There are things that I think it’s important to tell you about how I work that aren’t important at all; not to the experience of reading the poems, that is. Maybe in some inside-baseball sense, for people who collect poetics the way my friend David collects baseball cards: he buys a pack whenever he goes by the place, which is not every day, and because he is prepared to be surprised and grateful, he routinely gets great surprises out of it.
Whatever poetry I am making at any time has its roots in a source-text I created some seven years previously; I have been about that far behind for several years. The gap is long enough that I have forgotten what I wrote in any specific sense. The stranger I am today meets a stranger I was, at the cross-road of an interminable text.
The ideal is to ransack the profoundest scribblings of my heart with the same cavalier devotion that Tom Phillips brings to Mallock’s A Human Document or Ronald Johnson to Milton’s Paradise Lost. I fail at that, of course – the ideal is ever only the burst that gets you out into the field, and gets discarded in favor of whatever game it is you find when you get there.
It seems that seven years before I wrote what would become the source-text for these poems, I was listening to a lot of John Prine again. He is one of the comets that passes through my night sky on its way through, taking up all my attention for a time then singing off into the cosmos. And Comet Prine was passing through my sky again, in the season when I came to write.
And so, “burnt orange” talks back into “Bruised Orange”, after a fashion. Things get turnt, sometimes as hard as they can be without breaking, and sometimes breaking all the same. I have a sense that John often hides a song within the song, purloined-letter-style. Other times, the song starts out to be one thing and ends up being something quite other, as in “Jesus: the Missing Years”. The word I use to describe this phenomenon is, “realism”, and John Prine is one of the most realistic writers I know.
There’s an ‘anyway’ in “a photo I saw but do not have” that echoes that song’s tone of protective diffidence; the phrase ‘bought the farm’ shows up as well, although in both cases it is at least unclear that it happened at all. Many of these things have never happened, despite being founded in the details of everyday life.
BURNTORANGE is Buck Downs's fourth above/ground chapbook, after Shiftless [Harvester] (2016), The Hack of Heaven (2017), and Another Tricky Day (2020). Buck divides his time between Washington, D.C., and Ellisville, MIss. His latest full-length is Exit Style, available at buckdowns.com
