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Talkativeness
Talkativeness is yet another uncanny whistling choir in a reflective and engaging world all Craig’s own.
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Paperback
First published April 8, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 7, 2015
I loved this irreverent book of … is it poetry? It is inventive and anarchistic and fun and funny and may indeed be a spoof of the poetry establishment… but it is also in its way great writing, poetry or not. I would csall it absurdist poetry, but it is alive as any language use I have encountered recently. Craig, the book jacket tells me, is a "certified journeyman farrier and lives near Livingston, Montana," and this may or may not be true, as with all of the subjects of his poems with their great titles: Quick Sketch of a Bullet, Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, What Will I call This Poem, Wild For the Lord (which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Lord or wildness), Everything we Know About Ants We Knew by 1976, I am Examining a Small Crumb, and what might be useful for "getting" him: a long sequence called "You See Where I Am Heading"… which makes it clear the neither you nor he knows where he is heading. Or, alternately: he sure as hell knows where he is going and it shouldn't matter where he takes you because you will be pleased! And I love that, I smiled or laughed aloud on every page, I really did.
Think: Dreams, Bukowski, William Burroughs, surrealism and funny… and also, the writing often contains the kind of surprising juxtapositions we look for in any great and refreshing poetry. I am not a Poet or Professor of Poetry so I have no stake in what this writing is called or how it gets categorized. I am reading, besides this crazy book, Luis Urrea's The Tijuana Book of the Dead, which is a passionate and populist cry against the abuse and abandonment of children in our Tea Party times, and Linda Bierd's collection of refined establishment lyric poetry, Roget's Illusion. Most people in creative programs would dislike Urrea's and Craig's books and dismiss them as something less than what the establishment demands, which is what Bierds is recognized for, nominated as it was for the National Book Award, (and it is deserving, in my opinion). As with folks like Bukowski, who is a kind of joke to them, too, but wth, I like Craig's book as much in its way as these other books of poetry I am reading. This is good and refreshing and irreverent. I got it out of the library but I am ordering it now. Loved it.
Think: Dreams, Bukowski, William Burroughs, surrealism and funny… and also, the writing often contains the kind of surprising juxtapositions we look for in any great and refreshing poetry. I am not a Poet or Professor of Poetry so I have no stake in what this writing is called or how it gets categorized. I am reading, besides this crazy book, Luis Urrea's The Tijuana Book of the Dead, which is a passionate and populist cry against the abuse and abandonment of children in our Tea Party times, and Linda Bierd's collection of refined establishment lyric poetry, Roget's Illusion. Most people in creative programs would dislike Urrea's and Craig's books and dismiss them as something less than what the establishment demands, which is what Bierds is recognized for, nominated as it was for the National Book Award, (and it is deserving, in my opinion). As with folks like Bukowski, who is a kind of joke to them, too, but wth, I like Craig's book as much in its way as these other books of poetry I am reading. This is good and refreshing and irreverent. I got it out of the library but I am ordering it now. Loved it.
March 4, 2015
IDEA FOR A SCREENPLAY*
A man sits on his porch and reads aloud to the yard, to some plants and to some birds, his feelings of paranoia, anger and jealousy beginning to lift.
One small bird in particular hops back and forth excitedly to his syllables. The man, continuing to read, watches the bird carefully, for a very long time. The man begins to think that both (A), the bird comprehends nothing in his text, in fact the bird cannot hear him at all, but simply is naturally happy and would hop excitedly about whether the man sat reading to him or not, and also (B), each syllable penetrates the bird in the most inexplicable manner.
* Story takes place in St. Louis sometime in the spring of 1997. Film will have no soundtrack to speak of, and no stars… actors playing both man and bird will be unknowns. Shot in black and white, hand-held super 8. Running time: approx. 257 minutes.
-by Michael Earl Craig-
A man sits on his porch and reads aloud to the yard, to some plants and to some birds, his feelings of paranoia, anger and jealousy beginning to lift.
One small bird in particular hops back and forth excitedly to his syllables. The man, continuing to read, watches the bird carefully, for a very long time. The man begins to think that both (A), the bird comprehends nothing in his text, in fact the bird cannot hear him at all, but simply is naturally happy and would hop excitedly about whether the man sat reading to him or not, and also (B), each syllable penetrates the bird in the most inexplicable manner.
* Story takes place in St. Louis sometime in the spring of 1997. Film will have no soundtrack to speak of, and no stars… actors playing both man and bird will be unknowns. Shot in black and white, hand-held super 8. Running time: approx. 257 minutes.
-by Michael Earl Craig-
June 24, 2014
FLOWERS THAT STRANGLE
May 9, 2021
Unusual poems. I enjoyed them, a clear description of your imagination’s interpretation of an ordinary experience intertwining with unrelated words and ideas.
My favorites were Winter, From the Couch & Night Nurse.
My favorites were Winter, From the Couch & Night Nurse.
December 22, 2021
Changed my brain for a bit. Can’t wait to re-read.
March 1, 2022
A new all-time favourite for me...
One of those rare poetry books that should be recommended both to people who read a lot of poetry books and people who never read poetry books.
One of those rare poetry books that should be recommended both to people who read a lot of poetry books and people who never read poetry books.
August 11, 2024
kind of poetry that makes me want to write
will be returning to this
will be returning to this
July 6, 2025
Fire, one of the best poetry books I’ve ever read
October 23, 2016
The poems included here are not necessarily always straightforward, exactly--sometimes far from it--but they generally progress in a frustratingly even manner, in one speed and one direction. True, a couple feature that time-honored device of taking a sharp turn in the last line or stanza, in order to re-contextualize what came before, but even that is a familiar enough trope from elsewhere that it barely registers as a shift of mode here; besides, this sort of "experimentation" is abandoned early for the earlier-mentioned approach that dominates here. (Another technique fortunately not appearing much beyond the first handful of poems was the cloying use of first person plural and second person singular designed for a cheap, unearned feeling of inclusivity for poems that in their writing feel as if not at all designed to connect with readers, only their writer.) That familiarity is another drawback of the poems here; the references--be they to literature or other art forms--seem like obvious reaches for staying power but only succeed in making the work seem derivative.
Largely because of the studied regularity of the poems, I was most pleased by the occasional (too occasional) parentheticals, bracketed phrases, and footnotes that made appearances in some of the poems. Often, these were deployed in unique places that one wouldn't expect them, or were on their own merits clever or pleasingly worded, and even when the content fell into neither of those categories, they served as extremely effective interruptions, breaks in the reading of a poem in a way that Craig was unsuccessful in achieving by his use of either punctuation or stanza and section breaks. Many of his other techniques were equally ineffective; his narrators make references to people by name without managing to imbue any sense of mystery or wonder as to who they are, and narrators recount dreams or sleepwalking encounters without ever providing the poem with the truly oneiric sense that comes from a properly poetic depiction of dream-logic. There are other times when you can recognize what Craig is referring to, but his phrasing feels somehow off, or at least to fall short of a perfect match, whereas one typically expects and hopes for a writer to more perfectly capture such recognizable moments.
There are a few standout poems here, mostly sharing a certain focused and subdued quality that makes their directness read less tritely. In approximately descending order of quality, they are "Brief Speech," "Novella," "Wild for the Lord," and the first of the two poems entitled "The Desk." Even these, though, are not even memorable enough for me to remember almost any specifics less than an hour after finishing reading it; they were more bright spots by comparison to the rest, which mostly fell into that damning catch-all categorization of "fine," in this particular case meaning a combination of uninspired writing paired with unimaginative themes. There were scattered other moments that made me sit up and take note (the disjointed sentences of "Perhaps You See Where I Am Heading," its title serving as a (perhaps unintentional) sly joke about the unfinished thoughts within; the surrealness of "The Evening News"; the connections between recurring images such as rabbits, briefcases, post office, shared or common dreams), and it wasn't quite a chore to read, but I'll probably never think about any of these poems again unless I were to revisit them, and that doesn't seem likely, to say the least.
Largely because of the studied regularity of the poems, I was most pleased by the occasional (too occasional) parentheticals, bracketed phrases, and footnotes that made appearances in some of the poems. Often, these were deployed in unique places that one wouldn't expect them, or were on their own merits clever or pleasingly worded, and even when the content fell into neither of those categories, they served as extremely effective interruptions, breaks in the reading of a poem in a way that Craig was unsuccessful in achieving by his use of either punctuation or stanza and section breaks. Many of his other techniques were equally ineffective; his narrators make references to people by name without managing to imbue any sense of mystery or wonder as to who they are, and narrators recount dreams or sleepwalking encounters without ever providing the poem with the truly oneiric sense that comes from a properly poetic depiction of dream-logic. There are other times when you can recognize what Craig is referring to, but his phrasing feels somehow off, or at least to fall short of a perfect match, whereas one typically expects and hopes for a writer to more perfectly capture such recognizable moments.
There are a few standout poems here, mostly sharing a certain focused and subdued quality that makes their directness read less tritely. In approximately descending order of quality, they are "Brief Speech," "Novella," "Wild for the Lord," and the first of the two poems entitled "The Desk." Even these, though, are not even memorable enough for me to remember almost any specifics less than an hour after finishing reading it; they were more bright spots by comparison to the rest, which mostly fell into that damning catch-all categorization of "fine," in this particular case meaning a combination of uninspired writing paired with unimaginative themes. There were scattered other moments that made me sit up and take note (the disjointed sentences of "Perhaps You See Where I Am Heading," its title serving as a (perhaps unintentional) sly joke about the unfinished thoughts within; the surrealness of "The Evening News"; the connections between recurring images such as rabbits, briefcases, post office, shared or common dreams), and it wasn't quite a chore to read, but I'll probably never think about any of these poems again unless I were to revisit them, and that doesn't seem likely, to say the least.
May 29, 2014
Part uncanny dream, part riddle, part funny, part heartbreaking. Good poems, overall, and I think I agree with what my friend Matt said of Craig: "he's less pretentious than other Wave poets."
April 16, 2019
Redacted with apologies.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews