The
poetry of Jim McCrary is brief, watchful and alert, and is
also involved with those senses of portability that allow
a referential "carrying across" in the language
to a location of common function. The primary effort in McCrary's
work is toward a balance of ethos and pathos, perpetually
(re)discovered as a place. Yet place is a source
of, and site for, confusion, since it is a presence time moves
through, which therefore changes everything. It is in this
area, where time disturbs all places of being "at rest"
that McCrary takes his stance, which is, itself, always in
motion. It is this perpetual motion that gives to McCrary's
essentially simple work an astonishing degree of complexity:
This is the time that tries me
as often as sun up
not even a bite to eat
solves the older problem
that loose dreams create
if ever I could I would
certainly
adjust both
position and habit
although sore shoulders never
have any answer connected
Let's just say
leaning back
bending over or
jumping up and down
fuck it
and go along
wishing like spit for another day
like this
lacking in its totality.
To be frank, none of this is worth repeating.
(dive,
she said)
There
is often the sense in McCrary's work that he is talking about
one thing while meaning another in order to register time's
passage, while at the same time staying (1) "in the moving
moment" and (2) in the moment that ignited his wanting
to stay with what continues to move (the "past").
The effect is one of a continual argument for a defining "place"
that is impossible to come by and/or stay with. In that sense,
many of his poems take on the quality of dialog, as if he
were talking to himself from two different positions, which,
curiously, not only give the poems density, but are also the
source of their singulaity, one voice interrogating the other.
It is as if the pathos in the work prefered to stay
with the moment that excited it, while the ethos
of the work demands that the work coil up and out of the selfsame
initiatory instant, always at the ready for the next of it.
The conflictual nature of this dialog is to the cognitive
end of possibly "overthrowing" the position of The
Person (the central narrating figure) in the maze which the
dialog forms, so that the maze itself becomes the central
- and questioning - voice. This is McCrary's ethos;
comprehending the literal position in which to discover what
one is honestly capable of saying ("truth"), while
his pathos is what gives cause to it, staying with a common
depth of feeling; staying with what moves; i.e., he seems
to be always questioning what fact of function poeisis might
at any instant touch, as it moves around the cycle
(with at times sarcastic humor) from an end to the beginning
of new means:
A. If I wait long enough what comes?
B. 6:50 Santa Fe - westbound and late.
A. That's it?
B. That's real.
A. Yeh, but what about the clouds, for instance?
B. Ever see a cloud stop a GE 24000 hp diesel
doing 60 between Eudora and Lawrence?
A. You can't answer a question with a question. See Bradshaw.
B. Bradshaw! The guy who put the art of mobile making back
500 years?
A. You did it again.
B. What?
A. I give up.
B. Good start
[West of Mass, p. 67]
For
McCrary, place remains underfoot only insofar as it equally
remains "talking" in addition to "seeing",
in the cross between what one can get themselves in the position
of "knowing" and what one can get themselves in
the position of "saying", as if there were only
this schizoid consciousness that could eventually lead down
to the sense in which both of these positions composed the
single instant through which person, place, thing and time
all burn "with a like heat" as they pass for
the present moment in the present moment, in which there is,
finally, nothing but the graininess and particularity of a
resonance that is very like a homing instinct, a
means of tuning into where you are and making such
position true in the language, simply by depicting
all the confusion it takes to get there and remain there,
leaving it always for more of the same. For McCrary, nothing
is final, but for the further instances of stepping out into
each next moment, in order that he add the complexity of his
own insistence to what otherwise is barely there:
THE EARTH REALLY IS ROUND, ISN'T IT?
To some adding another leaf is to spend
all season waiting
what falls is already done
where it lands is over before
gravity assumes any importance
what the stick drops
I pick up and never will
discover a reason
all of which points to
lives put down
the old solution
what to do with process
if it is all a matter of fact
then why bother trying to prove
anything ever is caught
riding a bus doesn't free the sight
we're all moving toward something
and if I can see straight
I'm just fooling myself.
There ain't no straight
it's all flush.