Cessation Covers (2007) by Steve Halle

Cessation Covers by Steve Halle

How many people, in 2024, remember the Alternative Revolution in 90s rock music? When Kurt Cobain and Nirvana showed up, a gauntlet was laid down about originality, integrity, and independence. For a few years, independent purveyors of rock music took to the mainstream, so that what was on the radio, and MTV, didn’t have to be just corporate hoopla. Where poetry was concerned, the Aughts had its own version of Amer-Indie to sell, city by city, community by community. The issue was the same as it had been for the Alternative Revolution— independence, originality, and integrity. Corporate hoopla in poetry was turned on its head, and practitioners who had been forced into the margins moved center-wards. In Cessation Covers, Steve Halle takes the remnants of who Kurt Cobain was a lyricist— allusive, playful, self-contradictory, abstract— throws them together, with punk-level concision and O’Hara-level alacrity— and does Seattle-to-Chicago his way. Released from Philadelphia in 2007, Cessation Covers does, indeed, cover the entire relief map of the continental United States, to bask in the glow, from Frances Farmer on out, of what it means to be alternative.

Ocho #11 (2007) by multiple

Ocho #11 by multiple

The Aughts in American poetry were about dynamism, and momentum. A publishing boom overtook America in the mid-Aughts, and swept into view a publishing reality that made, for those with enough passionate dedication to be both interested and relevant, almost anything possible. Part of this boom was online, still newfangled as of twenty years ago, and part in print. Ocho, based partly in Illinois, partly in New York, was a stomping ground where all kinds of roads converged. I was lucky enough to edit an issue, #11, in 2007. With a few decades hindsight, the shock and awe for having been there for the introduction of Steve Halle, Mary Walker Graham, and the rest, triumphs over any other emotion I might feel. The shock and awe is also in Brian Kim Stefans’ sublime sestina; and Christopher Goodrich’s proto-Asian peregrinations. Ocho #11 is about roads converging by the kind of chaos theory explosiveness which made the Aughts so memorable to live through the first time, now again in 2024.

 

Blackbirds (2024) by Steve Halle

Blackbirds by Steve Halle

Steve Halle’s Blackbirds begins from the premise that language, when employed as poetry, can benefit, be purified, by the deconstructive impulse. The process, not of direct iteration, but of around direct iteration, being an impetus for words to take sensory data and transcendentalize it. The creation of a world around, rather than the vulgarity of head-on collisions. From the inside of an asylum, what is explored is what asylum, taking shelter, means— asylum in language, asylum in vision. From that sense of asylum, emerges the prophetic— beyond language, around sense. Blackbirds essential prophecy is then a revelation of what language is, what its potentialities are, in the face of travesty and stasis.

 

Gardening at Night (2024) by Andrew Lundwall

Gardening at Night by Andrew Lundwall

The popularity of Surrealism and the surreal, at any given moment, is determined by a sense, among those who matter most, that disorientation and dream-like fragmentation are the name of the game, where raw consciousness is concerned. In other words, a general sense of things, reality, being fucked up. The next step is to see if you can take the disorientation and have fun with it, milk it for pleasure. Gardening at Night, the first full-length effort from Andrew Lundwall, is an exuberant romp through the garden of dream-like realities and real dreams. From twenty-first century America, the Neo-Surreal issues from the surreal— things don’t fall apart, but they do get crazy all the time. Like Breton and others before, Gardening at Night hurls itself off the cliff of all the craziness, and out-dreams reality in the process.

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