Uselysses

by Noel Black

Poetry. Uselysses contains five discrete books of poems written over the last four years. Some of these are poems of experience. Others are night raids or open attacks on the reserves of meaning that, we're almost convinced, derive from properly appreciated experience; meanings we back on faith so we can keep having meaningful experiences in the future. As a radical questioner of such faiths, Noel Black subjects his own skepticism to sufficient pressure to line a mine with prodigal kindness or absolute contempt, depending on the company. Most vital to the reader, his voice is clear throughout, natural, and the poems are fun to read over again. A peerless comic poet, Black's poems have appeared widely, but few of the poems in this book have been published anywhere until now. Uselysses is Noel Black's first full-length book of poetry. "If he had written only the astonishing long poem, 'Prophesies of the Past', that concludes his book, Noel Black would have a huge heap of laurels to rest on, for it is the sort of reading experience they must have invented poetry for it flings one into a state of complete exultation. But Uselysses offers more than mere perfection. It is a Rube Goldberg contraption of highs and lows, pains and pleasures, built by a man committed to family and experiment in equal measure. Like Goldberg, Black knows how to disguise the real with the gloss of the zany, and his energy could push this riverboat up the side of a cliff. 'Sometimes I feel genuinely happy', he writes, and you will too" Kevin Killian."

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2011

Reviews

[Vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I noticed this great title from the Bomblog feed while I was boredly scrolling my Google Reader, in bed, on a night after hanging out with my friend James Joyce, discussing his name as an English teacher and as a writer, and the book review included an excerpt that resonates with how he and I would think about some people who think about poetry—

One thing I hate about poetry is the stately voice
you imagine while writing, as though you’re
standing at a lectern in a distinguished auditorium
on a university campus in a quaint mid-western town
in front of hundreds of intelligent and thoughtful people
who actually give a shit. (25)

That tone of self-awareness and anti-pretentiousness comes up often in this book, so reading this in one sitting probably has this ok-this-is-too-aware feeling, but still, with Noel Black, it's like, he's conversational and concrete and also fresh, so it's cool. I love the images like a banana jawline and how Black wonders if anyone else speeding eastward on I-80 has ever thought of the highway as Walt Whitman's dead gray tongue (33). I like how his mind takes the kind of tangents that lets him imagine having a moustache as his super power, how the moustache could sweep away crime, lol.

In the "8 Dead Poets" poem, the one for Emily Dickinson really cheered me up—

Death kindly stopped
& on She—hopped (18)

and the long poem at the end of this book, "Prophecies for the Past", is this zuithitsu that takes the risk of being personal. I appreciate that Noel Black doesn't hold back these images: being a child and putting his mom's dildo in a roller skate and pushing it out into the living room where she was having tea with a psychologist named Bruce who will later go by David (102), when his friend borrowed a banana to prove his boner was as big as a banana and afterward, being unsure of what to do with the banana, so putting the banana back in the bowl (lolol, 104), and a very cringe-y part is when he went down on a girl in a hide-a-bed and didn't know she was on her period until he went into the kitchen for a Tab Diet Cola and everyone laughed and he still went for the Tab (aw, 102). I like the part about being high and paranoid in a Toyota Camry, believing he was smuggling cocaine across the country like in a film I haven't seen (Easy Rider) but will now check out to know what it looks like.

I think his mom is a lesbian and his dad was gay with HIV, so the poem ends—

Six years later, you'll be at the coffee shop in the Tucson airport where you'll stare at the plastic-wrapped row of Hustlers on the magazine rack while your father tries to tell you he has HIV.

The tabletops will be orange Formica.

You'll already know because your mother will have told you a year earlier.

You'll just want him to say it.

But he won't say it.

Why won't he just say it?

You'll wish he would just say it.

That's when you'll think about the blood all over your face, and that Tab Diet Cola, and all the years of silence and forgetting. You'll wish you could make sense of any of it, rearrange the memories.

But you won't have time for anything more than these shapeless thumbnails.

Stick it in the time machine and set the date:

September 2, 1972.

--------------

^Hey that's my birthday. I feel inspired to write shapeless thumbnails on September 2, 2012.

p.s. I really like how the title on the cover is in different-colored letters, and I really like the girl carrying a wolf but I wish the face wasn't smudged out. Was that intentional? I guess it doesn't matter but I still wish the face wasn't smudged.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was almost interesting, as an expression of the poet's relationship to poetry. A craft talk or artist's statement.

But the speaker retreated from his moments of thoughtfulness to hide behind conspicuous (but not descriptive) pop references, sex object and dildo anecdotes, literary (joke) figures, stories of his gay dad, and saying that poems are hard to write and not that powerful. I thought it might be using those cliches to get somewhere, but I was disappointed.

UDP did a fabulous production job. Maybe I'll hang the cover up as art.

[Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

This made me want to write! At first the poet's self awareness in the poem was charming, caught me off guard: as I got further along it started to annoy me, but then he added other things in which made it fresh again. Great read. Oftentimes funny, a very "interesting brain" as a blurb by a poet on the back says.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chatty and amiable, Black really writes prose cut into short lines and called poetry. The best piece is the (I assume) autobiographical "Prophecies for the Past," which seems the least affected of all the other works collected here, at least after the string of mash-ups (i.e., "George Sandman"), which just don't work.

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last poem. Wowza.

[Dustin Kurtz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wild variance in the quality of these poems. Still, some are very worth reading.