MORNING IN AMERICA is challenging poetic work asking readers to entertain the startling possibility that the past is not, as Aristotle said, “that which has been,” but is instead that which has been lifted from the crypt to serve the purposes of the future-blind. That the past lives on in memory and inertial repetition is not news. That it has been reanimated with the help of financial steroids to enable the fossilized to lord it over the living is a 21st Century reality for this eco-conscious political poet whose anti-lyric and dialogue assemblages seek to re-dimension the range of resistance and return poetry to its avant-garde critical function.
Bombshell rainy morning. Finally had the presence of mind to go through P.J. Laska’s missive rec’d last week. O my word. Edited mss of A Milky Way Accent, by the late Bob Snyder, published by the author two years before his death.
I brewed a cup of tea and read Old Martins New Strings by Mason Dixon Trio (Joseph Barrett, P.J. Laska, Bob Snyder, 1990, Soup Bean Press) from cover to cover. Experimental in presentation, substantive as presence.
I have a few copies, PM me if you’re interested. Or email Igneuspress@gmail.com.
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In OLD MARTINS, NEW STRINGS The Mason-Dixon Trio breaks with the unvarying solo form in which poetry is published. The result is a polyphonic composition in which three West Virginia poets bring their work together around a set of common themes: love, family, region, earth. Evident throughout is the “new tuning” of the Northern West Virginia (“Norbilly”) school – a baroque maximalist style that combines class and vulgarity, the comic and the sublime.
OLD MARTINS, NEW STRINGS is “more than memory,” “terra ridentium,” “the Secret Word a-leaping, an intriguing three way mirror of contemporary American reality.”
