Chaos Theory - Christopher Buckley (A Plume Edition Book)

Today's book of poetry:
Chaos Theory.  Christopher Buckley.  A Plume Edition Book.  An imprint of MadHat Press.  Asheville, North Carolina.  2018.

If Chaos Theory were only the first title poem, as illuminating as anything Blake hammered out, well, Today's book of poetry would be satisfied.  More than.  But Christopher Buckley has a multitude of universes on offer.

My buddy David Clewell, former Poet Laureate of Missouri, and Grand Daddy of the Knowledge, will stand up and cheer when he gets his hands on this B.B.Q.  Make no mistake, these poems are steeped in mystery and marinated in some freaky source of wisdom.  Christopher Buckley might be the craziest sumbitch in American poetry, he also might be the Campbell McGrath/Albert Goldbarth hardball link to a new reality.

All Today's book of poetry knows is that Buckley is smoking.  Today's book of poetry looked at Buckley's Star Journal - Selected Poems back in March of 2017.  Buckley poetry-bombed our heart.  You can see that blog/review here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.com/2017/03/star-journal-selected-poems-christopher.html

VII. Fractals

                Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution.

                    It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.

                                            —Niels Bohr

A coastline, if measured down to its least irregularity,

tends toward infinite length, as do snow flakes. Clouds

or coastlines, no matter how close or far away we get,

the basic pattern, the surface and volume, repeat

ad infinitum...

                       Cloud or cauliflower, rough, broken

geometric shapes have an area that is finite, but

a perimeter that is not.

                                     It's a short walk from there

to Thomas Aquinas and Co., First Cause and effect,

and an intellectual trail of consecrated bread crumbs

back to a source we reflect.

                                            Computers came along

and we can enumerate all the patterned variations

in nature—lightning bolts, river networks, broccoli,

the branching of the circulatory system, pine cones

and ferns.

                Right now, someone is calculating the connection

between fractals and leaves in order to estimate how much

CO2 there is in trees, to help the environment with carbon

emission control so we might go on breathing and

piecing things together.

                                      Jackson Pollock's painting

appear to be composed of chaotic drippings and splatters,

but computers have mapped recursive patterns in the work;

high voltage has been trapped in an acrylic block, repeating

the bronchial patterns of trees.

                                                 Star clusters form

paisley patterns, and patterns repeat in the wobbly

orbits of satellites in the solar system, in weather,

economics, earthquakes and plate tectonics, and in

the mathematical model of eye-tracking disorders

among schizophrenics.

                                     Our universe could be a bubble

on an ocean of bubbles; a nearby universe might have Al Gore

as president and Elvis still singing in Las Vegas?

                                                                               Just like

the currents of the ocean, the brain itself might be organized

according to the laws of chaos—enfolded labyrinths, invisible

synapatic lingua franca, its grey death-mask mosaic

of temporary matter, the incremental and incidental tiles,

fragments that replicate, accumulate, and account for us

in every particular, and then are dispersed into the burning

dust fusing into the stars, into the silence that fills

every unaccounted for corner of the dark.

💫💫💫

"Like the wind, like the dust."  Such playful wisdom, such informed glee.  Buckley has a big tool box and he digs into it.  It's clear to us that Buckley is an old pro.

Today's book of poetry recently visited an old friend, a painter.  His house was literally ablaze with art, paintings, sculptures, pottery, much of it his own, the rest by his friends and fellow artists.  This man, Tom Campbell, is old, like me, yet his home sings with a vibrancy of intellect, hope and discovery — and that is exactly what Today's book of poetry feels when reading Christopher Buckley's Chaos Theory.

Buckley is warm and charming, hot and sharp.  Buckley recognizes the patterns in things, challenges us with the physics of emotion and shares his astonishment and wonder.  He imagines big; imagine a God particle.

Parallel Universes

                  Recent research has indicated the possibility of the gravitational pull of other

                      universes on ours.

                                       —Wikipedia

Einstein didn't live long enough

to work out the Theory of Everything,

the exact mileage to the immense...

but if parallel universes are the case,

he's out there in the stars still

putting the pieces together

even though Max Planck's study

of radiation suggested divergent laws

operating beneath the floorboards

of gravity and light...

                                     Now

they've turned up cosmic bruises—

4 circular patterns in the microwave

background radiation—evidence

that our universe has crashed

into others... One soap bubble

rubs against another and

you have a foam of universes,

 a mathematical crash and run-out

to the other side of the end of anything

you now have on hand... almost

endless permutations until you arrive

at a duplicate of our own

"Goldilocks zone" habitable planet!?

More or less.

                      It could vary by a micron

or two—the tiniest sub-atomic backfire

or jitter of an electron or quark

and scads of different outcomes,

though cosmic strings vibrate

essentially as Parmenides set it down

in his poem about the music of the spheres,

leaving out the north star as the still point

of the turning earth of course....

                                                   Thus

Elvis is still doing TV Spectaculars

from Hawaii; Al Gore was re-elected,

Rick got on that plane with Ilsa,

everyone in the middle east is sharing

pita bread and baba ganoush with his neighbor,

and somewhere on a stage Burns & Allen

are taking a bow: Say Goodnight, Gracie!

There's an even chance that communism

did not collapse, and instead of making reservations

at that French/Bulgarian fusion bistro,

you're eyeing the two potatoes and shriveled bit

of beet root left in the shop—some guy selling

lamp shades out the back....

                                             Sergei Krikalev,

Russian cosmonaut who flew six space missions,

could well head transportation for the EU.

We're here on condition that everything occurs

within the parenthesis of time,

within the end-stopped tributaries

to a sea, a great blind quantum scramble

where we arrive too late to the table

to translate the oscillating patterns and

packets of lights.

                            With every veneration

of my breath my cells are imminently obliged

to oblivion. You choose one god

or another, but religion is a trial,

an excuse to feel good about the fact

that you might be dead soon,

that, before you know it,

all your atoms will be headed

somewhere without you.

💫💫💫

In Buckley's world there are other worlds and for all we know; Elvis is still dancing in one of them.  Beautiful.

Our morning read was another doozy, as our old pal, poet and painter, Dennis Tourbin used to say.  Milo, our head technician, took a real shine to Mr. Buckley, he was still revved up from reading Star Journal - Selected Poems.  Milo said that it was like reading poetically about science and having morality/mortality/God dropped right into the middle of the conversation.

Christopher Buckley reminds us all of what poetry can do.  These conversations Buckley is having between himself and universe are worth listening in on.

On the Patio, after Reading Democritus

                   Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

                                         —Democritus

I pour a little Absolut,

as clear as the glass

that holds it, clear as the soul

which Democritus said

consisted of atoms of fire....

As good a guess as any—

the air long let out of 

the old expectations,

that film of atoms

that was said to contain

the characteristics of the gods,

who, like the stars,

were not immortal.

And wafer by wafer

the darkness arrives

on my tongue...

what was it my father said

back there when I was 7—

the blink of an eye

and it's all behind you?

He was a dour man

who imparted that vision

to a child and was gone,

leaving the irresolute motion

of the sea as guide—

a haze, a veil between me

and whatever point there was

in the wind where chicken hawks

spun upward, lifting themselves

above the spindrift thumbed

from the bay, the tides fumbling

to shore, winter grating,

gravel washing out

at low tide. 

                   And the islands

floating across the channel,

the music of spheres

murmuring in the background,

microwave radiation,

its gravity waves

yet to reach us....

                            Still,

the stars pile up across the dark,

light years, like the sound

of a sled through snow

lost on the edge of wilderness....

Dog-walkers, star-gazers,

either way there's something

in our thoughts that interprets

the circles of light that fall to us,

that hold our gaze out there

where meteors streak

whether we are watching

with our sleeping hearts, or not—

our dreams tied to some idea

or other about our lives,

some silver stumbling cloud

being drawn into the gullet of time.

What if, finally, there was nothing

to fear?

💫💫💫

Chaos Theory was exactly what the doctor ordered for Today's book of poetry.  We were feeling in a poetry slump.  An early winter has hit our offices hard, calling for -18 C today.  And it is still November.  The snow is piled on the side of our lane, three feet high (we shovelled it there).  Chaos Theory warmed things up here.

Christopher Buckley

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Buckley’s Star Journal: Selected Poems was published by the Univ. of Pittsburgh Press in 2016. Back Room at the Philosophers’ Club, Buckley’s 20th book of poetry (Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press), won the Lascaux Review’s Poetry Book Prize for 2015. SFA Press also published Varieties of Religious Experience in 2013. Rolling The Bones won the 2009 Tampa Review Poetry Prize and was published by the Univ. of Tampa Press in 2010, which published White Shirt in 2011.

Buckley was a 2007–2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. He has been awarded a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing to the former Yugoslavia, four Pushcart Prizes, two awards from the Poetry Society of America, and received NEA grants in poetry for 2001 and 1984.

With Gary Young, Buckley is the editor of The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place (Hey Day Books, 1999). With David Oliveira and M.L. Williams, he is editor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets (The Round House Press, 2001). For the Univ. of Michigan Press Under Discussion series, he edited The Poetry of Philip Levine: Stranger To Nothing, 1991.

More recently he has edited the poetry anthologies Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems & Poetics from California (with Gary Young) Alcatraz Editions, 2008; Homage To Vallejo, Greenhouse Review Press, 2006. With Alexander Long, he edited A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington Univ. Press, 2004); with Christopher Howell, Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees (The Backwaters Press, 2011); again co-edited with Gary Young, One for the Money: the Sentence as a Poetic Form (Lynx House Press, 2012); and with Jon Veinberg, Messenger to the Stars: A Luis Omar Salinas New Selected Poems & Reader ( Tebot Bach, 2014).

Over the last 40 years his poetry has appeared in APR, Poetry, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Five Points, The Harvard Review, & New Letters.

BLURBS

I don’t think I know of another poet who has such vertical range and depth; Buckley manages to have one foot in the physical muck and tenderness of the world and the other foot planted among the stars and galaxies of the universe.… There is something here that is deeply human and courageous, something like what I find in the essays of Loren Eiseley. And all of this would be nothing, of course, without the language, which is the glory of these poems.
     —Peter Everwine

There is a deep nostalgia here, but also wisdom and common sense, and beautiful writing. I welcome him at his maturest, poet of stardust.
     —Gerald Stern

These poems ask questions about an individual’s place in the universe and about the existence of the universe itself.… In his captivating voice, Buckley invites us to consider ideas of the mundane and the divine, ontology and epistemology, and what on earth we are here for.
     —Jerome Blanco, Zyzzyva

… we float in the universe … the slow gentle orbits of the planets progressing much like Buckley’s lives. [This] is a collection that is keenly aware of, but expertly deals with concepts of scope, space and time.
     —Nikki Stavile, reviewing Star Journal: Selected Poems in The Hollins Critic

There is a quietness to these poems and breakouts of lyrical intensity that define Buckley as a master of the art.
     —North of Oxford

These are poems of immortality and extinction that can still make you smile … [Buckley] has an exquisite ear for language and a gutsy way of blending bravado with humility.
     —Library Journal

Christopher Buckley

Read his poem The Shape of Things

Video: AskewPoetryJournal

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Flatlands - Ruth Williams (Black Lawrence Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Flatlands.  Ruth Williams.  Black Lawrence Press.  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  2018.

Today's book of poetry is parroting Erin Belieu when we say that the spirit of Willa Cather breathes sturdy throughout Ruth Williams most excellent Flatlands.  But that is a narrowing of focus when Williams has so much more to offer.

An old man's perspective on a young woman's poems has to be taken with several large grains of salt.  So Today's book of poetry will tell you our secret methodology.  Today's book of poetry grew up in a matriarchal home environment with four sisters, all of fine mind, and when reading I sometimes call upon them.  I ring the poems off of their ears to see if what feels true to me feels true to them.

Radial Plain

     As she lay with her eyes closed, she had again, more vividly than for many

      years, the old illusion of her girlhood, of being lifted and carried lightly by

     someone very strong[...] She knew at last for whom it was she had waited

     and where he would carry her.

     —Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

In my 13th year, hanging

the laundry, the white sheets

were like blowsy dresses

and my heartache

was a new

nostalgia, the plains

the leavening,

grasses a long cry,

the hair of my later years

growing before me.

How I spent that summer

like Cather, wanting

the strong arms

of another coming

round me, knowing

that this too was a foretaste

of what it meant to be flattened,

to love like the dirt,

hard, packed,

how fertile then

not to know what

I would become.

💫💫💫

It is hard to point out precisely how she does it but Williams likes to lead the reader down the garden path, gentle them to acquiescence, and then truthpounce them right between the eyes.  Williams is an understated gem.

Flatlands can be read as a book of hard won truths.  The reader can be sure at every turn because Williams makes you want to stay.  Once you've read one of these twisters you're hard wired to want more.

Import

On TV, the fattest man in the world

says his body was the result of

childhood issues.

It's a practiced explanation

I know.

Significantly, he notes,

he began losing weight

when his mother died.

His arms

hang with wings

the pretty doctor

says she'll

clip.

I don't mean to make more of it

than I should.

We are all envelopes

of loose teeth.

💫💫💫

"We are all envelopes of loose teeth."  Today's book of poetry almost fell off of our seat when we read this line, we are thinking it might go on our headstone.

Today's book of poetry has been laying low for the last little while; there are all sorts of unavoidable reasons.  Today's book of poetry will continue on a reduced schedule for a brief period.  We will return to regularly scheduled programming as soon as possible.

Our morning read was full of enthusiasm so these poems came out charged.  They bounced around the office like laser beams of clean, clear light.  Straight as an arrow.

Plain Winter

The winter lengthens. The blank horizon is a way

of being more profound than snow. Inside it, a lantern

swatch of yellow curling over a buried leg.

In pioneer days, they'd tie frozen

bodies to the fencepost. The twine a way of

waiting for spring.

💫💫💫

Ruth Williams is a poet after our own poetry heart.  Today's book of poetry is a big fan of the unadulterated voice, the real voice.  

Williams writes understated bulls-eyes.  There is music here.

Ruth Williams

Photo: Kira Whitney Photography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ruth Williams is the author of Conveyance (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her poetry has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, jubilat, Pleiades and Third Coast among others. She has also published creative nonfiction in DIAGRAM and Crab Orchard Review as well as scholarly work on women’s writing and feminism in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, The Journal of Popular Culture, and College Literature. Currently, Ruth lives in Kansas City where she is an Assistant Professor of English at William Jewell College and an editor for Bear Review.

BLURBS

Some writers approach the Nebraska plains as a big, empty other into which they may imagine. I understand the appeal of that mythology. But in Ruth Williams gorgeous new collection, Flatlands, the landscape is as alive as the plains truly are, and serves as both a generating place and quixotic companion to Williams's subtle, precise speaker. Throughout the poems, Williams images are beautifully wrought and full of surprises: a salmon being filleted opens like “a girl’s coral dress come undone,” and the "night heat” of spent fireworks sleeps in the hands of children who are “ready to knock.” I love this book—it’s musical syncopation, the tight, clean transparency of the poems’ lines. I think Willa Cather, the collection's genius loci, would admire Williams’s work, recognizing its fundamental truthfulness. Which is about the highest compliment I have to give.
     —Erin Belieu, Author of Slant Six, Co-founder, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts

Ruth Williams' Flatlands starts from the premise of emptiness and uncovers resources for what can be found and what's to be made. Landscape, identity, desire, the past and the moment—the distinct constellation of her concerns is thrown into focus by a taut, understated craft. These seemingly casual observations break out in bursts of insight flaring against the broad horizon.
     —Don Bogen, author of An Algebra

Written in the key of Willa Cather and in kinship with the spare and located writing practice of Lorine Niedecker, Ruth Williams’ Flatlands could very well be a continuation of the Prairie Trilogy. A subtle defiance circulates through these poems—a book of mouths—whose investments include the erotics of place, gender expectations, insecurity, and boredom—the "radical blah" that fills in and out so much of a life. Williams works through what it means to be from and in a place, understanding we are shaped by land and language. In an era of platitudes, I admire the reluctance in these poems, balanced by awe that our bodies may be our best souvenirs—“I don't mean to make more of it/ than I should.// We are all envelopes/ of loose teeth.” Reading Williams’ poems, I feel a little less weary about being a packet of debris, about being, in general.
     —Kristi Maxwell, author of That Our Eyes Be Rigged

In Flatlands, Ruth Williams turns her surroundings into well-crafted poems that deeply explore the physical and metaphorical landscape. We glimpse youth growing into maturity through a lens of desire and the elusive nature of love. Williams’ poems are filled with imagery, making inventive use of repetition (“Radical Blah” and “Sister” poems), syntax (“Surviving on Equations”), surprising, delicious sounds (“His Georgette”), and more. Her poems wisely lead us up to the edge, to the sense that there’s more beneath what is said. A fine collection.
     —Twyla M. Hansen, Nebraska State Poet, author of Rock • Tree • Bird

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.