Barton Smock's Blog - Posts Tagged "poems"
Wasp, gasp.
Had a strange weekend that saw my youngest son, who is medically complex/fragile, in the hospital with pneumonia, rhino enterovirus, etc, and was on sepsis watch for a bit. During all this, my newest published work was released by the elegantly dark Incunabula Media, title of which is Wasp, gasp.
https://incunabulamedia.com/poethicks
Am very grateful to David Mitchell for letting me do my thing, and for working with me on the cover image of the work, which is original art by my son Noah Michael Smock.
Also need to deeply thank the number of poets and artists who said something toward the work before it was spoken correctly away. Such speech is below and I've put it inside anything above me.
Praise for Wasp, gasp.
Reading these poems is like assembling a kaleidoscope in a dim room and each jewel that finds its place lights up a glimpse of a spectacular depth. This collection of words is brilliantly surreal. Unlike much writing that's brilliant and surreal, these pieces hold their contents with tenderness. After a while, the love shines through as more important than any sense one might make of lesser things.
-Kyla Houbolt, poet, author of Surviving Death
The worlds of these poems are apocalyptic. Is it the past searching for the present or the present searching for the past? How does one reconcile all of this life but trying to find the words. Touch, god, owl, moon, son, daughter, Mom, Dad, brother. Sex. Ohio. The movies. Baby. Death. The things we brush up against that tell us we are living / that tell us we are also dying. The insidiousness of religion, but also the saving grace of belief or worship. It is clear that Smock worships the word and the world the word can build - a boat. When I read Barton Smock’s work I never want it to end and I always want it to end because it strikes me deep in my heart. He writes in birthplace 76 I want to have these talks. Dog parts and lost hell. My hair dead longer than yours. These poems - a child stunned to find themselves an adult, the search for answers seems meaningless, and yet here is the word, building a ladder out of the muck. Here is the word continuing to make sense of all that has been lost. Of all that will.
-Jane Stephens Rosenthal, poet and filmmaker
This is powerful stuff, ripped from place of dream and nightmare, love and song, a deeply personal voice is given form here.
-Jon Cone, poet, author of New Year Begun
To read Barton Smock is to unlock a sliver of a Midwestern surrealist's (frog-less) dream. Here, God is often in the other room, consumed by the death of childhood and the stylings of the continual family, where famine and loneliness and love all succumb to the image-driven line. To the sideways divine. Grief as a sting. Most of Smock's poems (of which, he has thousands) are often a couple dozen words. Rarely more than a paragraph. A snippet. A breath. A postcard to bury in the ground, its flowers to be shaped like ancient ghosts. Barton Smock's newest ode is his collection Wasp, Gasp, a lyrical visit through childhood handstands and Ohio backlands and lackluster devils expelling hunger in a drunk stomach discovered in someone else's coat. To tackle the line is to fine-tune the prayer-in-hiatus, the blessed text of sleep. This book is the drink. This train is the king.
-Benjamin Niespodziany, poet, author of No Farther Than The End Of The Street
Smock leverages paradoxes, non-sequiturs, and wordplay to pulse out euphonious theophanies. With each succeeding poem, he intones nightmares and dreams the reader awake.
-George Salis, author of Sea Above, Sun Below
Barton Smock knows something that time also knows, continuing & carving out his own path within a rich tradition of surrealist-absurdist poets blazing a poetic path seemingly out of thin air. Smock’s poetic is filled with a stark heart & curiosity which leans on the unknown as much, or more, as on the known. This is the voice of a seer. The voice implores, becomes plural, rages & laughs & cries & asks. At times, a lost & reluctant prophet who heeds that "some places exist only after you reach them twice." Smock sees the deepness within himself, and perhaps, within all living beings in unison. And this may be one of my favorite gifts of Wasp, gasp—the poet’s way of approaching himself & this very existence with the same amount of integrity, imagination & nervous wonder. Wasp, gasp is a poetry of astoundment which I can foresee standing the test of time simultaneously with Al-Khazneh, Machu Picchu & Stone Henge alike.
-Daniel Cyran, poet, curator and editor of Anvil Tongue
I have lived in Ohio, and experienced its liminal qualities. Both an antiheaven and an antihell, it has the peculiar promise of being illegible from within and without. The narrator's body in Wasp, gasp is also illegible in this way, vibrating slowly between life, death and something else. In this space made by vibration, another something-else can emerge, in sonic play and folding images. God and dog circle one another then flop onto the ground, roll around. I know the demands of a liminal body in a place that won't hold it, what that might create. Barton Smock invites a reader to enter that zone too, the place that is a mode of being, one form of secret (or secret form) revealed:
The more internal/ the life, the longer/ the past./ A velvet cricket.
-Jay Besemer, poet, author of Men and Sleep
https://incunabulamedia.com/poethicks
Am very grateful to David Mitchell for letting me do my thing, and for working with me on the cover image of the work, which is original art by my son Noah Michael Smock.
Also need to deeply thank the number of poets and artists who said something toward the work before it was spoken correctly away. Such speech is below and I've put it inside anything above me.
Praise for Wasp, gasp.
Reading these poems is like assembling a kaleidoscope in a dim room and each jewel that finds its place lights up a glimpse of a spectacular depth. This collection of words is brilliantly surreal. Unlike much writing that's brilliant and surreal, these pieces hold their contents with tenderness. After a while, the love shines through as more important than any sense one might make of lesser things.
-Kyla Houbolt, poet, author of Surviving Death
The worlds of these poems are apocalyptic. Is it the past searching for the present or the present searching for the past? How does one reconcile all of this life but trying to find the words. Touch, god, owl, moon, son, daughter, Mom, Dad, brother. Sex. Ohio. The movies. Baby. Death. The things we brush up against that tell us we are living / that tell us we are also dying. The insidiousness of religion, but also the saving grace of belief or worship. It is clear that Smock worships the word and the world the word can build - a boat. When I read Barton Smock’s work I never want it to end and I always want it to end because it strikes me deep in my heart. He writes in birthplace 76 I want to have these talks. Dog parts and lost hell. My hair dead longer than yours. These poems - a child stunned to find themselves an adult, the search for answers seems meaningless, and yet here is the word, building a ladder out of the muck. Here is the word continuing to make sense of all that has been lost. Of all that will.
-Jane Stephens Rosenthal, poet and filmmaker
This is powerful stuff, ripped from place of dream and nightmare, love and song, a deeply personal voice is given form here.
-Jon Cone, poet, author of New Year Begun
To read Barton Smock is to unlock a sliver of a Midwestern surrealist's (frog-less) dream. Here, God is often in the other room, consumed by the death of childhood and the stylings of the continual family, where famine and loneliness and love all succumb to the image-driven line. To the sideways divine. Grief as a sting. Most of Smock's poems (of which, he has thousands) are often a couple dozen words. Rarely more than a paragraph. A snippet. A breath. A postcard to bury in the ground, its flowers to be shaped like ancient ghosts. Barton Smock's newest ode is his collection Wasp, Gasp, a lyrical visit through childhood handstands and Ohio backlands and lackluster devils expelling hunger in a drunk stomach discovered in someone else's coat. To tackle the line is to fine-tune the prayer-in-hiatus, the blessed text of sleep. This book is the drink. This train is the king.
-Benjamin Niespodziany, poet, author of No Farther Than The End Of The Street
Smock leverages paradoxes, non-sequiturs, and wordplay to pulse out euphonious theophanies. With each succeeding poem, he intones nightmares and dreams the reader awake.
-George Salis, author of Sea Above, Sun Below
Barton Smock knows something that time also knows, continuing & carving out his own path within a rich tradition of surrealist-absurdist poets blazing a poetic path seemingly out of thin air. Smock’s poetic is filled with a stark heart & curiosity which leans on the unknown as much, or more, as on the known. This is the voice of a seer. The voice implores, becomes plural, rages & laughs & cries & asks. At times, a lost & reluctant prophet who heeds that "some places exist only after you reach them twice." Smock sees the deepness within himself, and perhaps, within all living beings in unison. And this may be one of my favorite gifts of Wasp, gasp—the poet’s way of approaching himself & this very existence with the same amount of integrity, imagination & nervous wonder. Wasp, gasp is a poetry of astoundment which I can foresee standing the test of time simultaneously with Al-Khazneh, Machu Picchu & Stone Henge alike.
-Daniel Cyran, poet, curator and editor of Anvil Tongue
I have lived in Ohio, and experienced its liminal qualities. Both an antiheaven and an antihell, it has the peculiar promise of being illegible from within and without. The narrator's body in Wasp, gasp is also illegible in this way, vibrating slowly between life, death and something else. In this space made by vibration, another something-else can emerge, in sonic play and folding images. God and dog circle one another then flop onto the ground, roll around. I know the demands of a liminal body in a place that won't hold it, what that might create. Barton Smock invites a reader to enter that zone too, the place that is a mode of being, one form of secret (or secret form) revealed:
The more internal/ the life, the longer/ the past./ A velvet cricket.
-Jay Besemer, poet, author of Men and Sleep
title can't be blank
ALCOHOL MACHINE
Death gathers info for the bomb. A baby
is the childhood
of a line break.
I have bones
in my sleep. I have babies
in yours. Pregnant
in hell
one is like
a sore
thumb
tracking
the genders
of angels. This movie
is a crier.
Time and god are both the god that swallowed time.
EXODUS MACHINE
Shape’s
false
amnesia.
God’s last life.
Angels unforgettably conscious.
ORDER POEM
We’re seven babies away from god finding out that no one has heard the ocean. I say pain has an angel and you say it has a ghost. We eat for the last time. Some blank grief that not even a mother would save from a staring contest. I eat like a devil. You like a devil on a skateboard crying over the death of a ribless boy. Poverty is neither dream nor transport. I step on a nail in my scarecrow puberty and you bend yourself to rabbit, grocery cart, wheelchair. I run the shower and say things about your body into a coffee can. Birth is wrong about people.
DEATH POEM FOLLOWED BY A POEM ABOUT DEATH
We play rock paper scissors to see who gets the gun. I’ve already pointed my hand at your stomach and I’ve already apologized like a fever for saying that your prophets needed headache medicine. Jesus was looking for his sister. He was on the cross and his father got the day wrong. The problem with pain is that it knows when to stop. A friend lifts the baby and says I don’t know what you’ve been feeding this thing. It has more memories than god.
BLACK MOUSE MACHINE
(for Mark Lanegan)
Snow grief
and star
grief
so rarely
die
during the removal
of thunder's
stomach
that I thought
twice
and killed
with no help
from god
a red
fly
on a blue
train
BODY MACHINE
Angels choose ghosts for god. I’m lonely when you’re here and not when you’re not. For emphasis, don’t read this if you’re not my brother. If you are, don’t read this aloud. I’ve never been to a strange place. My son writes a story about a cannibal eating the mother of the antichrist. I want to fix the devil. The story goes deeper than I want it to. I drink all day. My sons are alive. My sons tell me they can be alive in their sleep. I want to test god. I give a pill to Adam and he waits for my signal. When Adam dies, he dies thinking his stomach is where it should be. My longing isn’t ready.
NOSTALGIA FOR THE VOID MACHINE
No one can dream about god. Water can’t be touched. Time makes itself into a seed that grief never plants. Death fails as a garden but not as death. Cheekbone, ransom, kneecap. I was sick for awhile and now want to love things.
FIRST MACHINE
I seashell myself into the wreckage of the angel’s elbow. Death’s memory and god’s memory are switched at birth. I lie to my mom. There’s a pill that makes me not take pills.
Death gathers info for the bomb. A baby
is the childhood
of a line break.
I have bones
in my sleep. I have babies
in yours. Pregnant
in hell
one is like
a sore
thumb
tracking
the genders
of angels. This movie
is a crier.
Time and god are both the god that swallowed time.
EXODUS MACHINE
Shape’s
false
amnesia.
God’s last life.
Angels unforgettably conscious.
ORDER POEM
We’re seven babies away from god finding out that no one has heard the ocean. I say pain has an angel and you say it has a ghost. We eat for the last time. Some blank grief that not even a mother would save from a staring contest. I eat like a devil. You like a devil on a skateboard crying over the death of a ribless boy. Poverty is neither dream nor transport. I step on a nail in my scarecrow puberty and you bend yourself to rabbit, grocery cart, wheelchair. I run the shower and say things about your body into a coffee can. Birth is wrong about people.
DEATH POEM FOLLOWED BY A POEM ABOUT DEATH
We play rock paper scissors to see who gets the gun. I’ve already pointed my hand at your stomach and I’ve already apologized like a fever for saying that your prophets needed headache medicine. Jesus was looking for his sister. He was on the cross and his father got the day wrong. The problem with pain is that it knows when to stop. A friend lifts the baby and says I don’t know what you’ve been feeding this thing. It has more memories than god.
BLACK MOUSE MACHINE
(for Mark Lanegan)
Snow grief
and star
grief
so rarely
die
during the removal
of thunder's
stomach
that I thought
twice
and killed
with no help
from god
a red
fly
on a blue
train
BODY MACHINE
Angels choose ghosts for god. I’m lonely when you’re here and not when you’re not. For emphasis, don’t read this if you’re not my brother. If you are, don’t read this aloud. I’ve never been to a strange place. My son writes a story about a cannibal eating the mother of the antichrist. I want to fix the devil. The story goes deeper than I want it to. I drink all day. My sons are alive. My sons tell me they can be alive in their sleep. I want to test god. I give a pill to Adam and he waits for my signal. When Adam dies, he dies thinking his stomach is where it should be. My longing isn’t ready.
NOSTALGIA FOR THE VOID MACHINE
No one can dream about god. Water can’t be touched. Time makes itself into a seed that grief never plants. Death fails as a garden but not as death. Cheekbone, ransom, kneecap. I was sick for awhile and now want to love things.
FIRST MACHINE
I seashell myself into the wreckage of the angel’s elbow. Death’s memory and god’s memory are switched at birth. I lie to my mom. There’s a pill that makes me not take pills.
