Out of Memory

Against Information and Other Poems, by John Lane, New Native Press, 1995, ISBN: 1-883197-06-6, $7.95, PO Box 661, Cullowhee NC 28723 (704-293-9237).

I like the little things a good poet does with language, little things that announce a big talent in the case of this poet, John Lane. Here are two lines from "Six Words Off a Postcard by Nin Andrews”:

Below the surface, soil is warm, intimate

I’d say. Even as a worm I’d expect more....

We get here some wonderful appreciation of the rime of vowels played off each other to create combinations as pleasant as they are appropriate: “soil” and “warm” to create a rime with “worm”; the sharp crisp syllabic rush of “intimate” played off against the three syllable run of “expect more” that creates another rime of sound and feeling. Well, he does these things, and he does them with an awareness of music and who music serves and why.

Another poem, “Hammered Leaves,” ends this way:

War is an intricate state of being, but the hammered leaves

of the craftsman are a private combat, carved over and over

by the old artist. He dies, but not in service of the palace.

Without rancor but with the sureness necessary by a poet who knows where real inspiration comes from and to where the poems go out, he indicts the NEA culture bureaucrats and the poets lined up in rows to suck at the federal teat.

“Against Information,” the strongest poem in the collection, may become as notorious as Antler’s “Factory.” I hope so. In a time when poets run in fear of content, especially the content sustaining the language we all live by, Lane’s fearless celebration of the materials of words, a lover=s embrace to keep language alive to meaning, is a sign of hope and a cause for celebration. But the other poems in the collection are also celebratory. I’d buy the book for their grace, wit, and commitment, keeping the poetic voice alive to value and meaning and humor as well as righteous anger.

We live in an information overload designed to drive us all out of our minds and bodies and into a hyper-space of no memory of the past and no desire for a utopian future. Our constant collective fear is the message from the computer: insufficient memory. The solution is, as it always is: Buy More, Consume. Our most pathetic and petty president, the man who bankrupted the country with our blessing, shares with us his Alzheimer’s Disease, our collective fate we embrace because being cowards is preferable to being citizens. Like William Carlos Williams said, “The way of the world is stupid and obscure and must be so to fit man’s intelligence. Therefore, we love show and hate the truth.” I fear that Lane speaks too much truth and will remain too little known. We need him. If a genuine culture exists outside the wreckage of the Know Nothings we have elected to abuse us, then it will exist because of our efforts to support the courage, vision, and faith that sustains this new press: New Native, with eight titles published so far. Rather than whine to a congress for a penny’s return for the dollars we send them, send the dollars to New Native. A real culture may be possible.

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