|
Carrie Berry reviews three books of poetry by John Kilroy The cleanest interface for John's books exists on the website for his publishing company, Chrome Press. The cover photos are linked. At Chrome Press, we believe poetry can rearrange your molecules. Poetry is star travel and genetic engineering—distance and DNA. You'll never step into a larger room than a poem on a page. The text for the site captures his spirit as a poet. There are samples of poems for each of the volumes and links to purchase volumes printed by the current press. Here are my thoughts on each of the volumes. I've never been great at literary critique but I'll share how they make me feel.
TORQUE In his third appearance in Fandango Virtual's iguanaland, CyberClem revealed his real life persona as the editor of a performance racing magazine. His third person bio explained how the poet in him evolved. He wrote about early attempts at writing a novel.
That was early in 2000. True to his word and his plan, he produced the first edition of TORQUE two years later. The copy he sent me felt huge in my hands. We moved into this house in November of 2020 and there are still boxes of books that have never been unpacked. I finally gave up looking for the original and purchased a new one from Amazon. While described as "an aggressive beast of a book" at 316 pages, the new volume seems smaller at 5x8 inches and is only 305 pages. It is still a beast of a book.
The blurb for the first edition on goodreads says:
My happy introduction to the poet was as CyberClem on AOL's poetry boards and that's who he continued to be for the next five years. He may have been 'just Clem' before he went online—It would be so nice to be able to ask him! My only real objection to this description (probably written by him) is that it defines a fairly narrow target audience given the power of the poems. I'm sure his audience will include those who love cars and women and possibly some who like poems. :) Old conversations with CyberClem bemoaned the fact that poetry was lost to most readers, even other poets. He and I lived in opposite regions of California with clearly different cultures. Moving to Scotland in 1997 (to live with another poet I met in 1996) presented still another cultural immersion. But whether I was an electronics production manager or a legal secretary, an empty-nest mother or depressed wife, in the SF Bay Area or Scotland, I was still driven by the same need to find beauty in everyday things, to understand pain and to learn what made me tick. John's poetry isn't beat or gonzo, though there are elements of both. He has the uncanny ability to don the voices and skins of so many real people and make you believe the ups and downs of their worlds.
In the early days of our friendship (1995) CyberClem said, "Wouldn't it be great if we could all meet somewhere in a bar once a month?" I went with that inspiration and borrowed the name "iguanaland" from one of his poems under the knife in the AOL poetry workshop where we met. I can't remember which one it was after he changed the title. A different poem ("half a something ain't nothin") graced the simple first edition that was dedicated to him. In the third edition there was an interview with captain america (so named for the photo of the poet in racing leathers) in which he talked about his feelings about the poetry scene at the time. That issue also included a group of his poems we decided to call a race with the wind featuring: "Lord Bull's" In the above mentioned fifth edition of iguanaland, the feature john kilroy, the poet evolves shared a bounty of intense poems:
"Peachfire" John contributed one more poem in my Scotland venture, Bonfire, that encouraged poets to offer commentary about the poems they had written. This poem, "my fabled atomizer" and the eleven listed above are all included in TORQUE.
I have been exposed to the poetry of John Kilroy (the poet always known to me as CyberClem) over a number of years, so I cannot speak to the experience of opening this book as a new reader. I found myself skipping around in it, flipping the pages back and forth and reading one or two at a time. It would take quite a leap of faith to start at the beginning and read straight through. I have done it, but I was already wearing John-Kilroy-colored glasses when I did. Read John's article about writing "my fabled atomizer" in the link above and you'll get a better idea of how faith comes to play. As he says,
I highly recommend the experience however you go about it.
During the pandemic my husband and I reduced our wordly store of goods and moved to the country. Yet another new server gave me the idea to revive an archive of Fandango Virtual. The Bonfire files required only minimal tweaking and transferred beautifully.
PROOF OF FLIGHT goodreads says:
There was no doubt in my mind that a new and final iguanaland would feature CyberClem. It was fun pulling together the historical files and putting them into a form that could be read by modern devices. I did a quick google search for "John Kilroy poet" that immediately brought up this book (PROOF OF FLIGHT) and TORQUE on Amazon. I bought both books and a used copy of ZERO BREAK-AN ILLUSTRATED COLLECTION OF SURF WRITING, 1777-2004. I was so happy to find he had published again and looked for a way to get in touch with him to let him know what I was doing.
The next search sadly uncovered various versions of his obituary and a couple of articles and reviews on goodreads by his son, Jake. And one more book, POINT B. This news was a real gut punch. It was nice to have the perspective of his son, though. In our past conversations John and I had shared very little personal information outside of the poetry itself. I knew he had a great wife and 3 kids and he knew I had two grown kids with families in California. He met my new husband the same time I did in my poetry forum. After John shared his real name and broader details of course I looked him up, but knowing what he was doing when he wasn't poeting didn't change anything. He was still a brilliant poet with his finger on the pulse. By the time TORQUE was published I was dealing with my own health issues and we lost touch. Now, reading about him filtered through his son's perspective gave the poems a slightly different edge; a burnishment so to speak. Basically, it was the response of a member of his readership and proof that "Poetry is star travel and genetic engineering—distance and DNA."
The books arrived and I found it impossible to get past the grief to read them. I stacked them various ways and thumbed through the pages trying to find some lead in. I continued to work on sorting out the html for the iguanaland edition but whenever I got to the part about the books, I hit a brick wall. Now I can procrastinate very well—it is one of my prime skills. I finally disconnected myself from social media to concentrate on the task—and promptly filled my days with word games instead.
Surprisingly (and over a year later) it was ZERO BREAK that solved the problem. Now that tome is a REAL beast of a book—so big I had put it in another room to keep from injuring myself! I was doing a word search game and came across Hellespont. I remembered reading about someone sending a postcard for a college application showing them jumping "Childe Harold-like into the Hellespont." Hang on, I thought, isn't Byron one of the poets in ZERO BREAK? I hauled it out and read "Wave for Mickey Dora". I know virtually nothing about surfing but I had a browse through the book and saw the picture of Miki Dora, so read about him online. I never did get back to the Byron bit but I did feel drawn into the pages. I then picked up TORQUE remembering that was one of the poems. I can see why John was proud of that inclusion and why it gets mentioned with every one of his books.
Once I read that poem, I was able to complete the review of the first of the three books and made the decision to group them together in one file. I loved the way the TORQUE cover came up on the page like it was rising out of the clouds. The goodreads blurb on PROOF OF FLIGHT was thinner, as was the book by about 70 pages. I opened it and read the dedication:
I normally don't read from printed books because I have trouble with my vision. I didn't have a kindle copy, so I cranked up my lamp and pulled the book close to my face. I started reading How The Asphalt Can Dream You Up and without realising it found myself on page 133 with the poem "Apricots" starting the section Wrongly Enchanted We. I had read the poems straight through as if they were a novella. And you know, John, they kind of were. A day to soak it all in then I read the rest.
PROOF OF FLIGHT has much of the same intensely rich metaphor and imagery as TORQUE but this collection has a slightly different vibe. I got the feeling of an odyssey, but not in the Homeric sense. Instead it was more of lifetime flashing before one's eyes cyclically like an ouroboros with projections of life, death and rebirth—lather, rinse, repeat. Some of the poems seem a bit more grounded with a stronger connection with the author as poet. Yes, he is still stepping into skins, but some of them are clearly his own.
There were more poems in this book with themes relating to my own life and literary experiences. Even with many surreal elements, there was a maturity I could connect to—maybe an age thing or just that our grids were more aligned—you inevitably reach a point in life when there is more philosophy interspersed with spirituality.
In this round he begins to break the wall and talk to the reader. There are several transactional interchanges.
In "Geometry of Perfect" he writes:
In one of my favorites, "Afloat On A Window", a prose poem blessed by a little Federico García Lorca inspiration, he writes:
One of the most striking offerings is "Essay: Reverse Rotation Engine." I remembered an earlier version of this in Avatar Review about the same time TORQUE came out. I didn't find it right away because it was published under the name of Clem Kilroy. The original version was personal commentary on an actual event involving Stan Fox's experience with Smokey Yunick's legendary reverse rotation engine. He was comparing this unusual motor racing event to how poetry should be approached. He presented the concept of Profound Fun (his capitals) but didn't explain it. He talked about what he owed to his children and the world and introduced the brilliant image of the tiger in the bush:
Revising the essay for PROOF OF FLIGHT John took the same text and streamlined many of the sentences, adding a few more and in some cases reducing them to fragments. These are separated by bullet points that force you to read it as a stream of consciousness narrative. There were a couple of times when I thought, "I'll have some of what you're having, John." The following section has some fragments left out:
That link allowed me to revisit some other work in those twenty-year old files including an excellent review of TORQUE. Quite interesting was a couple of prose poems which had been given a transfusion of magic lifting them into their much better versions in PROOF OF FLIGHT. "Afloat On A Window," for example, was originally "Immigrants Ride Windows"—the character Janice became Muriel and was joined by Tatiana and the Poet who engineered a much better ending. "Only. Merely. Mostly."
Where How The Asphalt Can Dream You Up is the skeleton of a novel (or a manual for rotating tires on a unicycle or a map of the solar system), Wrongly Enchanted We is a cupboard in a log cabin stacked high with every puzzle, game and broken toy you've ever owned. And a mirror.
His love for playing with words is evident everywhere. Take the poem called "Why Poetry Bounces Off Old Guys (To Be Read From The Bottom Up)". In the first pass through the book I read it that way. (I always do what I am told—NOT!) Later I went back to read it top down and delighted at how well it was engineered.
The poem "Rectangle" is a precise rectangle of words. Is there a code to be broken? A poem to reconstruct? A box of leftover words? I've revisited it a few times. One thing for certain is that line 9 is made up of the words: wrongly enchanted we.
Another poem (imaginatively called "Famous Two Poems Shuffled") is two poems shuffled. It must be famous.
"Teeth Guards At Night" is one of the poems linked at Chrome Press. Read it and you will find about 20 lines into part 2, the source imagery for the title of this book.
POINT B goodreads says:
Everywhere POINT B is listed has some version of the above blurb. If you were lucky enough to have read the first two, why not read the third? Even on Chrome Press they say,
And then they do. I won't, but do go and read it yourself. He signs it,
Love & Profound Fun, John
The jolly wee bit of text wrapped around the corner of the book is an extension of the entire back cover that shows an angled page filled with the words PROFOUND FUN! repeated in a multitude of colors and patterns and separated with the same bullet points that accompanied the stream of consciousness narrative in PROOF OF FLIGHT.
Back to Chrome Press, they say,
In between reading the poems I spent some time investigating where my brain was taking me; trying to find answers to that challenge. Earlier this year I read a book by Douglas Hofstadter called Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. I promise not to go into that in any depth, but in this masterpiece were interwoven tales of Achilles and the Tortoise, illustrating the concept of Zeno's paradoxes, including the dichotomy of never getting from Point A to Point B. In the arrow paradox, Zeno states that for motion to occur, an object must change the position which it occupies. He gives an example of an arrow in flight. He states that at any one (durationless) instant of time, the arrow is neither moving to where it is, nor to where it is not. It cannot move to where it is not, because no time elapses for it to move there; it cannot move to where it is, because it is already there. (Wikipedia)
That made me think of the Arrowverse which in turn reminded me of these lines from "Flash" In PROOF OF FLIGHT:
At this point (B?) I realised the insidious paradox of Profound Fun. How do we love thee, John Kilroy? I shall but love thee better after death. Impossible.
Meanwhile, I discovered a set of 6 videos on YouTube called Old Guy Poet — John Kilroy. It was meant to be seven but the last one was 'postponed' because he lost his voice. The series was recorded just after POINT B was released in the summer of 2021 two months before he died. I was in tears the first time I listened to one of these and I had to go back several times to experience all of them. I was torn about whether to mention them here, but the fifth one includes three poems from POINT B. The first is "PET Scan" and deals with his prognosis. He says, "there's no better way to approach the subject and really get to kind of the soul of the experience than poetry." He follows with a poem that is a delightful image of a childhood memory, illustrating the range of this book. I will not be providing a link—those who know and love John will find it. "PETscan" and "Center of the Earth" are both available to read on Chrome Press.
In the third video John answers the question: Why Poetry? He describes "a critical tool if we're to ever understand a world that so often extends beyond words." He also shares three more poems from TORQUE, The text is well worth the read and can be found on Chrome Press
When I first saw these videos it was strange to listen to my old friend apologising for being old before reading a poem he wrote when he was young. The more I listened, though, the more I realised what a 'John Kilroy thing' he was doing. Literally weeks away from his exit and he is still proselytizing about the importance, potential and value of poetry in the world.
I have been in and out of these books for weeks. When I imagine them, the individual books are separate volumes in boxed sets. Six books lined up on the shelf. Is there a favorite? Depends on which I am reading at the moment.
According to John,
The three books serve as a trilogy to provide an experience of immense, profound fun. We suggest they be read in order: TORQUE, PROOF OF FLIGHT and POINT B. I agree.
© Carrie Berry |
| [ ¡fandango virtual! | iguanaland | fv books ] |
