Tonal Ellipse of the Art
They made us too late and too early.
We’re breathing the wrong air,
bleeding out in the wrong rivers.
Signifiers fall out of the sky
to mourn their clouds
saying O with their songbirds
who are dead.
O pinned to the graph
for the locus of speech,
a novel full of Os to fall through
like a fire on for eons. I am a chant
of front doors closing in the Spring.
The way the outside is one big room,
a hallway sometimes, an auditorium others.
They put a thousand horses in me
to slip through the gates. There they all are
galloping up the great trees of the night
lightning lancing down their hides
into into into into into into into
into into into into into into into
into into into into into into into
into into into into into into into
into into into into into into into
into into into into into into into
Mike Bagwell
Mike Bagwell is a form of mutual antagonism towards the sky, and a writer and software engineer in Philly. His work appears in Action Spectacle, ITERANT, Sprung Formal, Heavy Feather, HAD, Bodega, Okay Donkey, and others. He is the author of A Collision of Soul in Midair (Bottlecap), Or Else They Are Trees (El Aleph), and micros from Ghost City and Rinky Dink. Find him at mikebagwell.me, @low_gh0st, or playing dragons with his daughters.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
I think one of the masterful things about this poem is the pacing. Not to like, commit too much to the bit but it kind starts at a light trot and by the end we are in full sprint mode. I think the breathless pace and sound work of the horse imagery is just so compelling. It takes a pretty skilled poet to control the pacing that tightly through a poem.
I also think you could pretty much any line of this poem and have a banger moment. My personal favs are "I am a chant/of front doors closing in the Spring." and "galloping up the great trees of the night/lightning lancing down their hides"
Also let's talk about the ending, it’s a bit of a risk in a way but one that I think pays off. The into functions both as a heartbeat, blood bleeding into the wrong rivers, and as the horses hooves beat of a thousand horses. Beautiful beautiful ending.
Interview:
At the end of this poem, we have the "into" acting as horse hooves hitting the ground, this feels (to me at least) like kind of a risk in a poem that not everyone may get. Talk to me about why you made this choice?
I think this poem hinges on risk: it gets to this point and suddenly has to move and to move fast. I rode that need as best I could. "Into" is a perfect little iamb, two letters on each of two syllables like a horse's hooves in a gallop, constantly in motion physically and semantically. It's a Trojan horse of a word, allowing for a transformation that takes the poem and the reader into movement itself, into language, and then back to form. Shape emerges out of this repetition: the becoming-lightning, or becoming-seismographic, topographic, any-graphic. Ultimately, the repetition eclipses all. In written form, the typography emerges and I begin to think about the letters themselves: the island of the i, the rainbow n, the crossroads t, and the void o. In speech form, I focus on the rhythms of speaking and breathing, the word becoming even more absurd to the point of taking on a music and a chant of its own. This poem is from a collection called the Skypenis Poems, which pitches various personae against Lacan's Graph of Desire. There, the letter O represents the point where the Other escapes assimilation, where language fails to encapsulate and breaks. That break is actually what makes meaning possible, the flow around that void. The "into" functions to trace that movement.
I'm wondering which poets, and which veins of poetry you feel the most inspired by or called to AND which poets you think your work might be like?
I find Dara Barrois/Dixon exploring this kind of turn in her latest work. For instance, "A Triumphant Return to Fiction" from a Sprung Formal issue I was also lucky enough to be featured in as well, has a rather normal poetic flow—or at least normal to contemporary poetry—before it devolves into a huge list of synonyms for the word "hallucinogenic." It goes on just long enough to be too much, and then a little further. This kind of escape from poetics, or a shift to a new dynamic plane of poetics, is incredibly compelling. In this collection, I take a lot of influence from Berryman, Passoa, Zbigniew Herbert, and other perona poets. More generally I find a lot of inspiration in CAConrad, Tomaž Šalamun, and Kim Hyesoon, just to name a few.
Why did you choose team Taylor for this poem?
Animals! Taylor seemed to have an affinity for the becoming-animal in poetics, for the weird things that language can do at the edges of humanity and nature. Is this in the category of "send all your nature crap to Taylor?" I thought so at least.