Even
in his early work, Jim McCrary’s minimalist poems display
a strong “sense of place.” This is not the “sense
of place” popularized by Eudora Welty. Her “sense
of place” is a technique of ontological heightening
which uses concrete descriptions and specific details to establish
bridges to values, beliefs, and ideas of reality that characterized
the post-bellum South.
Instead,
Jim McCrary’s sense of place is a process of becoming,
or, conversely of “unbecoming.” This is not the
same as disintegration or deconstruction. This is simply to
say that the sense of “place” is a manifestation
of a mindset that brings the reader to a sense of placement
in being and time. The “unbecoming” is a poetics
of “ur-place” where McCrary manipulates and dislocates
referents in order to liberate text from its denotative meanings.
In
Hotter than and now, McCrary’s ambiguities
of self problematize authority and, thus, the point at which
we begin or end the meaning-making process:
Dog is
Scrambled
Walking out
Of a
Mirage
Ambiguities
abound. Illusions take the place of the corporeal, tangible,
tactile flesh. The beingness that can be said to have at least
a connotative “Other” is toyed with to the point
of breakdown into Wittgensteinian play or at least conjecture.
The transactions of communication involve logos
itself, and although the reader is assumed to be able to stop
the spinning, multiphasic, multipodal perturbations of being,
McCrary’s poetics suggests ineluctable flux –
a never-ending story of ephemera, and thus, loss.
To
be deliberately obtuse is to acknowledge the ultimate intractability
of logos – that it never really means.
It primarily rests upon more or less-defined fields –
color fields, if one wishes to think in more concrete terms.
These are simply blank projecting spaces upon which our minds
force myth to unfold.
McCrary's
book My Book is, ostensibly, a chronicle of memory
and remembering. It is the phenomenological moment in time
which can be defined as “being 12 years old.”
As such, it is an exercise in anti-nostalgia, which is to
say that it takes the sentimentality one would ordinarily
associate with being 12 years old and deconstructs it to its
composite parts, less the emotions, less the affect.
The
sketches, along with photographs of a boy with dog, evoke
Middle America, but as a dream inverted. The core of what
drives nostalgia – the longing for unity with archetypal
parents (Oedipus, Electra); grieving separation and loss (Edenic,
post-lapsarian pain) – is taken away and the objects
are scattered. The resulting configurations are remarkably
like echoes-forward. They are premonitory acts of what will
be enacted
Was it play really
moving
across some battlefield
imagined
For
McCrary’s 12-year-old, what is important is not what
is now remembered. What matters is what happened outside the
field of vision:
It coulda been for real
it
coulda happened for sure
that
view
just off the edge
The
epistemology of the 12-year-old subject heightens subjectivity
about what takes place “just off the edge” of
the remembered place, whether it be a battlefield or a home.
Subjectivity
is a place of reversals in the calculus of anti-nostalgia.
The anti-nostalgia equations of the inward journey further
problematize reading.
The cliché, the travel narrative that privileges memory
(especially nostalgic memory of a past involving imagined
unity), is perhaps one of the trickiest poetics around.
To maneuver through the discourse without succumbing to the
seductions of the genre and the false constructs of innocence,
patriarchal protection, maternal sustenance and en-wombing
is certainly not a task for the unaware or logos-unawakened.
McCrary’s Mayaland foregrounds the concept
of passage and passivity. Through a series of poems containing
the phrase “being led,” McCrary explores the epistemologies
that compete for the perfect word-action sequence. He explores
language, signs, discursive space leading to action.
Lest one suspect language capable of moving one forward, propelling
one involuntarily, McCrary takes a hard step. His poetics
reintroduce the will, and a muscle-movement of volition illustrates
how consciousness relies on action:
The ‘door’ so to speak
remains either open or shut
Where there is a will.
Dive,
she said is McCrary’s staggeringly beautiful collection
of poems centered around the Central America he so dearly
loves. In them, he takes a sharp turn away from minimalism
to a more fully-developed narrative of passage and of portals.
Resonating
with the other works, the ontological energy of dive,
she said derives from the moment one decides –
again, through force of will – to identify the logos
moments that constitute portals. Once passed through the portals,
one starts to see how the transition consists of steps that
one takes to either go into a state of becoming or not. The
poem parenthetically alludes to the “unbecoming”
of myth, archetype, or reconstructed fairytale.
Deconstructed
logos turns into topos –
a place, and also a topic. The poet manipulates the vehicle
to make a point about intersections of being and perception.
In
“Potre,” McCrary expresses it this way:
Driving this “thing”
fast and fast again
blurring to the right
blurring to the left
no signs in sight
which confuse
not only
me too
McCrary
resists facile reduction to a socially constructed meaning.
The willingness to pass through a doorway to overdeterminism
is anathema to the thinking poet. A surfeith of recall leads
to an excess of regulated thinking. McCrary’s “Too
Much Recall” states
who rules
whose rule anyway
fools rule of course
“Dub
and Neva” is a long poem that evokes epistolary forms,
with all the epistolary form’s conviction that somehow,
somewhere, a conversation is possible. That fantastical conversation
would be – if attainable in the phenomenological world
– would transcend the ego stain of private language.
Parallel discourses are perhaps the most comforting in the
habits of being that McCrary evokes:
DeKooning
of course
Never said
Much
With
enactments and echoes of the aural equivalents of color fields,
McCrary demonstrates a love of logos where
logos is pure “unbecoming” and the poetic space
is a portal of both desire and un-desire.