Colby Clair Stolson : bodega night pigeon riot, by Amanda Deutch

bodega night pigeon riot, Amanda Deutch
above/ground press, 2020

 

 

 

I was taught, and I believe, that in a later version of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” he changed (fixed, really) one simple thing: he replaced the hard colon at the end of the first line (there are only two lines) with a semicolon. Guided, of course, this was the single-most elucidating statement on poetics in my whole time as an undergraduate. The colon handed the reader a metaphor, said, Look, these blurry, ghostly faces really are wet petals because I say so. Do you get it? It is raining. The semicolon, if we are to tilt our heads up a bit, says something much, much more interesting, and breaks free from what Pound thought, I think, to be an old and restrictive poetic device. The semicolon hands nothing over to the reader, but places two images in proximity to another by way of metonymy. The reader is encouraged to make whatever connection their mind can generate! With the semicolon, one may say these faces, placed beside wet petals and a black bough, look awfully wet, dark, and perhaps flower-like in the rain while the metro rolls past. But this is not making the heavy ontological statement familiar to the metaphor. The faces are not wet petals. With the semi-colon, we’ve only made that associative leap through the wonderful power of our meaning-making minds. This is the metonym. It is just as valid, thankfully, though less beautiful, to see the apparition of faces and the wet petals as two discrete images having nothing at all to do with each other. That could be the unmediated way of seeing, but it isn’t how we actually see with our minds and with the speed at which this world runs. Discreteness is not how the poet sees. Maybe at first. But then the links inevitably form a chain. Isolated, disparate, these adjectives are, for the poet, to be nowhere near the verb ‘to see’.

“saucer magnolia petals”

In bodega night pigeon riot, Amanda Deutch takes the metonym one formally exciting step further. She composed the chapbook on a commute along New York City’s elevated M and J subway lines on a Wednesday. Her method is proprioceptive: Everything through that subway’s window during her commute that she could see, compose and connect is here. There are no semicolons—her chapbook doesn’t need them! This is all in service to the form. She asks, What if the linking action of the semicolon was superseded by the action of flipping the page? Deutch moves us to think of the page and its stanza as one scene out of the window of one subway car. When you flip the page, you’ve blinked and the subway has moved on to showcase another scene. The pages themselves function as proximity, nearness, and, therefore, connection. This is immediately apparent to me when flipping through the chapbook. Most of its stanzas are neat groupings of three lines, a formal decision which beautifully imitates the long, rectangular image of the first subway car arriving on the first page. Each ensuing page is also the next subway car, in a way.

With the readerly act of flipping the page, the concrete images are chained along a very literal (i.e., metro) line and hit us like expertly-selected staccatos.^[1] The fast-moving sights and ‘landmarks’ that were picked out and locked down on this commute make not only a particular view of NYC and Brooklyn, but are also idiosyncratically and unequivocally Wednesday as observed, however indeterminate, by the poet. The “opacity outlining the architecture / of a mosque” may still be there, in that spot, on Thursday. However, depending on the time of day, on weather patterns, on the industrial haze, on the level of water density in the air, the opacity will never be the same. Nor is it likely that the poet’s recording of that opacity and that mosque will fall between “this moment of being / white static over the / New York City skyline” and “Now Pretty / Red Nail, Check”. Deutch’s poetics make this distinctly Wednesday. The commute on Thursday’s another thing altogether.

Popeyes, Checkers, Dunkin Donuts

graffiti on beige building:

Police State USA

 

bodega night pigeon riot is a picture of NYC (and of America) on a certain day and is a microcosm of NYC (and of America) in the 21st century. Deutch blends us a thick mélange of fast, fast consumption, of unique and plentiful places of worship, and of social commentary. As in the excerpt of graffiti above, one ingredient of the mix seems to produce or bring forth the other. The barrage of business, church, place, and filth (“this city / the filthy one”) reproduces that overwhelming of the senses only the presence of a city can elicit. The chain of concrete image after concrete image is a heavy one.

This city that makes

diamonds or glass

out of us all

It is not my place to say whether New York City has made or is making a diamond or glass out of Amanda Deutch. The city, to which I’ve never visited, would most definitely compress me into glass. Too transparent, they’d say. Doesn’t fragment the light at all. Whether diamond or glass, Deutch finds respite among the concrete and metal cityscape; in fact, respite is her final destination. Like Pound, who digs up the natural out of the urban, however darkly, Deutch departs on her journey with “saucer magnolia petals” and arrives at a Romantic scene underneath a tree, reading to children.

while petals

[page break]

litter the concrete.

It’s her expert use of “litter” that really gives the whole chapbook a cohesion in both form and content. The denotation and connotation of this word are both clear. We may see the napkins and potato chip bags flitting along the concrete in these petals, and, vice-versa, the petals in this litter. There may be beauty in it yet.

The formal statement made by bodega night pigeon riot is fresh and exciting. That content and form are eternal reflections of each other in this chapbook-length long poem is impressive. We ought to look forward to what comes next from Deutch.

 

 

 

 

Colby Clair Stolson is a young writer from Alberta. He grew up somewhere in the in-between, in a town called Ponoka. Every day he asks himself, 'who knows if the moon’s/a balloon’?

To make his wages, Stolson is the Sales and Marketing Coordinator for Calgary-based publisher of fine literature, Freehand Books. Catch him!—in the community!

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^[1] Entirely for fun, and because I’ve never visited NYC, I mapped out Deutch’s commute to the highest fidelity possible. You can see it at this link. Be sure to check out Portland, the unnamed city in which I think she lived based on the textual evidence. In cases where the density of Popeyes or Dunkin’ Donuts was too immense, I’ve chosen to mark several of them off.