February 5, 2000, Review of “Reside” by Patrick Pritchett
Review of Reside
Author: Patrick Pritchett
Dead Metaphor Press
PO Box 2076
Boulder, Colorado 80306
40 pages
staplebound, paper
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
$5.00
ISBN: 1-880743-14-0
There is nothing really new in the concept of the poem, or the text, as something that only really happens on the page, somehow removed, as Wittgenstein suggested, from “life as it is lived.” (Zukofsky was so hip to this in his and the century’s teens that a great deal of his work remained virtually unread — despite Pound’s early championing of him and Bunting as strugglers in the desert — until Carroll Terrell began drawing the university’s minds to him in the early seventies.).
But there is something new in these poems, as least to me. Like Zukofsky, Pritchett directs the reader’s attention away from a possible world that exists outside of the poems themselves and focuses it on the words on the page, but what is startling is to find that there is something that still sings at the center of these poems. And what remains is their song, as if these poems were a libretto (or could easily become one with a sympathetic composer). The most obvious form of their musical structure is in the repetition of certain words that are strung throughout individual poems (and even, in the case of the “Autumn Series,” throughout a whole series of poems) like the frequent reappearance of a fugue’s theme.
“Autumn Series” is central to the book, not only because of where it’s been placed in the sequence but also thematically, and it is here that these repetitions are most concentrated. Words like “burning,” “body” and “shape” reappear so frequently that they become nearer to the abstractions they actually are. And — although it is silly to lift a passage from this series, like lifting a few bars from Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” — this stanza shows what beauty is possible when working like this, of placing words like “autumn,” “desire,” and “fall” the way John Coltrane uses variations on the theme of “My Favorite Things” as punctuation in one of his best-known solos:
In the beginning of autumn is a field
of thinking about autumn.
About the fall and the desire
of things to fall
and the desire of things to
be many and not one.
Perhaps intentionally, just when the poems begin to soar, carried upwards by their own lyric power, Pritchett’s concerns with the “word” and “text” show up with all their clumsiness, as well as words and phrases such as “syllabary” and “tropes of enclosure” (who can imagine using those words in any situation other than a poem aimed at the university?).
But between those “poetic” words and concerns, there is a pure and sincere lyricism that even Zukofsky and Pound, masters of this sort of thing, were rarely able to maintain for a length as long as Reside. And one guesses the reference here should actually be to Ronald Johnson, author of the epic sequence “Ark,” to whom sly and direct references are made throughout the book. It’s a shame Johnson died in 1998. One imagines that he would have perhaps enjoyed and admired these verses most of all. C’est la vie.
Although the book’s insert speaks of themes such as anxiety, loss, and departure, Pritchett’s main concern in “Reside” is the lyric, and the poems seek what Zukofsky meant when he described the poem as “lower limit speech/upper limit song.” In the lines that open the poem “Reside,” Pritchett tells us exactly what’s in store:
In the little room we placed
the objects of the little room.
So that belonging, its assurances, its meters,
could reside, could be said “to glow.”
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