“The HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE,” Charles Olson famously instructs in his 1950 “Projective Verse.” Olson is interested in the poem as a kinetic force––the poem being “energy transferred from where the poet got it, by way of the poem itself, to the reader.” To watch Zach Peckham read the poems from his debut collection, As If And, is to witness this very kinetic transference of heart, breath, and line take place. Peckham honors his short, explosive lines with an aspirated caesura. His breath, which is often pushed to its limits, punctuates each break and pulses every end word to its expressive capacity. He does this especially in the poem “Carcinoma And” where the final line, “no you are less than adequate,” is repeated as many times as can be completed in one steady breath until his face turns vermillion and no more sound can be forced out of his mouth. It is stunning to witness the physical unison of the body and the poem as manifested by Peckham’s performance. Peckham truly honors the didactic work of the LINE, his stanzas are usually comprised of couplets or monostiches, with some lines only containing a single syllable. We are compelled to call him a “syllablist” due to his granular, phonemic breakdown of the poem, but this would inadvertently put Peckham in a category of isms and to quote Ferris Bueller, “a person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself.”
We are compelled to force such an invented genre and appellation due to Peckham’s consistent and tight honoring of syllabic value, which is the value of poetry, to unfold a slower language that pauses and hiccups the linearity of syntax and exposes the hidden potential both between and within the language. Most of the poems in As If And utilize a steep verticality, words truncated and dropped like descending a knotted rope. The book’s first poem “Force Perpetuity” begins:
in to narrow
-er narrower
tunnels funnel
-ed down along
a line
lifting
rips
up aside
split ten
-sing
div / id
ed field rings
compu
-tational
sense
The form of the poem quite literally takes on its contents as the language narrows, funnels, rips, splits, and divides as a reflective mimesis. Peckham’s use of the short line keeps an ongoing propulsion and discharge of its own energy in keeping with Olson’s dictum which states, “Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.” Peckham’s process for “getting in” and maintaining this energy-discharge is revealed ostensibly through his tight control over the phonemic quality and in his predilection for internal rhyme patterns which he often breaks to form staggered end rhymes. The second half of “Force Perpetuity” exemplifies Peckham’s use of rhyme scheme.
the lens
the lift
the send
the sift
spend
for what
assist
a cyst
grift of
the gift
aligned to much
too narrowly
While rhyme schemes inherently address homophonic similarities, Peckham’s use of rhyme often cleaves the sonic transfer of each word and aligns a greater semantic value between them. Above we see this take place with “assist / a cyst” and “grift of // the gift”. The cleaving of assistance becomes a purulent malady, whereas the latter addresses the ontological overlap of scam and generosity. While rhyme patterns can often become predictable, Peckham’s slow shift and transmogrification of associative functions offer surprises at every turn.
The title of the book, three conjunctions, demonstrates Peckham’s interest in the small, overlooked words that all of language hinges upon. Too often poets try to hide their bad writing behind their bloated and obscure vocabulary, as if the more impenetrable their language the more aloof their venerable and tender intellect (written with an eyeroll). Peckham’s vocabulary is far from ordinary but his reverence for the connective tissue of the word is much more evident. The prefixes, suffixes, conjunctions, prepositions, and sneaky adverbs are made the focal point by his narrow and nimble enjambment. Peckham demonstrates this intention beautifully in his poem “Entrance The” which begins:
is it
phys
-ics or civ-
ics
the NPCs
in PPE
low snow
+ on
go
this in
vent
-ion’s
in cent
-ive for
a pro
-cess of
disinteg-
rations
The phonemic breakdown of the multisyllabic words often exposes and expresses the smaller worlds contained within them. By enjambing the word “invention” along three lines, we experience three different words in isolation: “in,” “vent,” and “ion.” This is exactly how the poem can blur and bloom an intentional new experience directly below the ordinary. Peckham’s penchant for the granular demarcations of language bring to mind the sonic interests of the Umbra poets, specifically the graphemic universes of N.H. Pritchard, whose works The Matrix, Eecchhooeess and The Mundus merge the interiors of language to explore new possibilities hiding in the plain sight of our systems of syntax. Peckham, like Pritchard, renders the utile structure into something open and multitudinous, breaking the bone of the word into its molecular cosmos of marrow and enzyme.
But wait! These poems are also fucking funny! Peckham enfolds his humorous lines subtly into his lengthy screeds, which are mostly polemics against the rise of tech oligarchs, the exploitation and commodification of labor, and the incipient obsolescence of the soft sciences. The quick snips of levity help to keep the reader engaged and the poem grounded in a material of the people. The poem “Banned Width” (an obvious pun on data transfer) has many such moments: “Have you ever / wept your pants / doing a creeping / kind of dance,” or, “hey you / yeah you // get dusted / you nut / you flustered appliance,” or, “knock knock / fuck you,” all catch the reader off guard which makes their delivery all the more effective. The appeal to humor should come as no surprise in a book that uses the first line from Kid Rock’s international hit “Bawitdaba” as its epigraph and that later appropriates one of the most perplexing questions from the Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles” as the final two lines of the poem “Sorry”. Other humorous effects may only be manifested through a live experience of Peckham’s reading––the way he punctuates and intones certain words or phrases (such as the beginning of the poem “Liberal Arts” which begins with the rhetorical question, “is this anything”), or his complete focus on the energy-discharge of each poem which often leaves him out of breath in the brief pause between the poems. Peckham’s breath, focus, and subsequent exhaustion often feel closer to watching a physical comedian than a poet, even if they are consistent with Olson’s didactic approach. “Verse now,” Olson states, “if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.”
Overall, it is the essential units of language that drive the poems of As If And and to watch Peckham read from the book only gives us greater certainty of their kinetic potential. As If And is an exciting addition to our contemporary poetry world made possible by the editors of New Mundo, a press and journal based between Queens, NY and Buenos Aires who have already published integral poets such as Geoffrey Olsen and Jenkin Benson and who maintain a deep translation initiative for lesser-known poets of Latin America. As it is our collective responsibility to keep the vulnerable publishers of print media alive, we hope you leave this review with a burning desire or probing guilt to purchase work from their catalogue. New Mundo is a press that is doing the work and like Peckham says at the end of “The Liberal Arts,” “nothing happens / unless people work.”