Whim Man Mammon by Abraham Smith
One might wonder what Walt Whitman would say of Abraham Smith. The title carries blurred traces of his name. The way math works here, with significant remainder, seems to be the way analysis works within the book. The speaker’s tongue is loose, or something at least is loose. Smith is loose. I’m convinced that he is surely one of the most important loose voices of our time. This captivating collection of poetry is important for its loyalty to spoken language the way “love is inside / light wet seeds / nailed into / the crawlspace / between eyetooth / and barred goon.” As I read, I find it rewarding and effortless to set aside any need to analyze or categorize. I listen and magnetically follow the speaker’s pace with images that are sonic more often than visual.
Smith’s first book is profoundly enchanting, imparting the sense of glimpsing something raw and perhaps ignorant, and if ignorant then sacred, haunting to straightened aesthetics: “kiss the barista / click of the lock / satisfies / iron knob is / the arsonist / the siren the / arsonist / ironing god.”
Especially in “Mouth Breathing,” though true for the collection, there is the sense of a speaker who may be affectually off-kilter yet skilled, recording implausibly precise incantations: “40 shit eating grin / kid shoveling / ice cream / into his crow / killer’s mouth / 40 that’s a lie / bb’s don’t kill crows / looking away / kills crows.”
Smith enacts compelling arguments for natural-feeling yet slightly mechanized ways of hearing speech and also engages with language-school type wordplay. As an elite son of Ladysmith, Wisconsin, Smith has acute and experiential knowledge of dialect, and the propensities for dialect are propelled by his lucid aural ability. Just as a musician’s ear discerns pitch, Smith wields the ability to weld blurred sounds into coherent words.
“Perhaps kelp when I said that hurt you we did not kiss you did not want to throw your necklace / on a wolf with no good idea for his neck.” The voice is somewhat parambulatory, yet it is sonically located – through the speaker’s meanderings, a stupefying panorama is made real.
This book is rare, individual, and proudly American, for all America’s non parallel-running personae. Another fine meteorite from Action Books.
