Joe Elliot does something that is very difficult to do, he makes a poem funny and sublime and lets it tell a story too, poetry that is not for some, but for everybody.
I’ve been wanting to get Joe Elliot on my blog for a long time, and am happy to report that you will hear him reading poems from his new book, An Everything, in the Vimeo below.
Then a review by Kimberly Lyons about the poet and his work follows. I highly recommend it. Enjoy.
An Everything
Spuyten Duyvil
2024
Joe Elliot
Last week was quite scary and this week promises an awfulness kicking off with January 20th. This shitty Monday won’t stop me though from heralding Joe Elliot’s An Everything, his most recent of fifteen books and chapbooks and online publications (Lunar Chandelier Press published his Homework twelve years ago). The array of his unpublished work is enormous.
Elliot’s work and approach to poetry is cared for and followed by a large coterie of New York and Brooklyn poets many of who came on the poetry scene in the late 1980s. In early years, Elliot’s small press, Situations, created lovely handmade books in conjunction with Soho letterpress designer Anne Noonan including early books by Marcella Durand and Lisa Jarnot, among others. Elliot has co-hosted reading series at Biblios Bookstore in NYC, the Zinc Bar at two locations in NYC and is at present co-hosting another series at another bookstore in Brooklyn. Elliot mentors young poets as an English teacher at a Brooklyn high school.
For decades Elliot has experimented with several book forms and formats. In his poetry the voice – something reliable and core that registers throughout -carries through. Something that may be reflective of reading W.C. Williams. I hope Elliot’s the interesting networks of influence may be researched further. (That which might have once been described as lineage).
It’s just circumstance that this poet expends his energy on writing poems, maintaining family and friendship and community relations and nurturing other poets. I don’t believe I have ever once read a self-promoting notice from him anywhere. He does not judge those of us that do those things as far as I know. He’s just too busy and long ago ordered his priorities.
Elliot’s poetry, like, say Maureen Owen’s and Elaine Equi’s, (among the poets I am aware of) could have an applicability to and something to offer to the multitude of readers outside the “poetry world ” and whom are open to a degree of unexpectedness in form and who desire a poetry that speaks clearly among its aspects. Elliot’s writing is always clear and made of scrupulously unfancy, unvague sentences. However much the phrasing in these poems echoes speech and one hears a person speaking, its layered sharp turns sudden stops and intrusions of imagination in the midst of articulation is writing. Not speech.
I write this as a discernment and not to offer that this is what poetry should aspire to. Not all poetries offer that wide-ranging possibility (at least as things are now). Some poetries are specialized and concentrated and actually are too experimental or carefully built on a historical trajectory of previous writing or radicality of thought to be “for” “everybody.”
Elliot offers a poetry that is, may I say, undeniably contemporary and “American” without in the least trying to be that or valorize that and while also offhandedly criticizing.
“Maybe we don’t have to infinitely expand/and crush everything into cinders/and fill up and pave over those spaces/that are always opening up.”
Once in a conversation among poets, Elliot said that he decided to write staring with things he actually saw and heard and felt. This was not a prescription for how poetry should be written but a personal ethic. Maybe even a discipline of practice. An Everything offers a compact set of Elliot’s recent poetry and evidences an evolving awareness and developed flexibility of thought. How this preference for the real comes through in these new poems is that the array of things and language for things that he attends to and that often initiate the poem are microscopic and universal; natural and manufactured.
“Then I got to rummage around/the cupboards and pantry for a funnel/a large masonry jar, the paper towels/a square section of which I tore off/and folded in quarters to make a filter/…”
Then, the poem swerves. Instead of evocation or description or enchantment with particulars filling the poem, thought and further realizations arises from perception with an effect that is never predictable or sentimental or an yway pre-formulated. Somehow, a poetic process alchemizes to a statement. Contraries are distilled and like William Blake advises, never falsely harmonized. “…this movement into the thick of things.” and “The pattern is always/striving to get outside of itself and unravel.”
Elliot’s poetry throughout all the books has always registered the details of actual life in contradiction with the mind that accompanies the body.
His poems seek understanding and meaning from contradiction, failed efforts, miscommunications, misunderstandings and human ignominy. Awkward mishaps carefully described are in many instances the peculiar core occurrence the poem is wrapped around. Yet, Elliot’s poems also creatively express everyday grace among strangers and family and articulates gratitude and register in one detail after another instances of unexpected joy “…binding tomatoes and hopping on/your bike and riding to work…”
The poems in An Everything while maintaining the characteristic diction and voice of earlier writing go further and are wrestling with quandaries. “…if the self/is a mere hallucination being projected/ on the back of the mind…” “The ever shifting space between being/ and not being.” One of the effects of an Elliot poem is that the reader is accompanied by a friendly mind through the alternations of experience. In these poems suddenly you are also dropping through space and “…splicing open/the burgeoning teenage poet’s belly to release/a kaleidoscope of pollinators back into/the world.” There’s a weird, hallucinatory solitude in An Everything that slipped into Elliot’s poetry while longtime readers were distracted by an everything. The swerves are sharper and even more unexpected. God or not? Ok, God.
Ok, what is it. Perhaps, “an unknown area that implies/an infinite
largesse, a continuous thicket…” In imagining, the poems jump into very new and big spaces: “the black water/of the pond is your bottomless mind,/infinitely influenceable.” ….”the chalk outline on the sidewalk is your reward/for believing in atoms. The infinite vacuum between each…” and that brings this poetry into a sphere of “…an unimaginable and unknowable/Nothing.”
Elliot’s poems have always brought the fact of death in but the poems of An Everything go deeply there, grieving without cliche or platitude and facing lacerating actualities and regrets and then suddenly coming to an edge that is strangely exhilarating.
Why do these lines:
“…at the bottom of the Avenue L stairs/…is a beautifully sour/
puddle of cafeteria milk, its carton/stepped on, disfigured, crippled/ in the corner, also unsafe and lovely.”
Remind me of J.D. Salinger?
I believe the poetry of Joe Elliot is one of the hidden gems of American literary life.
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An Everything is published by Spuyten Duyvil. You can check it out here:
An interview with Joe Elliot:
And five poems in The Brooklyn Rail:
And you can check out Kimberly Lyons and her A commodious bee here:
Such a terrific presentation! I love Joe’s sly & wise poems, and Kim’s review enunciated that so well.
Buying his book, so much did I endear myself more with the everyday of our lives through each poem Joe Elliot had written and read here. Beholden to you, Don, as well, for your tender persistence in getting him here. – Donna Fleischer