By Terry Trowbridge
Why
Far Too Close is a chapbook, 35 pages of poems written by Jesse Anger, published in 2014 by the Canadian small press Blasted Tree Press. It also happens to be part of the gift economy that exists in the geography of he QEW highway corridor that loops around the southern end of Lake Ontario. In 2014, I had recently to Toronto with another poet, J., for late-onset graduate school. The principal method for me to stay in contact with my friends and acquaintances was by postal mail. I would buy stickers, chapbooks, zines, cards, that would fit inside of an envelope with a single postage stamp, and mail them to people. Seldomly, one of my friends would note my return address and post mail back to me.
My friend named C., who I met at undergraduate school at Brock University, a stately institution of brutalist architecture on the Niagara end of QEW commute, has a job in the geographical center of the QEW: the Main Branch of the Hamilton Public Library in Hamilton, Ontario. C. worked as an archivist. Somehow, she came across Far Too Close and noticed it fit perfectly inside of a postal envelope. It is a bit taller than a smartphone, a little bit wider, not quite as thick. Far Too Close fits inside a flat, posted, greeting card, or into the back pocket of a pair of denim jeans. The perfect size, in fact, to be taken off of a bookshelf and used as a coaster, or a mousepad, or a straightedge ruler. Far Too Close has been versatile literature.
That is why I am reviewing it now. Ten years ago, it was a tangible exchange medium in a material gift economy, serving one of literature’s essential social functions. A decade has passed. By writing a review essay, I return Far Too Close to a different economy, one of literature, made from the marketplace of ideas, the cultural cachet of careerist CV lines of CanLit grant seekers, the long duration of print to sit in hibernation before getting refashioned into whatever discursive or intertextual textures are evoked by book reviews and response essays. An archivist sent it to my personal library, and object permanence – the metaphysical fact and the psychological phenomenon – does the rest.
Oxymorons
The title Far Too Close is an oxymoron. It might be the most abstract level of thinking through metaphor. Canadian English is full of idioms based on the idea of physical targets and meeting or missing their marks. You’ve gone too far. We’re close enough. That’s far from ideal. The title Far Too Close looks, syntactically, as if it lacks nouns for subject and object. But in fact, it is a noun phrase for a state of mind in which proximity (or accuracy) is uncomfortable and the closer to the target, the more discomfort is increasingly imposing. The oxymoronic tension between far and close is descriptive of a state of mind made possible by a common figure of speech.
But the poems themselves are not uncomfortable. They tend to be made of sparse couplets and short lines. They contain occasional rhymes but not predictable rhyme schemes. The rhythm is not found in the cadence of the words but becomes apparent in the breathing of the reader. Jesse Anger is a contemplative poet thinking about parenthood and the items in our daily lives that create a narrative between generations of grandparents, parents, children.
Jesse Anger daws attention to how family-focused perspectives of change and stability are dependent on expanded or contracted time scales, “Our ground’s unstable./Geologic time/and vaster weather/asterisms. An infant’s eye” (4). The perception of self can be our perception of time, or we can change our perspective, “forgetting that life/is to give, time but a stitch/in the side of what is” (5). He writes about his awareness of limited time and the temporal limits of memory in the poem “The Unmarked” (6) about walking through his family graveyard. He juxtaposes that theme with “Roll in the Sea” (7), a poem about the difference between being born into our environment without a choice about when and where; but this is contrasted with our ability to choose what we perceive and contemplate, “My eyes/are time’s to open, mine to close” (7).
Some of these poems draw attention to our bodies as unknown objects, territories, or persons. On the topic of our own skeletons, Anger notices that, “Nakedness deceives as much/as mirror-masks and such/disguises” (9). In contrast, thinking about a playing guitar, he acknowledges bones, “you bone-fingers round her neck” (11). Far Too Close is a book about social and biological structures that are apparent in daily life but also not seen directly. Therefore, Anger might seem to be somewhat mundane in his observations; but there are parallelisms between the limitations placed on us by circumstances and biology, and the limitations placed on us by cognition and conversations thinking about parents talking to children, as parents, he thinks about a quoted line (italicized but unsourced), “The things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget” (14). Perhaps his tarot card poem, “Hanged-Man” resolves the seen and the unseen, “Here a fool is growing wise,/the sentient, then clear” (18). The pieces of reality missing from our conscious notice are essential to the persons who we become in our maturity.
Time
What is interesting, though, is that Jesse Anger writes a poem about the Hanged-Man, a tarot card of calamity, but the character he interpolates into the card is The Fool tarot archetype. This might be explained by the following poem, “Artless” where “The fool cannot prevail,/he does and does not care” (20). The Fool archetype can overcome calamity because, in his foolish blindness to detail, to cause and effect, all endings are the same process that leads to more process.
So he sets the metaphorical foundations for his poem “On Hanging” that makes a kind of list populated by puns and juxtapositions, “Dreamcatchers/wind chimes/mobiles/men” (23_ dangle as much as “modifiers/murders/phone wires/fat” (24) dangle. Jesse Anger is a Romantic Era poet, in the sense of locating nature in the machinations of mind. Far Too Close is about opposites that, instead of contrasting, compare with each other; such as endings and beginnings, old and young, known and unknown.
However, that metaphysical resolution does not mean the social life, or political life, are without anxiety. In a poem titled “Close” that seems to be about divorce and custody agreements, Anger sees not opposites per se, but opposites as oppositions, We do not rhyme at the close./…only the turning away/the coming to terms like/50/50, and who is fit for more/of a child’s time” (27). Anger sees that people opposing each other, and demanding justifications, create another kind of unknown and imperceptible mental states, “I do not know/where to being when going/is all that’s left” (27).
Hamilton and surrounding region
Jesse Anger’s hometown is Dunnville, a rural small village connected to Hamilton and the Niagara region by two-lane roads that also count as single-digit numbered highways. It is closer to Lake Erie than Lake Ontario, but landlocked enough to become dependent on the QEW for economy and culture. If these poems are about the Hamilton, then his poem about a 13th birthday with his father, “13” might be one that I can relate to. “We circled the cul-de-sacs,/ passed 718 John Street/where I’d woken in blue dawn” (35). When I was born, my parents brought me home to apartment buildings at the end of the John Street in Hamilton, on a high-up floor, our balcony overlooking the city (the other side of the building overlooks Hamilton Harbour and the Burlington Skyway bridge). Canadians are notoriously uncreative when it comes to street names and neighbourhood fashions. We are easily coded by language and postal codes, watersheds and traffic grids.
Maybe that is why Jesse Anger’s chapbook is so easy for me to read. Anger’s poems, although spare, and seemingly focused on irreconcilable opposites, calm me rather than worry me with paradox. We might share the same language and a set of regionally coded linguistic rhythms. We share metaphysical assumptions because we were born into the same hyperlocal culture of literary family life that, in my personal experiences, characterizes Hamilton differently than the ends of the QEW urban cultures. While I have a copy of Far Too Close because of coincidences, those coincidences are not random. Myself and Jesse Anger really do coincide. My friend C. worked in a huge library branch that was at the center of my childhood downtown world. She is also a local yokel from rural Dunnville.
The gift economy connects us to our culture and maintains our awareness of the people and places that make up our society. Chapbooks like Jesse Anger’s Far Too Close can be important components of those economies of spatial and temporal scales. From libraries, book fairs, through post offices and the multiple moves of graduate school, poetry can be the material component of our shared experiences. The commodity of thin, stapled books is ephemeral in geological time, but easily withstands a decade. A book review can be the percussive drumming that sustains both the passage of time and the acknowledgements of active readers.
The book: Anger, Jesse. (2014). Far Too Close. Mohkinstsis: The Blasted Tree Press.
The publisher: www.theblastedtree.com
The tarot in the picture: Nettles, Bea. (2019). Mountain Dream Tarot. Chapaign, IL: Self-published.
About the Writer
Terry Trowbridge is a Canadian living on Lake Ontario, a plum farmer, a sociolegal researcher, a book reviewer, and a Pushcart nominee. His poetry and essays have appeared in something like 100 different journals, zines, and chapbooks. His Erdős number is 5.
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