cover image HAZE: Essays, Poems, Prose

HAZE: Essays, Poems, Prose

Mark Wallace, . . Edge, $12.50 (103pp) ISBN 978-1-890311-15-5

With debts to past masters of postmodern collage from Ed Dorn to Charles Bernstein, Wallace's poems seem drier, more direct, more clearly political than their precedents. Almost equally divided between verse sequences and very personal, almost curt, critical essays, Wallace (Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn't There ) tweaks all assumptions, from the complacencies of mass entertainment to the axioms of the artsy left, hammering home provocative ideas with confrontation and harsh clarity: "I don't admire Rimbaud. He's not worthy of it. But what could be more boring than admiring a poet?" An essay surveys "recent non-mainstream poetics," returning to inescapable debates about "the personal and the political, the partial and the collective," advancing the tricky concepts of "discourse" and "haze," and asking outright: "what is the relation between the poetry we are involved in and the kind of life we want ourselves and others to lead?" The final verse sequence lists plots from horror movies, likening their shared features to the paranoia Wallace finds in everyday life: "A man with the head of a fly/ A monster with wings who sits on churches/ A devil who wants to buy your soul/ Deformed human beings in a circus sideshow"; it introduces a society in which "I think the thoughts they want me to think." But Wallace's subtlest, most original work here is in "How to Finish a Story, or My Correspondence School," whose 10 dense pages explain that "One continues, if one does, without/ younger urgency" and promises slyly (in a sentence that takes a whole page) "THIS/ IS/ AS/ SIMPLE/ AS/ IT/ SEEMS/ BUT/ NOT/ AS/ IT/ GETS." (Apr.)