Turning talk into art
In his open, active new collection, New Haven-based poet Christian Schlegel (below) explores “what happens if i try not to pour myself into a pen but turn away and talk.” The three pieces in “Ryman” (Ricochet), Schlegel’s second collection, are
“talk poems,” transcribed from three separate talks. The pieces are not plainspoken in the way some poetry can be described as, and they are not even exactly chatty, but, in discussing visual artists and films and poetry and pals, one senses a hum below the words, the distinct energy of mind-to-mouth. It is, in large part, a book about thought; about absorption and interruption; about how to see a problem and explore it; about how painful the elimination of waste can feel, the pruning and reducing; about discovering and discovering again. “i’ve learned over the past years or especially three years to forego all discussions of essence.” Friendship and poetry have order in common, he notes, and the texture when he’s discussing his friends is intimate, with the subtle tension, too, grappling with their art and writing and romances; a sense of gratitude and wondering comes through, deepening and complicating a reader’s sense of their own circle. Thoughts ping-pong, ideals pingpong, gnip-gnopping back and forth across the table of the mind, between, for example, “the pure unrealizable experience of the moving image and the recapitulation in language that tempts me/ the language of others.” The collection, which is strange in the best way, feels not like other books I know; asks, spoken and unspokenly, how we make each other’s art, each other’s language, each other’s thoughts.