Reviews of Howard McCord's
THE COLLECTED POEMS

TO DREAM OF A LISTENER

   If the reward we are looking for when we read the work of living poets is--beyond appreciation, or even revelation--the discovery of a kindred spirit, this shock of recognition won’t strike often.  For most readers, especially poets, there will be only a few contemporaries whose body of work is like opening a door inside oneself.  For me, one of these rare discoveries has been the work of poet, novelist, and essayist Howard McCord.

   “To write a poem is to cry out; to cry out Is to dream of a listener," McCord has written. But where are his listeners? Why is he not better known?  The subject of neglect in poetry is an old standard, but perhaps worth touching on briefly in McCord's case, because in addition to the usual reasons for poetic obscurity is his political incorrectness. He's an old white male who sings the warrior virtues.  Worse, he actually has something to say about the world he has passed through, and he is able to say it with formal elegance and dyspeptic wit.  He looks at our culture with the same cool, critical regard Juvenal and Martial turned on Rome. These sins may damn him now, but will ensure he is read in the future by the proverbial happy few---if style and intelligence still count.

   The publication of McCord's Complete Poems (Bloody Twin Press) now affords new listeners the opportunity to discover an extraordinary maverick voice in American letters, one I first encountered a few years ago in his novella The Man Who Walked to The Moon and in The Wisdom of Silenus & Other Essays.

   His Complete Poems is a massive, beautifully produced volume of 419 pages filled with unabashed sensuality, impressive scholarship, tender lyricism and a winning recklessness. The mountains and deserts of the American West, where he has hiked and climbed all his life, as well as foreign landscapes from Iceland to Southeast Asia, provide the background and often the subject matter for his work.  Like Gary Snyder, he reveals a landscape.

   (Given this adventurous range, it came as something of a surprise to me that McCord, like most American poets, has earned his bread in academia, capping that career with a lengthy stint as Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.)

   Each volume collected in the Complete Poems seems to reflect a chapter in McCord’s life.  In the poems he creates a persona in which the parts--Westerner, outdoorsman, husband and father, teacher--make up a mythology of self, the autobiography of a poet.

   The effect on the reader is cumulative.  You grow fonder of the poet as you encounter him in each of his guises.  He is a master of the stunning metaphor- as in the opening lines of "Listening to Maps:"

"The sound of old maps
is like doll’s laughter,
brittle as china twigs
or a bird's thinking.”

   He is particularly good at an underrated rhetorical form, the rant:

"I squat over the law
and return
what I have received."
("Raca”)

   He is tender in a series of poems about his wife Jennifer:

“Jennifer,

A cold night moves
me close against your back
and the sum of our warmth
flows through the coverlet
as an infrared fog....”

   (In another Jennifer poem he writes approvingly about her learning to shoot a pistol after receiving a death threat.)

   He is clear-eyed about mortality in "Litany:"

"Bless wife and children,
bless friends, bless whitening hair
and blurring sight,
bless heart's malaise,
bless snow-blocked trails,
bless no escape ....”

   McCord has been a life-long rock climber. (The frontispiece of Complete Poems shows him dangling from a rock face.) His book is a mountainous, granitic thing, striated with wit and surprise.  Its rugged slopes and craggy outlooks require of the reader a diligent attention to detail, and a taste for risk; but the ascent is worth the effort, and the view from the top is wide.
   ---Michael Perkins from Rain Taxi

---

A Complete Poems should be as resistant to tidy summation, to comprehensive review, as a life. The Complete Poems of Howard McCord is. In fact, this last sentence alone conveys enough, the heart of honest criticism, all that can and need be said about a book without belaboring its immutable essence, the very fact of it: The Complete Poems of Howard McCord is (and does its own speaking).

            In the face of this, a reviewer might do best to step aside––it’s easy to avoid comment, and, in any case, I prefer my silence to the prattle I can generate when pressed to speak. Here, though, I can’t help myself. I’ve read a book, as if for the first time, fresh from the mystery of naming things, and I can’t leave its poems alone. Four months have passed in this way. I have learned names, shared meals, traveled and talked with them like a man long starved of company. It would be a violation of fellowship not to respond to their collective arrival in the world. Besides, they make sure friends––I want others to know them.

            But where now to start the invitation? My copy opens to page 252, suggests that nothing, which is to say everything, is random. I may as well begin “In Iceland”:

If there are wild men,
they love gently.

They wash their bodies
in streams we drink
from, and we do not
notice.

They hunt with the skill
of a willow moving to
the wind––one egg, one fowl,
one fish a day, and the sweet root
of angelica, which even
the clumsy may stalk.

If there are wild men,
you will know it
only by the snapped bleat
of a ewe some dawn,
or a bottle of good Polish
vodka gone from your tent.

Details may leap to mind at first: the fabulist’s authority, born of experience and wed to a wry, prodding smile (is the wild one here among us, after all?); the deceptively plainspoken skill that effaces itself in embracing all possibilities (witness the pun inherent in “stalk”); and a cool, detached urgency that seems to announce, “Reader, it’s only your life that’s at stake.” (This craft deserves a separate treatment.)

Beyond all this, though, the poem, like the book itself, unfolds a map that calls me from its edges to the interior. It clearly knows the way, so I follow.

What I find lures out of hiding a self-exiled hermit cartographer at work: “The page is a mind’s track./Everything reveals. It is not necessary to read./Wittgenstein is folded in the limestone” (“Listening to Maps”). At work? Yes, but also always at play, here and throughout––Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse” walks the shadows of these poems, flashing on occasion to the foreground with a grimace shaped to reassure and shock in equal parts.

            Necessary or not, I read on, desultorily, taking comfort in not needing a plan, led up and down each scarp by titles and the bright will of my compelled hand. Every page affords a finger-hold. When I slip, I trust my fall, get up. I’ve gone too far, too greedily, over new terrain to want to find my way back now.

            After delight in “Longjaunes His Periplus” (“A chest of maps/is a greater legacy/than a case of whisky”) and “Hunting Canaries With Robert Bly” (“I want the one, sd Robert/with the yellow eyes, the/eyes that wd be green if/his feathers were”), I land in the good, warm company of “The Old Beast Dead at Mainz”:

The old beast at the stake
burns like wet velvet.
“I smell better
when I fart,” he
shouts to the crowd.
Through the applause
his hair shrieks
like a halo.
“You may not believe,”
the old beast mumbles
at the smoke,
“but I’m due back
by summer.”

“I’ll resurrect as a raven-
bird, and bite your daughter’s
ass and tits in dreams.”

“And what I get her with
will press you slow
along the throat
and never speak
and not be killed.”

At Mainz
it was
so consummated.

Do not despair.

Where Faust and Mephistopheles conjoin, the old beast arrives, trailing fire, anarchic brimstone, and the musk of eighty-proof lechery, as in this stretch of “Old Beast Talk:

The old beast curls on the stool.
His mouth is wet.
Bourbon is philosophy
at 8 a.m.

“I take my love affairs
like books,” he says.

“When I did reviews, I read
nothing I could not praise,
and praised some things
I had not read.”

The barkeep nods.

“So let it be with women.
I like to fool around a bit.
Winter’s the best for dalliance.
Young wives with dull husbands
watch the sky for signs, and I
walk in.”

I understand the worst beasts shoot first always, the best shoot from the hip. This one does both. His worldview preaches unity, leads him to treat the callow and the considered, not each according to its measure, but as one. He has no age, never misses supper (he knows how to find sustenance in drink). To show the way, he romps like a satyr reared on scotch, Job and Chuang Tzu throughout the eponymous cycle’s twenty-four poems.

            Now I pass through “Peach Mountain Smoke Out,” “Two There Are I Wish to Celebrate,” “Li Po as Greek Kachina.” I trust they chide me––each demands to be quoted in full. Next come “Julia at Nineteen,” “More Physics.” Now the “Jennifer,” poems (all twelve titled “Jennifer,”), such as this, on page 257:

It is called Breaking
Out of the Ground
and it is done by
Force.
I have begun to see
a slim wise country lass
in the paper. The keys
of the typewriter
never strike her.
She walks through them
as though they were brambles
or monoliths, amused.
Or happy.
And at this point
I know it is called
Breaking Out of the Ground
and it is done by
Force.

I forge ahead, rest a while, return, following my own tracks set down perfectly inside those that lead me. I’m coming to have a sense of what drives me to walk, with or without direction, through these pages, wherever they may point. In any case, walking here, in the clarity of aphorism, narrative, epigram, the erudite, human company of one who makes and masters trails, has cleared my head. If I get lost in the wilderness, so be it. Let them call off the search. I plan to stay.

I want to list each poem, print them all, hold them up like a child raving in the first blush of discovery. I want to add my note of admiration: Look what I found! But that’s what the collection is for––to point, name, doubt, affirm, for everyone down here. Like Uncle Walt’s great Song, The Complete Poems of Howard McCord celebrates itself, the world, by unselfconsciously taking on the ten thousand things, blessing and damning (the old dualities) as it goes.

         As for McCord the man, there’s no use in trying to track him. He’s up in the hills, blending into the rock, always one step and two thoughts ahead. If he wants to, he’ll find us. In the meantime, we’d do well to sleep with our eyes open and our vodka under the pillow. Better yet, we should simply keep the book open. McCord & Friends are throwing us all one hell of a party inside.
   -––Christof Scheele, Bowling Green State University

---

REFLECTIONS ON McCORD
WHILE AWAITING THE PLAYOFFS

Behind the recently released Complete Poems of Howard McCord, an irony suggests itself. This writer, steeped more than most in iron-age lore, and experienced directly in treks and voyages through the world's less often traveled by-ways, holds so firmly to the Western world's cultural riches, the active critical mind which has claimed, settled, and shaped the mountainous desert country into which he was born and to whose larger surrounding world he has bequeathed so exemplary a body of work. The Cavalier poets would recognize in him a brother, metaphysically astute and graceful in rendering the play of (to swipe a phrase from Bertrand Russell) a robust imagination.

Reared as a poet during the anti-intellectual late fifties, early sixties milieu of the Beats and the New Left, McCord veered, as did Olson and Creeley, towards the more solidly grounded tradition identified with Pound and Williams.  Without abandoning himself to the beliefs and the G-strings of the aboriginals, he absorbed them while keeping up his subscription to Scientific American, and his admiration for John Browning.

For the above mentioned active brain-cells, check out,

Insisted he drank
infusions of locoweed
(Oxytropis lambertii)
and that salvation
was in antiquity and bone:
not Greek metric
         "Classicism is a sentimentality"                 
   ---My Brother's Death," p. 14

And for those who relish grace in a club-footed world,

A gossamer dialectician remarked
That matter is the measure of things
And no Milton rose to smack him
Butt to breakfast with a rude              
      fourteener
Or riot out his throat
    with what a kiss
Can do.
   ---Homily On the Age, p.21

Good advice alone among critical comments deserves attention and this bit comes from JENNIFER, a series McCord wrote for his wife:
                             
Don't wait
on morning.

Get going and find the book.
   ---Carl Thayler, author of Shake Hands, Poems From Naltus
           Bichidin, and West, a forthcoming novel

The Poems has me soaring past my already high expectations --how beautifully and consistently you focus your visions, no line bending in imitation of anyone's other, clean to the bone like a skeleton dried in New Mexico sun. ...I am surprised not by the quality of the poems but by how emotions kept so well concealed, emerge, dominate, and move me. ....No real poet will miss the beauty of this book. ... It's a magnificent achievement.
   ---Phil O'Connor, author of STEALING HOME,
         DEFENDING CIVILIZATION, and other books

       order THE COMPLETE POEMS

Reviews of Howard McCord's
THE MAN WHO WALKED
TO THE MOON

The Man Who Walked To The Moon is an extraordinary book. It completely confounds one's expectations of the fantastic novel, but the mysteries at its heart --death and survival, an almost primeval experience of the natural world-- are transcendental mysteries. Reading this slender volume is like peering into the primal cauldron of Cerridwen herself, and glimpsing there the very acts of death and regeneration: ghastly, terrifying, and ultimately miraculous.
   ---Elizabeth Hand, in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
          Fiction

The Man Who Walked to The Moon is a stunning achievment for a first novelist: a brief, brilliantly written philosophical adventure story that will endure.
   ---Michael Perkins, author of I Could Walk All Day,
          The  Gift of Choice, The Persistence of Desire, and other books

The Man Who Walked To The Moon is loaded with high-caliber language so poetic it sweeps you off your rocking chair like a magnum shot. I was pasted to it for hours, following crazy Gasper through his imaginative world. Bone-chilling.
   ---Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me, Ultima, and many others