THAT THING
We once had one in our house
with handles on both sides. But
I forget its name. Sometimes
I even forget my own. The self is
an overlaying of multiple identities,
comprised not just of what is
remembered and forgotten, but
of how one is located in the wider
questions of belonging, memory
and solidarity. At least, that is what
was on my mind as I lit a bonfire
in the kitchen, which is where
I was located. It’s a mystery as to
what that lump is but the chances
are it’s nothing to be concerned
about. There are better reasons
to lay awake at night worrying
yourself sick. I am from here,
I thought, and recognise the pots
and pans, and how if one polishes
them enough they shine like brilliant
household suns. I think I may go
and live in a shed when all this is
over. In the last twenty years
average house prices have grown
about seven times faster than
average income. That’s on my mind
as I write this, and watch the fire
brigade go about their business
with consummate professionalism
and gusto. It occurred to me also
that Galileo said “Nature’s great
book is written in mathematical
symbols”, although I think he said it
in Italian and it’s not really relevant.
It’s interesting what crosses one’s
mind as the events of the day occur,
watched by miserable youths and
unquiet presences who, with nothing
to do but act as reminders of what
has been lost, refuse to stay home,
and instead nibble away at the edges
of what would otherwise be a perfectly
acceptable existence. Here comes
another little person trying to attract
my attention. Take my hat, please.
You’ll see it’s not been keeping much
warm at all. Those are shadows
taking shape before my very eyes,
and that’s a horror show over
there, and those little horror shows
gathered around them will, I guess,
be their children. How awful!
The boys and girls I have known,
the workmen and the labourers
on the estate, they are in the past
now, of course, but they are still
kind of present, although I don’t
know their names, and never
did. And when old Chivers choked
on a chicken leg everyone thought
it was a joke until it was too late.
That was a learning experience for
all of us, and is on my mind as
I write this. The burning issues of
the day are ablaze with themselves
but grow tiresome. To be a fireman is
apparently the career of choice among
an increasing number of university
graduates, and is a sign of the times.
Yes, thank you – I will have another
of those canapés. They’re delicious
even if they’re not home-made.
And thank you for reading this.
You’ve made my life better, briefly.
—Martin Stannard
from “Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters”
Leafe Press, 2020
https://www.leafepresspoetry.com/2020/05/martin-stannard-reading-moby-dick-and.html
Martin Stannard lives in Nottingham, England, and his poetry and reviews have been published widely since the late 1970s. He has also had the honour (and pleasure) to read his work at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City. He was the founding editor of joe soap’s canoe magazine from 1978-93 which, after Martin in 1980 discovered the work of Paul Violi (with whom he subsequently became a close friend), was the first magazine in the UK to regularly publish New York School poets including Ashbery, Koch, Violi, Charles North and Tony Towle. The magazine’s complete archive can be found as downloadable PDFs at www.martinstannard.com/jsc. In 1993 he arranged and accompanied Koch and Violi on a reading tour of the UK, after helping to organize an exhibition of Koch’s collaborations with artists at The Wolsey Gallery, Ipswich, Suffolk.
Martin’s recent publications include “The Review” (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2020) and “Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters” (Leafe Press, 2020). More information can be found at www.martinstannard.com
Like most of my poems, “That Thing” is language-driven, insofar as it’s not about any thing in particular, but takes a line or phrase as somewhere to begin and heads off to a place I don’t know exists until I get there. The starting point here, as far as I recall, was an overheard phrase (“with handles on both sides”) describing some object or other. What follows is helped along by four or five other snippets culled from I can’t remember where, but most of what is said in the poem is from inside what I like to call my brain, joined together to make what I hope is a coherent (sort of) object. It occurs to me now that the last two lines could perhaps be stuck on the end of almost every poem I’ve ever written, albeit with an irony warning.
–Martin Stannard
The New York School Diaspora (Part Eight) The News from Great Britain: Martin Stannard [by Angela Ball]
Martin Stannard’s “That Thing” meditates on an emergency: a bonfire lit by the speaker. We get, amid flames, this stunning observation on pots and pans: “how if one polishes / them enough they shine like brilliant /household suns.” The lyric moment dissolves as the speaker holds forth on surrounding phenomena. A patrician anti-Whitman, he rejects multitudes; speaks with a pre-emptory directness not unlike Frank O’Hara’s in one of several poems called “Poem”: “I am thinking my own thoughts, who else’s?” Oblique subject-shifts disorient as we bowl along his association-stream to a party we have catered (mediocrely), to land in our role as readers, receiving thanks given with one hand and retracted with the other. There’s an obtuseness reminiscent of another O’Hara “Poem” in which the speaker arrives in the middle of the night to find his host lying “flat on a sheet of blood”: “There are few hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest / only casually invited and that several months ago.” With the hauteur and finesse of a Jack Benny, “That Thing’s” delightfully absurd persona, sheathed in aplomb, presents us with a world of incongruities, its source of absurdity not merely events, but our take on them. “The burning issues of / the day are ablaze with themselves / / but grow tiresome.”
–Angela Ball