a new measure (poetry report)

  Have Fun Pretending is made up of 120 untitled poems, each very tightly justified to the left margin and vertically centered. Though they have line breaks, they read more like a nonstop droll of speech whose effect is accretive and reverberant, at times sounding a bit like Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation : Do good things with bad money do bad things without money. Become a bad person for free without money, as things become free for everyone who acts now. All free things become bad things. All things become bad, too, because whether a bad person or a good one. No one is free while others are obsessed. No one is without the possibility of becoming capable. Lines like these and “nothing ever happens where no one ever profits / except when authorities are aware of the circumstances” speak to Hampshire’s antipathy towards mass-produced political discourse, his sense that good deeds have always already been bought by bad money and repurposed as virtuous marketing schemes. Indeed, much ...

On the first page of From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson , the “speaker” (Flangan) asks: “Was anything true, in fact?” This question speaks to Flanagan’s existential state as he proceeds to enter some form of a trip that, on my reading, lasts essentially until the fifty-third page (only to begin again, or re-intensify several pages later).   This question also speaks to the reader’s state as they long to pull some “sense” from the book itself. Billed as a detective novel, Agent Dickinson uses that genre’s archetypes, imagery, and common objects just enough to get away with using the label. Indeed, just as frequently as you read lines as if pulled from a campy detective show with an avant-garde twist (“Girls, they whistle, though whistling not, as awoken were shields with serif S.O.S.’s fonts, calling blue, tangle day, a bluish piercing foreign on disturbance, fostered shield, now, is that signage saying blue? Who is that, substance, Sheriff Raphael, who??”), you get caught in sweeps...