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alluring cohesiveness and lovely phrases
There is always anxiety in the dark, whether it’s in the black envelope of a movie theatre or the pitch of a passionate embrace. Part of this nervousness comes from the constant disconnect from sight: in the dark the eye only catches half images, half visions that spiral into excessive thoughts and doubts. This is the space songs for the dancing chicken occupies, collecting disparate scenes and lines into beautifully wrought and detailed maps that explore the shadowed and antsy corners of city existence and personal narrative.
Cut into six different sections, the poetry here is firmly rooted in the specific. Schultz is especially effective at grasping the small pivot within a poem, a lit window or curled ribbon, and reacting to this tiny turn by exposing the inner voice of its narrator. In this way, the emotional core and the sensual physical experience are always closely tied together, always apparent and thrust forward. These are poems about feeling the teeth of a key or seeing an exposed body and having the mind cut those experiences into pieces until they are small enough to carry as constantly compacted memories.
Sections like “better hell” and “in a factory” house poems that are tangled together and confused, overlapping within sensations. But there is always an underpinning emotive connection that unites them: in “better hell” it is the claustrophobia of a city, the constant strangeness of being surrounded by strangers. While each of the poems in this section fume with religious phrases, it is the sense of constrictive place that pulls the works together. The prose poetry of “in a factory” drags like lake water waves, lulling with impeccably rhythmic yet startling with the overwhelming language that builds; the increasing listing, always beginning with the phrase “this is a pain,” climbs and climbs until it outgrows the poem, eventually falling in on itself, daring the reader to “carry this poem in your pocket until poems go out of date”.
However, where songs falls into problems is when it falls too heavily into the abstract. The first section, dedicated to film icon Werner Herzog, lacks the same attention and richenss the later sections posses, relying too heavily on the technique of juxtapositioning disjointed snapshots; often the lines within the poems are too disconnected from the surroundings lines. The result is a wide collage of images that are too distanced from each other, like a set of cut scenes strung too closely and randomly together in succession.
Ultimately though, it is the sense of site that gives songs for the dancing chicken its alluring cohesiveness and lovely phrases. These are poems of places that every reader has been: the seedy hotel in passion, the memory of a mother pulling coats from a closet in the middle of the night, the nagging tug of writing poems for the wrong people. These are poems half formed in the dark, faces and images and emotions hidden and revealing themselves on city corners and through the slow turn of the moon’s light through a window.
songs for the dancing chicken is avaliable through ECW Press (April 2007) for $16.95 Canadian.
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