When I am in more active publishing phases, I always encounter Simon Perchik's poetry.
The second poem there also shows a body (feels male this time?) interacting with the earth, its thoughts deferring to its sensorium impinged by terrestrial matter and the weird aesthesis that engenders. It’s a quieter lyricism. Perhaps that is a good mechanical trope to describe the way Perchik’s poems function, in general: descriptions of the interplay between thought and aesthesis in daily life. Most poetry functions in that way, at some level, but in Perchik’s poetry, there tends to be an absence of any sort of strong assertion, and the sense-data seem to chip away at the narrative (uniquely human) elements of each poem, or seek to replace them with their own substance (a metaplasia). In Perchik’s poetry, the phenomenology of the senses is louder (more weighted) than the constructions mind wishes to place upon them. Sometimes, this feels like a visualization of anxiety. Because the senses, once opened fully, can bombard consciousness. Often, it feels as though the “speaker” of the poem is undergoing erasure. Again, this seems congruent with zen practice. There’s a mortal feeling to the way this particular poem ends, but we can’t really tell if all the dirt, the literal earth,which clings to the body in this poem (“and the gravel path clings to your skin) signifies a burial or someone simply arising from sitting or lying on the earth as evening falls.
The mind wants to visualize the "sink" in the poem as a typical kitchen sink, but the image collapses and reassembles itself into something else, perhaps a landscape feature, since few sinks can gather water "waist-deep."Although it is true that we often lean on a sink so that its water is, in a stretch of sense, "waist-deep." But the lines which follow refer to one faucet being "abandoned" as the other "gathers branches." Perhaps this is someone in an abandoned house which is in the process of being penetrated by nature. That could perhaps explain the olfactory imagery, the earthen smells that conjure synaesthesia in the poem. Perhaps it is a sort of belated homecoming. That's one possible read, but surely one among many.
I was happy to see he's still publishing quality work all over the place.
I had not been aware that his compilation, Hands Collected: The Books of Simon Perchik (Poems 1949-1999), was nominated for the National Book Award at the turn of the millennium. But that was an early and clearly premature summation, nowhere near a Collected Poems, since that retrospective only surveyed his books up to the young age of seventy-six.
His website humorously flies a quote from Library Journal: "Perchik is the most widely published unknown poet in America...."
Where to situate his poetry? I like that it's clearly sonically-driven, that the sense of narrative is often incidental if not thoroughly hallucinated (think Rorschachs of sound). But a careful lyricism emerges nonetheless.
Sometimes he reminds me of Merwin. But with much of the writing, I think of the zen tradition in literature, and the way Perchik's stanzas spin like different quarks in poems like these two at the Superstition [Review] reminds me of the zen poetry of Shinkichi Takahashi.
In that first poem, ("Her ankle needs adjustments, puddles...") it's as though he's describing a woman's body that won't stay a woman's body, but reveals itself to be the landscape, earth itself, but also the cosmic forces feeding it and moving through it. Takahashi's poems are filled with objects like this that won't stay "the objects they are." Nothing will inhere to the point of definition or the apodictic.
The second poem there also shows a body (feels male this time?) interacting with the earth, its thoughts deferring to its sensorium impinged by terrestrial matter and the weird aesthesis that engenders. It’s a quieter lyricism. Perhaps that is a good mechanical trope to describe the way Perchik’s poems function, in general: descriptions of the interplay between thought and aesthesis in daily life. Most poetry functions in that way, at some level, but in Perchik’s poetry, there tends to be an absence of any sort of strong assertion, and the sense-data seem to chip away at the narrative (uniquely human) elements of each poem, or seek to replace them with their own substance (a metaplasia). In Perchik’s poetry, the phenomenology of the senses is louder (more weighted) than the constructions mind wishes to place upon them. Sometimes, this feels like a visualization of anxiety. Because the senses, once opened fully, can bombard consciousness. Often, it feels as though the “speaker” of the poem is undergoing erasure. Again, this seems congruent with zen practice. There’s a mortal feeling to the way this particular poem ends, but we can’t really tell if all the dirt, the literal earth,which clings to the body in this poem (“and the gravel path clings to your skin) signifies a burial or someone simply arising from sitting or lying on the earth as evening falls.
The mind wants to visualize the "sink" in the poem as a typical kitchen sink, but the image collapses and reassembles itself into something else, perhaps a landscape feature, since few sinks can gather water "waist-deep."Although it is true that we often lean on a sink so that its water is, in a stretch of sense, "waist-deep." But the lines which follow refer to one faucet being "abandoned" as the other "gathers branches." Perhaps this is someone in an abandoned house which is in the process of being penetrated by nature. That could perhaps explain the olfactory imagery, the earthen smells that conjure synaesthesia in the poem. Perhaps it is a sort of belated homecoming. That's one possible read, but surely one among many.
I like the way the "person" in this poem is maybe you (it is in the grammatical second person) but maybe another you, some disembodied any-person, floating through sense-perceptions that feel more real than any sense of personality that you "possesses." Again, zen.
I think Perchik's lyric poetry gains immeasurably by keeping its lexicon limited to "simple," familiar words. It makes for a comfortable surrealism of the quotidian.
Here are three more Perchik poems published in 2018 in Conjunctions.
I hope there are many more poems by Simon on their way and that he starts a new trend of poets continuing to write great poetry even when they are centenarians. In case you missed it, Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize for a stellar collection published when he was eighty-one, and he continues to publish strong work as he enters his nineties now.
Who has time to die when poetry's calling?
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