
for a while.
Then you went out looking
for a new blue moon.
Now I live in the basement of our love.
And, just so you know, reader, I checked: that’s not a Harrison or Lynne, that’s a Norris line. What a beauty.
The third book in the trilogy, Stray Dog Café, I have been told by the poet, wasn’t written during the pandemic, but was edited during the pandemic. I’m going to allow myself to use such a technicality to include it in the “Ken Norris Pandemic Trilogy”.
The Stray Dog Café was a café in St. Petersburg, Russia that was known for hosting writers and poets between 1911 and 1915, and is the figurative focus of this book. The epigraphs of the book are great, and provide much in the way of context for the book to come. The third epigraph, at least for this reviewer, does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of setting up the book:
In choosing his manner of death, M. was
counting on one
remarkable feature of our leaders: their
boundless, almost
superstitious respect for poetry. “Why do
you complain,” M. used
to ask. “Poetry is respected only in this
country―people are killed
for it. There’s no place where more people
are killed for it.”
―Nadezhda Mandelshtam
What a dark affirmation. Norris is again on the run in this book, traveling to find meaning in whatever form that might take. If Hawaiian Sunrise was Norris rediscovering his “tropic heart”, then this is certainly Norris seeking out a long dark night of the soul. The third poem of the collection, “Find”, bears this out:
Fill a page, and find a reason.
To welcome the blue sky in.
To grant to the fairies their wings.
This isn’t what I pretended
I wanted. This is what I get
as time is running out.
The main theme of this book is exploring the space between construction and destruction, of traveling (again) to find the generative liminal space that exists between home and away. This section from the opening poem of the book, “The Misplaced Thing”, says this much better than any reviewer of it can:
Lost somewhere
between here and there,
and there can be
no accounting:
It’s gone,
as if it never
truly existed.
You know you had it
once, in your hands―
you turned the pages
and read the words.
In this case
the misplaced thing
is a beloved book―
The Stray Dog Café in Russia was known to be a space where writers would discuss ideas, and Russia itself (and traveling within it) seems to be a stand in for the café for Norris. This is why, for me, Norris begins the book with a dedication that reads “for the Russian winter”, as it isn’t necessarily about the country, but more about what he finds within it: the history, the clarity and insight Norris finds there that is entirely divorced from the place itself, and the alienness of being somewhere foreign. To that end, there is much talk in this book of celestial bodies, and aliens, which I believe is equally about being in a foreign place and traveling (and inhabiting) somewhere that inspires. Russia is clearly a formative space for Norris. This dynamic conflation is evident in the poem “My Trip To Mars”:
Leaving Earth was a big mistake.
I didn’t realize how every cell
in my body would cry out
to be returned to it.
In space, on Mars,
I was foreign matter.
And the local Martian gods
really didn’t much care
for who I was, and were hostile
to where I came from.
Norris may be “foreign matter” in the eastern North, but he is propelled by the experience, inspired, in flight, achieving heights where he is able to see himself, to see the bigger picture of himself, how he is constructed, how his work is constructed or inspired, to see the scaffolding of himself. Although, before there can be construction there must be planning. The poem “Change” speaks to that planning:
I don’t remember
what I was trying to do.
To put words into perfect alignment,
but towards what end?
Save beauty alone.
It can’t be that.
No one believes in beauty anymore.
Everyone believes in cosmetic change.
Everyone, that is, except for Norris. He is trying to build something new, something meaningful, and the best weapon at his disposal with which to do so is his poetry. In this excerpt from his poem “117 Songs”, Norris drops his gauntlet when he writes:
We’ve lived inside these rooms
so often we think that we know them
so well. Not true.
Time to listen
with new fresh ears.
I think most poets worth their salt can understand the need to try and say something lasting, to build something that can withstand. Even if we could reach Mars and write work there, to make it that far away from here and start something new, that work would be left behind as we flee inevitably to Saturn, Jupiter, beyond, ever-making new, moving ever-deeper through the vastness of space. Norris reckons with this “predicament” in the poem “Byzantium”:
The gong-tormented sea
drives you a little crazy
after a while.
Poor Yeats, thinking
there was a way
out of this whole cruel predicament.
He could dream a dream
of imperishable art
but it can’t help him now,
and it won’t help me.
So what to build, then? Let’s go back. Norris’ “The Misplaced Thing” ends with the verse:
Maybe this is merely
the first step
out onto the uneasy road
of increasing unknowing.
Ah, that old Socratic rag! As Norris tells us throughout the book in a variety of ways, there is beauty that is worth knowing, there are life lessons worth learning, there are uneasy roads worth traveling, but the liminal space of “unknowing” is the most generative or constructive space, and of these spaces death is the most final and potentially expansive, given all of our unknowing of that last road’s end. The poem “So Long To September” wrestles with this gorgeously, and ends with such grandeur in the face of such numbing cold that I begin to understand Norris’ grand construction, and maybe why Russia had to be the canvas:
Autumn’s arrived here in the fallen world,
the world that’s fallen through numberless
existences,
leaving more than a few holding on for
dear life.
There’s a gratitude for every day still
remaining.
But September’s gone, and will not be
returning.
And neither will we when we go, when we reach that final space, and when such a realization is fully realized it can open us up to such bigger spaces here in the world while we still have time left in it. However, there is a cost to living so fully, as we see in this excerpt from the penultimate poem of the book “Under Construction”:
We’ve got to make
something out of these lives, this time
we’ve been given. Removed
from professions that never suited us,
but were a way to pay some bills.
The rent is always due.
And in the end, after we’ve gone from destruction to construction to destruction again, where do we go? Where can Norris take us in the final poem of such an epic book, and my imagined trilogy? He begins that final poem, “Dead Wall Reveries 2”, with a new perspective, as great endings tend to do, opening it all up again:
It was never under construction,
and I don’t want to talk about it
now. The sun is rising again
as the contexts continue to change.
And he ends the poem with the only image one can after such a long dark night of the soul, with an image of frantic and frenetic creation in the face of it all:
As for my dead wall reveries,
that’s the way I worked.
Staring into the blankness
of blank paper, a white wall,
and scribbling like crazy.
I love this final image. The only thing a poet can do in light of all of these competing constructions and destructions is keep writing, which is the most cliché piece of advice you can give a young or aspiring writer, but it’s true. Keep going down those “uneasy roads” and trust in the power of “unknowing” to the point where it’s your weapon as opposed to your destroyer. How many poets have fallen by the wayside for fear, for lack of perspective, for lack of being read? Impossible to count. Impossible to keep them all in our memory, to keep all the wisdom of the poets close at hand, but we keep reading, keep writing, keep building this enormous bank of unassailable work that’s so vast it feels like we need to make room for it all off-planet, to the point where all this wisdom and work sits behind us like some uneasy and foreign force, some ungraspable education, but it’s not, it’s all us, making small choices that build, writers writing hard stuff, beautiful stuff, putting themselves out there, moving themselves beyond the breakers, flying to Mars and reporting back.
I thank Ken Norris for reporting back so much this year.
End of transmission.
