Far-flung Travels: Other Romes by Derek Mong

But all of that ignores the predominant pleasure of many of these poems. Mong’s acute sensitivity to the sounds and musical effects of language is matched only by his ability to manipulate those effects in fascinating ways. “Blackout” enacts its electric shocks in words, and is well worth quoting in its entirety.

Little blue bold on a split wire —
shock in the dark, my corrupter

of clocks —

you quiver once then kindle flames
that lick the bark off evergreens,

one’s broken bough

unbound you from your artery,
so blow the grid and burn the tree

till block by block the dark

will dawn along these gravel roads
and cars crawl home on the harness

of their highbeams. Let the tiki

torches dot the lawns. Let screen doors
swing with laughter and lukewarm beer.

Next door

my neighbors cuss the curfew cop,
someone shoots Roman candles off

their roof and cheers.

I’m home, upstairs, stripped to nothing
but my underwear and running

in the dark. My lips part —

I plunge into the emptiness
where a bed should be, its mattress

the net beneath an acrobat

blindfolded, free: my fall is like
the time it takes a match to strike

and singe

the sheets: I am a comet streak
or spark. I will end incomplete.

— pp. 40-41

The language here is effortlessly showy. It is a tour-de-force of soundplay, and the verbal effects come nonstop: the drawn-out l’s reined in by t’s in “little blue bolt” followed by the cracks of “shock in the dark,” or the movement from “quiver” to “kindle” or of the lines “to strike / and singe / the sheets: I am a comet streak / or spark.” The very approximate end rhymes grow more exact as the poem continues, and we know that the poet is in control of his language, fashioning jagged lines that buck and chomp at the bit. The poem ends in a recognition of incompletion, the same recognition found in “Vitruvian Man.” We are running in the dark like blind acrobats, and Mong’s work brings us a feeling of madcap exhilaration. His poem echoes the same sense that the world has gone askew that is found in Wallace Stevens’ poem “Emperor of Ice Cream.” It also evokes a similar outcome: to see things as they are, whether they are incomplete, flawed, or beautiful. Mong’s line, “Let the tiki / torches dot the lawns,” provides a variation of Stevens’ “Let the lamp affix its beam.”

The poet’s series of sestinas on Fellini movies puts me in mind of James Tate’s motor-mouth mode and David Foster Wallace’s play with footnotes and riddles; the structure of his sparer verse recalls William Carlos Williams. To say that at times the myriad influences do not seem entirely integrated is to indicate that Mong’s already formidable talents will only deepen and mature. He is, in my opinion, one of the rare talents: a poet whose gift for creating invigorating verbal effects through juxtaposition and enjambment is underpinned by a philosophical mind and an instinct not to take himself too seriously.

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