Nate Logan : on: There’s Nothing Out There

 

 

 

 

I saw Halloween (1978) on broadcast TV when I was too young. This is how any number of sordid tales begin. Haddonfield, IL looked a lot like where I lived in Indiana, so it wasn’t hard to imagine terror just outside my house. Completely reasonable to feel tense at an unexplained noise. I can’t say I was a horror fan then (I also had a semi-recurring dream of being eaten by a lion). I still startle easy, but I’ve come around on horror movies. Now, instead of feeling scared by the original Halloween, I recognize and marvel at how effective it still is at evoking feelings of dread and watch it at least once a year. It is the simplest of stories, sure, but a love song doesn’t need to be penned by Shakespeare to make you cry.

The titles for the poems in There’s Nothing Out There come from an old website: The Horror Film Compendium. For more than a few years now I’ve stuck with the prose poem form and that’s the case here, too. I’m grateful to Gina and J† at Cul-de-sac of Blood for having first published a number of these pieces. And to JJ for the chompers and this text: “bless the horror movies we saw too young.”

 

 

 

 

Nate Logan is the author of Wrong Horse (Moria Books, 2024) and Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He’s editor of the literary magazine Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Nate Logan : This is Not a Place of Honor, by John Leo

This is Not a Place of Honor, John Leo
Night Gallery Press, 2024

 

 

Don’t ask me the time.
For years it has been 3:42.
I have pulled the page off the calendar
and every next page says March.

What’s that joke? “I’m still processing last March?” The first four lines of “The War is Ongoing,” the prologue poem in John Leo’s second full-length collection, This is Not a Place of Honor, more than nails it on the head. But it also gives the reader a sneaky preview of what’s to come. Yes, many of these poems bubble from our collective experience of the last handful of years, but Leo also has a foot in the past. I mean the long-ago kind of past. A little further on in the same poem: “Hannibal is invading over the Alps. / I can hear the elephants in their snowshoes.” So, now what?

Cannae, Chrysippus, and Clark Gable all make appearances here, among others. These evocations are reminiscent of Leo’s first collection, The Names of Ancient Wars, and it’s easy to walk the bridge between that book and this one. In this second collection, Leo’s voice is more seasoned and he flexes it to great effect, especially in what might be considered the “quieter” moments of the book.

The title poem finds a speaker who’s been stood-up on a date, sitting in a taco joint. Consigned to watching football, there is a hurt, a kind of longing that’s easy to recognize: “I should be admiring your tan / as it disappears into the dimming lights.” And then the sharp turn in the next stanza: “I have of late considered / the disposal of nuclear waste.” The speaker imagines a future where the landscape is “paved and scorched black”; the only thing that remains is “a plaque etched from brass and riveted / in permanent warning: / This is not a place of honor.” It might be easy to imagine why the date didn’t show. But this apocalyptic thinking gives way to duende at the poem’s end:

The bartender tells me Harry
does not pay her what she is owed.
The penalty, she tells me,
for breaking a promise,
is a thousand years with the people you love.

What is “this place” that’s referred to in the book’s title? What does honor mean to the speaker(s) of these poems? There’s much that can be speculated upon on that front. History repeats. The war is ongoing. But really, if your eyes are open, you already know this. So why visit this place? John Leo, in a voice both Midwestern and wise, takes a reader on a tour of waking life in the world-at-large, proving that, while it’s technically 2024, it’s also still last March, always already the past.

 

 

 

 

Nate Logan is the author of Wrong Horse (Moria Books, 2024) and Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He lives in Indiana.

Nate Logan : Making Water, by Laura Jaramillo

Making Water, Laura Jaramillo
Futurepoem, 2022

 

 

One of the great things about poetry is that its history is full of the grandiose. Only poets can get away with this. Dante puts his poetry rivals in hell (admittedly, hard to beat this one) and the poetry beef was born. It’s 2023 and Mary Ruefle titles her latest collection The Book. Who else can do this without drawing ire from their contemporaries? Laura Jaramillo.

Despite the dark implications of the epigraph for Making Water, from which the title comes, Jaramillo chooses that over “bleeding in silence.” Water is necessary for life and, Jaramillo suggests, so is art. Making Water is both singular and expansive, both a collection of fragments and a narrative that details the speaker’s wrestling with contemporary life. As the ending of “Quarry” puts it: “Everything I know is fragments swimming off into the / private world of women” (8).

Slivers of this private world are revealed throughout the book. In “Bad Magic” the speaker appears to say to herself: “No longer quite young, you appear to yourself as a photograph / and the bad magic of Images fails you. Having never known your / beauty as a breathing being, a desolation appears to engulf you” (19). “Bread/Wine” uncovers even more as the speaker muses: “Motherhood must be so saturated with the future solitude / of children” and “The avant-garde buries its women like this / without flowers” (22, 23). Jaramillo’s speaker expresses many commonplace concerns, but her exploration is more nuanced. She is a keen observer who feels deeply and whose reactions impact the reader in their haunting phrasing.

The other major theme that ebbs and flows in Making Water is that of being part of a diaspora/immigrant/refugee community and its trials (specifically in coming to the United States). From “Gate Agent”:

          Double escalators in cold light read the hieroglyphs as aerogare
          Weight of sleeplessness mapped onto disconnected corridors.
          A girl bleeds from the mouth at border control. But also a budding
          stillness, move quietly thru q’s (42)

And in “Handedness”:

          Just call me the LOL assassin, or forget to. Austerity is a metal
          spike to adorn our vague tongue with acid dislocating speech.
          English, the language of knives and incorporations,
          the language of instruments (67)

Like water, the speaker is moving, seemingly without end. In “Gate Agent” we’re in an airport and a border, both points of transformation. What’s striking is that this is an American airport and an American border crossing—these are places many of us go at one time or another, but their design appears much differently through the wide-awake eyes. The experience of crossing changes the speaker, both internally (“a budding / stillness”) and externally (“English, the language of knives and incorporations”). How do we explain when words fail? We try (and fail better) in poetry.

I can imagine the world where Making Water is the title of a ghostwritten celebrity autobiography. In that book, the title is a callback to a movie role and the words are empty calories. But lucky for us, we’re in this world where our poets are bold and create art that shakes us out of our sleepwalking. Laura Jaramillo is one such poet and Making Water is a collection that does just that. This book will stick to my heart for a long time.

 

 

 

 

Nate Logan is the author of Wrong Horse (Moria Books, fall of 2023) and Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He lives in Indiana.

Nate Logan : (further) short takes on the prose poem

folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem

 

 

 

 

My favorite quote about the prose poem comes from Mary Ruefle. In an interview with Washington Square she says:

A three-hour class on what is a prose poem is? A waste of time. That doesn’t mean it can’t be prose, or that prose can’t be poetry—but for all practical, speaking purposes, it’s right-flush margin or it’s lineated. It’s so simple. What is all this postmodern complicated bullshit?

That squares away the what. But why? The prose poem is like a trick shown on a how-to guide for magic VHS tape: the assistant still gets sawed in half, but does so lying in a glass box. We know how sentences and paragraphs work, their rules. Can’t buy a thrill. But infused with the idiosyncrasies of poetry, its cadences, attention to detail, and penchant for bending in light, what was once banal becomes possessed. There’s magic that can’t be explained, despite what the tape claims.

There are frequent stops when traveling by prose poem; for me, this is one of its unique charms, maybe thee charm that keeps me coming back. Unlike another poem that can move between a line that spans across the page and a zig-zag all within the same piece, I know, and the reader knows, the prose poem will start and stop, then start and stop again. Being invited to sit with sentences, poetic sentences in no particular hurry, is a pleasure. Furthermore, the tendency for the prose poem to wind around surrealism (neosurrealism?) is a nudge to the reader to stay with sentences longer—the associative leaps lend themselves to contemplation (this is a whole other essay). The “radicalness” of the prose poem still lies in its form, but the beat has changed. And when the poem does end, either at one paragraph or a few pages, if it goes especially well, the accumulation of sentences stirs a reader, which is what all good poetry should do (even still, Charlie, I didn’t mean to make your mom cry).

 

 

 

 

 

The Way You Laugh When Something Goes Wrong

We had more time to pursue extracurriculars.

You: Historians can generally pinpoint when the boner comedy lost its charm.

Me: Would you call your cape moderate to severe black?

Me: Does knowing six things that may or may not be personal qualify as true romance?

A sudden increase in wind speed knocks thoughts of my ancestors right out of my head and onto David’s baked potato en route.

Instant Classic

Oldsters versus youngsters at the karaoke contest.

If I thought too much about the future or power ballad love, I got a nosebleed for my trouble.

Next time you work on your tan, congratulations!

Bismarck re-mapped.

The county surveyor was just pulling my leg, the son-of-a-bitch.

Already we’ve run out of ways to reminisce on our exes, failures at sea, etcetera.

Will your head fall off if I name my raincoat after you?

Maybe it’s a low-budget remake?

Staying in character even when bored out of my mind.

There’s no shortage of blessings.

 

 

 

 

Nate Logan is the author of Wrong Horse (Moria Books, fall of 2023) and Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He lives in Indiana.