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I had to work hard to get through the thirty poems in Peter Magliocco’s fifth book of poetry, entitled This Junkyard Heaven. It is an intense, highly focused set of poems created in a very large and well-schooled mind. In a recent Books & Authors interview with Magliocco he notes no fewer then eighty-eight favorite writers, listing among them: Mailer, Kerouac, James Purdy, Boll, Grass, Sontag, Beckett, George Sand, Sartre, Camus, and Chekov. Magliocco’s literary interests are as rangy and challenging as the poems in this dense and intellectually rich work.
Here are two examples from This Junkyard Heaven. The first, entitled “the hallowed cave”:
what rings off the soft shell
old pain we hoped to keep inside
beyond clinical flesh-resurrections
medicare doesn’t pay for
or any stay in Hotel Heaven
depicted in a Bosch crowd scene
with computer-colored enhancement
your tan legs kick in a spam god’s brothel
time won’t spasm between us
our stem cells in love’s test tube
a crystal bukkake the drunk drink
as a wonk midwife spirits our progeny
from lantern-lipped crevices.
And this one, entitled “nirvana”:
the entrapment of fallen stars
brandishing what corporate insignia
time-tattered reliquary indisposes
our blood seeps
into silent rain
sometimes, in effigy of sleep
the morning’s a far-off vestibule
-cloistered by brightly colored paintings -
waiting for our entrance
while
keening for our presence
Blake's tigers maul
throats of Vegan magicians
revealing what elixir of bodies
our bones whiter than pale rabbits
inside divine top hats,
cats spring born again
squealing with animal faith
intimidating our human tread
(waking from a dream
mother’s spindle
turns us around
to glimpse other planets
or the first time)
& crawl on all four again
away from manacled stock brokers
on the once sacred ground of Wall St.
a red sea of humanity skittering
into heaven’s
eternal
liquidation.
I don’t know about you, but poems like these often leave my mind cross-eyed. I could only read three or four in one reading, and then had to let my mind rest before jumping in for more. I asked Magliocco about the complexity of his work. “What is intuitive and crafted appeals to me so far as writing poetry goes. I don't feel my writing is 'complex,' just not as superficial as much floating around the small press ethers. Perhaps the ideas in my poems are what strike you as complex. I certainly believe in examining intellectual & artistic ideas in poetry, whose meanings aren't readily clear always while writing…and that's one reason for writing them, since the ideas are also a search for meanings in our lives.” He went on to describe his process, “I don't do a lot of extensive rewriting, but sometimes I take things from bad or failed old poems and merge them with incomplete newer work…a poetic transmigration of sorts. The things taken can be whole lines, a few words, and content totally rewritten in a different form. William Burroughs used to cut-up his writing and paste it into a totally different context, though the results verged on irrational dream associations sometimes. I try to insert the free-feel of what you refer to as "stream of consciousness" with more structured and thought-out lines. Our unconscious mind has to interact successfully on a daily basis with our conscious one: the two have to be brought into harmony, in art and life.”
I had two strong impressions come over me while I read Magliocco’s work. One, he has a signature ‘voice’ in the small press. It is the unique collision of academic and street poetry. Two, poetry (as displayed in Magliocco’s writing) is a great laboratory - it is an art form short enough, with boundaries wide enough to mirror many of the aspects we find in visual art. I asked him about his influences. “In the small press there is only Bukowski even though he's been gone and I can't think of two poets better, though I like Alan Catlin. I like e-zines like The Oracular Tree. And Jose Saramago is the prose writer I like.”
Many of the poems in This Junkyard Heaven are highly visual rather than narrative. The total creates an impression rather than brings the reader to a conclusion. He frequently uses metaphors drawn from visual art and historic events. This made me wonder if Magliocco had been schooled in three-dimensional arts and he said, “My frame of historical references isn't that shockingly scholarly or erudite! I had some art history courses years ago at California State University at Northridge, where I picked up a B.A. in two-dimensional art. I use things obviously from my educational baggage, from my own study too. The names you mention are chiefly from well-known artists and poets: Peter Paul Rubens painted his wife Helena, William Blake's tygers burned bright; Apollinaire was a French poet who died fighting in WWI. But yeah, some readers probably will find those references in the range of limited curiosity only. 'Words and metaphors' are what it's all about, I'd read something by Nabokov to really have a work-out with the dictionary.”
Magliocco is also editor and publisher of the small press magazine ART:MAG (P.O. Box 70896, Las Vegas, NV 89170) which features many major voices in the small press. I asked him about ART:MAG: “I started it in 1985 by hand-lettering short poems with colored pens and pencils -- it was a logical extension of creative ideas from art school days, I guess. Having discovered the small press, I wondered if I could merge art forms with literary content. Those issues were called 'original series' because I included actual original bits and pieces of my sketchbook drawings in them…not mere copies. That changed over the years for a number of reasons, since nobody seemed thrilled by these experiments and the small press mag-sensibility is hard to change: many want the poem to take precedence, not the artwork.”
The title poem of this collection is a visual wonder, here is the opening stanza of “This Junkyard Heaven”:
(after a non-existent painting of Eva Hesse)
I have wanted to convert you to beauty
like an elemental force of nature
you can do little about, but must
learn to live with as a power
beyond our real reach , for we sketch just
its outline, its rainbow shimmer
across this junkyard heaven
called life with its cities
tenebrous & densely impacted
by flesh, metals, trees, earth ions
for all condemned lovers to cling to.
As I read Magliocco’s collection, I most admired his depth of his mind. His writing is rich and complex. He shares his soul, his fears and passions in a unique collection of poetry – as good as any master painter could write.
Check out the Books and Authors interview with Peter Magliocco.
Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over one hundred print and electronic publications. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations for writing and most recently he read his poetry on National Public Radio’s Theme and Variations. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory. Ries is also the author of five books of poetry. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot and he is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore. Check out http://www.literarti.net/Ries/ or write him at charlesr@execpc.com.