There It Is: New & Selected Poems - Michael Casey (Loom Press)

Today's book of poetry:
There It Is: New & Selected Poems. Michael Casey.  Loom Press.  Lowell, Massachusetts.  2017.

Today's book of poetry picked up a copy of Michael Casey's Obscenities (Yale University Press, 1972), about two hundred years ago.  Since then we've been wondering what happened to this wildly authentic voice.  Our search is over, Lowell Massachusetts publisher Loom Press sent Today's book of poetry There It Is: New & Selected Poems and we can finally catch up with Michael Casey.

There's a lot of catching up to do.  As far as we can tell Casey has published ten or eleven books/chapbooks.  From what Today's book of poetry sees in There It Is Casey has maintained his down to earth, working man approach to his poetry since he crawled out of the jungle in Vietnam.  Not literally, Today's book of poetry knows nothing of Casey's military service and experience except what is revealed in his first poems.  But he was there and his poems are like televisions where he supplies the narrative.

Today's book of poetry had deep respect for the Casey who wrote Obscenities.  Nothing has changed.  Michael Casey's poems are so crystal clear and free of artifice it almost feels like a trick.  But it is a damned fine one, the reader's connection to Casey's poetry is automatic.  Instantaneous.

forklift driver

the forklift driver

fucked up the elevator again

he tried to drive the forklift in it

when the door was close

this is the third day in a row

something like that happened

I'd say to him

don't even bother ta punch out

just leave

it'd be worth the week's pay or so

just to get rid of him

do you know how important

that fuckin elevator is?

Lou is yellin all over for yarn

because he can't get it

and this is holding up the knitting room

napping room and the whole place

gonna be backed up now

they tell me Lou

is pissin and moanin up there

like he was pissin razor blades

💫💫💫

This next poem is one that Today's book of poetry remembers from our first Casey experience, back when we read Obscenities all those years ago.  I never forgot it.  

Michael Casey can stay with you.

a bummer

we were going single file

through his rice paddies

and the farmer

started hitting the lead track

with a rake

he wouldn't stop

and TC went to talk to him

and the farmer

tried to hit him too

so the tracks went sideways

side by side

through the guy's fields

instead of single file

Hard On, Proud Mary

Bummer, Wallace, Rosemary's Baby

The Rutgers Road Runner

and

Go Get em—Done Got Em

went side by side

through the fields

  if you have a farm in Vietnam

and a house in hell

sell the farm

and go home

💫💫💫

Michael Casey writes poems as though he'd mastered ventriloquism.  Every voice he assumes in these poems feels real and true, sounds it too.  Casey has acquired some mad dark knowledge over the years and he knows how our hearts work.

Yet There It Is is populated with characters we all know because we live with them all around us in our daily lives.  These people, these feelings, are universal.  Michael Casey isn't above kicking your feet out from under you to make a necessary point.  At the same time Today's book of poetry sees a sense of humour of heroic measure.

the wall board knife

Armand's son read

an article somewhere

unscrupulous contractors

are building houses so cheaply 

with fiberboard

that any crook

can break in

not through a door or window

but just using a wall board knife

and cutting through siding

and particle board

very easily

Armand related this to me

before his son

went to the sneezer in Billerica

but I was curious

so I ask a contractor acquaintance

someone building two million dollar

condos in Concord

does he use

cheap fiberboard in construction?

right away he says no

and then he adds

not when anyone's looking

💫💫💫

The only problem Today's book of poetry had with Michael Casey and There It Is is that now we want/need to find the rest of his excellent work.  Milo, our head tech and pseudo-librarian, has been properly tasked.  Milo thought that Casey rocked and insisted on leading our morning reading.

Today's book of poetry is slowly getting back on track.  We did want to share and celebrate with our readership, Today's book of poetry is currently getting over 1,000 readers a day.  We recently clawed our way past 500,000 readers.  

There It Is may be the biggest surprise in our recent reading.  As much as Today's book of poetry was looking forward to reading Michael Casey's Selected..., we felt rewarded way beyond our expectations.

diction a detriment to the working class

she used to be our neighbor

but they moved away to a bigger house

and I babysat when she was nearby

one child then

and I babysat when she moved

two children later

to a monster house

three car garage

into none of which

would the Hummer fit

she knew the going rate

one dollar per hour per child

she always rounded down

one hour fifteen minutes

would be paid as one hour

it grated though

but jobs are jobs

so I get the call one day

they drove me there and back

and while there

her aunt shows

with her four children

I am there

for three hours twenty minutes

and she gave me three big ones

next time she called

I declined and she was really mad

I mean I was the one cheated

you know that right?

however in retrospect

I should not have said

fuck you and your auntie too

well I guess

💫💫💫

Michael Casey's poems are honest and true and necessary.  There It Is is a new favourite in the Today's book of poetry offices.   And a future classic.

Michael Casey

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Casey is from Lowell, Massachusetts, and attended the public schools in that city. He received a B.S. degree in physics in 1968 from University of Massachusetts-Lowell, where poet William Aiken taught the modern poetry course. Drafted that year, Casey became a military policeman in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and later in Landing Zone Bayonet, Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam, with the Americal Division. The journal of his military experience became the book,Obscenities, published in 1972 by the Yale University Press. His book, Millrat, on blue collar work in a textile mill dye house has been published by Adastra Press. Casey taught for many years at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

BLURBS

The publication of Michael Casey's New and Selected Poems, with his quirky portraits of ordinary Americans, is an event to celebrate. Like a photographer snapping pictures relentlessly, he must have written a poem about everyone he ever met with dead-on realism. Compared to him, the Spoon River Anthology is a work for kiddies. If Robert Frost was a poet of the rural New Englander, Michael Casey, also a New Englander, brings to life his mill town background, the guys who didn't go on to college and the larger world, but married the girls they dated in high school and got jobs in the mill. When he's sent to Vietnam he captures his fellow soldiers in their own military jargon. A master of the vernacular, he forces one to question writing in the 'correct' language when so many of us speak it quite differently, the language we think and feel in. Rare among poets, he's willing to explore colloquial speech in all its messiness, and gets it down perfectly – in fact, he's got us all down spot on. This collection, with its wide range of voices, is a unique achievement.”
     — Edward Field, author of The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and After the Fall: Poems Old and New

“I first heard Michael Casey read these poems on a July evening in New Hampshire long ago while the war in Vietnam was still a tremendous confusion and sorrow for all of us and the poems made sense of it in a new way. My writer father had discovered that our summer neighbor was a poet and had invited him to read to us. I was stunned by the power of the language, the great-heartedness of the poems, the way Casey was not afraid to write about how men act under pressure, the way he used ordinary words to describe extraordinary feelings.
Now I read the poems in a New York City apartment in a time that seems as confusing as the 1970’s. Michael Casey’s poems changed as he went back to work after the war and later when he moved north, but their power is undiminished. He is tough but the poems are tender. These are poems that grab you by the heart and refuse to let you go. Read them!”
      – Susan Cheever, author of Drinking in America: Our Secret History and E.E. Cummings: A Life

“These are wonderfully droll, deadpan poems, like slyly condensed short stories, with an eye for the tellingly absurd detail and an ear for the oddities of everyday speech.”
      — Michael Foley, author of The Age of Absurdity and Isn’t This Fun: Investigating the Serious Business of Enjoying Ourselves

Doug Holder interviews Michael Casey

Video: Doug Holder

loompress.com

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