January 9, 2006

Dan Buck, This Day's Wait (Highwater Books, 2001). 99 pages. $8.95.

You Can't Blow Up a Social Relationship (See Sharp, 1998). 20 pages. $1.50.

I picked these two up at Rock Scissors Paper zine store/burgeoning art gallery on Telegraph near Grand in Oakland.

You Can't Blow Up was originally published in 1979 by a loose syndicate of Australian anarchist and libertarian socialist groups. It's available through AK Press for $1.50 and also here for free online. The book posits an anti-terrorist argument that is worth revisiting.

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Ever since I read Baudelaire's "The Bad Glazier" in Elizabeth Willis' prose poem class some years ago, I've had the sneaking suspicion that the difference between many prose poems and flash fiction pieces was a question of marketing. In fact, I've had more than one publisher explain to me that whenever they get anything poetic that can pass as fiction that's how they package it; the idea being that the poets will be able to recognize it as poetry and that fiction as a genre has better sales potential. Regardless of labelling, Dan Buck's short bursts of mordant cynicism have nothing extraneous, just very simple core narratives on which to hang a very bleak, absurdist world view.

"The Bird" begins immediately with a twist on an old fairy tale trope: "Once there was a bird with a headache" (67). The tale ends in angst, staring at the abyss: "For he knew he'd get no rest fearing that everyone in death would fear what he didn't know in life."

And while this may sound like bad Goth zine fodder, the work really does offer surprises and a freshness that obliterates any comparison between the two, so much so that I'm left wondering whether this is the poetry in prose I'm suppose to recognize as differentiated from short short fiction.