The key to penetrating the poems in 'Damaged' lies in the organic nature of their language, which extends from the poet like a layer of skin, perpetually shedding and replenishing itself as it goes. Andy Riverbed's words are things, not abstractions, like objects lying about a room; they have substance, form and color; and they're near enough to reach out and touch.
shells ,
data , coral coconuts
{between 1 + 2) usually
quiet}
; laundry maids patrol {
(long tuber
sprout) exhale nose
and dance y a 'la
Morrison acro s s
the wave
;dash!
("Laser crawls and)
Riverbed goes strictly on his nerve in this work, taking no prisoners, as they say, along the way. The incidental quality of the mostly short poems only enhances their overall impact in that the reader isn't force-fed effete notions of his own, or of the poet's, grandeur. There isn't a trace of snobbery to be found in these poems amidst their relentless testaments to the painful verities of existence itself, as personified in Riverbed's baleful version of the proverbial Life in the Big City.
remains of
men burnt down to oblivion.
used to walk,
barefooted and slumping,
lips kissing the ground;
now decomposed
skeletons devoured.
(Fingernails)
At first I didn't know what to think of the drawings of William Joyner Jr. that accompany the poems, but I came to realize that the seemingly child-like style in which they are composed compliments Riverbed's one of tragic beatitude in a charmingly dissociative manner. More importantly, they never distract attention from the poems, in much the same way a good boxing referee remains invisible in plain sight during a match. Also, the drawings lend to the graphic, graffiti-like character of the visceral landscape elicited from the poems, in broken pieces, as it were.
I cry
when I see pictures of ferrets
or photos of destroyed landscapes,
birds soaked in petroleum
and hear 'bout boys
in the European Union
who tortured a toddler
threw his body to the tracks
in hopes
their mess'd be cleaned up.
I cry realizing
I didn't cry when my father died.
(Lately)
Reaing Andy Riverbed's 'Damaged' put me in mind of the late, great Bob Kaufman, the quintessential Beat street-poet who wrote "Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness" and "Golden Sardines," two extraordinary collections of poems exemplifying modern man's miserable state of isolation in this crummy world, but in a beautiful, sometimes hilarious language. It would be easy to classify Kaufman's language as an outcrop of jazz, namely Bebop, but it's more accurate to call it the language of chaos, which is a universal language if ever there was one. Pain, despair and sorrow serve as the raw material out of which Kaufman's, and Riverbed's poems are made. But 'Damaged' is not a book of mere lamentations, nor is it a paean to lost youth or some such trivial ideal. It's too hip for that.
When I was really young,
I'd wrap my watch so hard,
months later when
released
my skin wrenched,
rotting and stinking.
(As a teenager, my father)
Life is indeed ' a vale of tears,' consisting of hapless, fragmented instants and instances, whose meanings are dubious, if not inconceiveable; 'a tale told by an idiot'; but in this case, by a savant as well. Riverbed's world is the same insane world we all live in today, the brittle surface of which only needs to be scratched with a fingernail to reveal its face of a death-mask.
Joe La Rosa
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