Apps Inspirations: Logan Ryan Smith

Carrie Hunter’s Ypolita Press has been putting out some impressive chaps lately. A few days ago in the mail I received Carrie’s own excellent Blog: A Winter Poem, and also Logan Ryan Smith’s Tracks. There are many things about Tracks I find striking; the most salient element that jumps out at me in this chap is the melopoeaic level it contains: music built into the language. Logan and Carrie are both San Francisco poets, and of course there’s a rich tradition, going back to the San Francisco Renaissance of the mid twentieth century, of Bay Area poets scribing richly musical texts. Smith’s chap fits squarely into this tradition, and there’s a particular affinity for Robert Duncan’s poems that is manifest here. What is most surprising to me about Tracks is how comfortably and seamlessly Smith fits rhymes (as well as assonances and alliterations) into his lines. A few brief fragments will suffice to demonstrate:

on the tracks
the wheels crush the rat’s head

if you listen
you’ll hear the crack

then Echo says it back
and all the lepers

glimmer, shake, and laugh

This chap seems to have a few thematic constituents: travel/movement, open/empty spaces, states of consciousness and perception attendant on these themes. There is also a subtext of sickness/illness running through the poems. This little fragment conveys all these things, and in a richly resonant voice that could not be as rich or as resonant if rhyme were not employed. This little nugget is just as rich:

At the station
The faces turn stasis
To dust in the places
The faces of lepers
Are facing

Notice how skillfully sharp the enjambment is between the second and third lines, how these lines twist into their own significations with grace but also with a kind of shock or charge. These “shocks” and “charges” are all over Tracks, and confirm for me its status as one of the most startling little gems I’ve come across in some time. While it’s clearly too early to opine that poets are ready to use rhyme extensively again, it’s a positive confirmation for me that I’m not alone in what I’m attempting with the Apps, and that others are finding similar solutions to problems we face as poets in a new, still inchoate century.