::an old favorite::

HARRY SMITH

“Clear Mirror Care”: some thoughts on Jared Hayes’ The Dead Love: hands and more hands together

0.1          If CA Conrad’s blurb for Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals learns me, it’s that some here these days are still looking for a ‘poet’s poet’, one who will get them writing. And yes, for Conrad, (for all those in the know), Bernadette is that poet! And, I would add to that, Yes! Jared Hayes is also that poet! The poems of The Dead Love take me here by hands, reading-writing in a single ringing  gesture…

1.1          The Dead Love’s first series "Into the Furrows" is the most challenging one for me; and benefits from multiple readings. Or, multiple voiced readings. “Furrows” works through translated language from two foreign-born, non-English writers. Paul Celan and Helene Cixous make a curious pair; each writer’s work stands as bold example of the psychological effects of the most difficult strands of 20^th Century globalization: colonization and ethnic cleansing. For both writers – Cixous of French Jewish descent raised in Algeria, Celan a German-speaking Jewish Romanian whose family was interned and exiled in World War II, eventually landing in Vienna, then Paris – there is an uneasy  sense of belonging, or rather a ‘constitution of exclusion and non-belonging’, in their subjects and language. This exile can ‘trap one in a foreign body/language that does not allow one express themselves’, though both have determined to forge a writing life of bare witness, to communicate despite, and specifically through, this exodus. The corollary effect of their resounding images –  Cixous’ “white ink”, Celan’s “black milk” – shows a dramatic, upsetting disturbance in the dislocation of the natural essence of beings wrought by war, colonization, racism, exile, exodus.

 “Furrows’” dialogic prosody keeps the reader (okay, this reader) poised in the middle space of a conversation of between, of figurative voice-spaces, a bardolike talk state between the living and

The Chicken of Tomorrow!

"There's no driver? The chickens are taking over!"

Uncle Jim's Dairy Farm

"b-but i want to write poetry and act!"

Now Available!

The Dead Love: Hands and More Hands Together

by Jared Hayes

Publisher: Black Radish Books

ISBN: 9780982573198

Price: $15.00

Available at:
Small Press Distribution




"I understand Jared Hayes is conducting here a deep spelunking into connected caverns of other texts. What I don't yet quite grasp is how he's articulated all the ropes, quickdraws, carabiners, hexes, cams, and sundry poetical devices to work in such syntactically spectacular ways. 'I root up (I have brought them) landinwards, hither (I will make them resound here.)' And that's just at the first drop, barely in, still fathoms to go.... Well, some people have the ambition and guts and others just watch. I could say 'tour de force' from my spectator chair, but that wouldn't really do. So I'll say, as a first handle on it, that THE DEAD LOVE joins the masterpieces of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Susan Howe, and Ronald Johnson as one of the most exhilarating 'citational' explorations ever made in American poetry." —Kent Johnson

Jared Hayes lives in Portland, Oregon. hayes is the author of The Dead Love (Black Radish Books) and Bandit forthcoming from Little Red Leaves’ Textile Series. He believes collectivity and community are important and so is a member of Dusie Kollectiv, Black Radish Books, and Livestock Editions. Jared's poems can be found.

redesign

welcome back to the barnyard. slightly redesigned, but still collective and collecting...