Featured Poet: Jeffrey Gustavson
Jeffrey Gustavson is the author of Nervous Forces (Alef Books), and has published poems and stories in Agni, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Canto, Epiphany, Fence, The Fiddlehead, Grand Street, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other magazines, and in the online journals Forget, Plume, and Silence. He is a recipient of an N.E.A. grant, which he used for a residency at the Montana Artists Refuge. His art works have been exhibited at The Myrna Loy, in Helena, Montana; in the Footfalls series, in Greenport, N.Y.; at Lincoln Center, in New York City; and at The Shed, in Brooklyn, N.Y.
An Introduction by Martin Edmunds:
I’ve taken keen pleasure for decades in Jeffrey Gustavson’s work, and still cannot anticipate his next choice of subject, stance, form. Here you’ll find poems in his own voice, euphoric ekphrastics, dramatic monologues (others have been staged in New York), dictions high, low, mixed (“Yeah, he’s seen the conquered gods in chains”). It’s inspiring how much work a single phrase or word can do here, common or uncommon, as does that “yeah,” or cyanide used to “canker” a carved mask. Read these twice, you may stop believing in the myth of synonyms.
There’s plenty of stuff in these poems (slickenside plinths, iodine, Chornobyl slag, chlorophyll, tornadoes, Bura squalls) to impress and drench the page with our elemental globe; they’re built to bear its weight, and wear its atmospheres against their skin. Embodied by their words, these speakers inhabit a world of feeling as well as emotion. The lasting achievement here is not simply the panoply of this choir-cum-tumult, but what comes, clarified, through it — the irreplaceable grain of the author’s voice.
I greatly admire the patience of “Dream Job,” the trust in its slow deepening, darkening; and hail “Two Strange Trees” for sentencing that knocks rust off the mind, for its superb intransigent reserve, for exploring the tautening astringencies of the 3x3x3 form Gustavson has pioneered, for the sculptural cut of its lines.
I love the verve of the swerves in the ekphrastic poems, their sprezzatura even while playing or struggling in our polyglot world with the rudiments of another tongue. Hijinks of all stripes. Our funniest poet since Berryman? He can slapstick you to laughter, undercut your reader’s armchair comfort with a bonesaw. This lyric-master teller of tales keeps pace with Twain and Waits. A quintessential American original. Who would turn away from peering over his shoulder through the flaming windows of the sorcerer’s house in “Calentura”? — a made man in his barrio, “a brujo now, by his errors or his arts.” (Could Prospero have put that phrase any better?) If a gambit seems far-fetched, wait — the poem may end up deep in the internal weather of our lived nights and days. What true brujo hasn’t gone out on a limb, only to chop it off — the better to prove he can fly? How not follow the painter’s assessing gaze in his self-portrait, “Lo Schizzo” — posturing, capering till his offhand, casual observation catches us out and turns the poem inward.
Auden wrote, “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” In Gustavson’s case, that love has been lavishly requited.
