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First published in Small Press Review
July-August 2010
By Kirby Congdon
barely breathing
by The Poet Spiel
$9
196 p, pa, pfct bnd
March Street Press, 3414 Wilshire, Greensboro, NC 27408
Available at: www.thepoetspiel.name
Familiar with Spiel’s work, I had noticed “last call” in a recent review Presa Press has
put out in Michigan. I see that it has been reprinted in his new collection, Barely Breathing.
The poem simply documents the tumbling down of reason in a man’s last hours. It reminded me
of a summer job I had at the World War 1 Veterans Hospital in Napa Valley, CA. A cranky
fellow needed a bedpan when the staff was out to lunch. The whole staff got hell because,
as kitchen help, I had brought the bedpan to the old man’s side. Kitchen help were not
allowed in the ward itself. The next morning, as I came to work, I heard an attendant
refer to this same patient in these terms as the attendant carried another bedpan
out of the ward. “There he was, staring at the ceiling, dead as a doornail, both eyes
popped wide open, perhaps not scolding anyone but, like, man, asking what’s going on?”
Where does the meaning come from? Is there any? What are the boundaries between burgeoning
health and the symptoms of being only a human being? When and how does love and affection
enter into any of it? Do we dare dismiss the indifference of the ward attendant’s casual
remark? Can the ward attendant afford to grieve for a whole barracks full of dying veterans?
We all wonder in a quiet moment of reflection at the phenomenon of existence, of being alive,
at being who we are in the middle of it all, feeling and thinking as we do. Spiel’s stance
is to move us to the outer edge of it all where we are spinning on the rim of the phonograph
record, or in the complexity of the compact disc or among the molecules packed in the memory
bank of the computer as he drags in the capacity for intelligence, that awareness of knowledge
of life that can look in the mirror and see the endless vista before us reflected in back of us
as far as the eye can see. The Christian Bible sums it up beyond the grammar of normal English
in the assertion, “I am that I am” where the first person pronoun is both the private individual
clinging to his identity and the totality of the universe which our senses take in and make real.
For me, this is Spiel’s stance from many angles – not an answer, or a solution, or a doctrine.
It is an insight that absorbs science, history and experience, along with the compulsion to put
it into words, whether we are thoughtful poet or attendants speaking spontaneously in a hospital ward.
Spiel’s work questions the quandary of death itself. He wisely avoids denying it with
platitudes on the one hand or explicating it on the other since either approach would
only bring us to temporary palliatives, or, in other words, bad poetry. Indeed,
it is a mistake to gauge or measure the affect of death. It seems to matter most
when one has already given an irretrievable part of yourself to someone else.
Your own identity is partly defined in another person’s very existence. At that
person’s death one becomes a little insane as one realizes that this possibility
is now a fact that is too large for one’s reason to grasp or deny. Spiel’s work
translates the facts and the insanity into words. I have a theory that all artistic
expression is the process of translation so that the unintelligible, like an unsolvable
mystery, can be grasped, even if not completely accepted.
Kirby Congdon
Email: Kirby Congdon via The Poet Spiel
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