Steve Potter Reviews 2 Books of Poems by Jeremy Springsteed
Jeremy springsteed’s poetry of fascination
A Review by Steve Potter
The poems in the first two sections of Jeremy Springsteed's collection Salt, Weasel, Corpse, and Other made me think I'd like to declare the existence of a heretofore unacknowledged genre of English language poetry and edit a selection of them along the lines of Carolyne Forché and Duncan Wu's seminal anthology Poetry of Witness. I would classify these poems of Springsteed's as belonging to the tradition of the poetry of fascination. Whereas the poems in Poetry of Witness deal with firsthand accounts of cruelty, oppression, religious persecution, war, and slavery, the poetry of fascination is about wondrous and mysterious people, places, and events usually seen from a greater distance than firsthand.
Unlike confessional poetry, the poetry of fascination rarely bares the poet's soul or reveals dirty little personal secrets. One never feels icky and thinks too much information after reading or hearing a poem of fascination the way one might after reading or hearing an old confessional poem or a contemporary neo-confessional poem. I make that distinction between confessional and neo-confessional because, as editors at the Poetry Foundation put it in their essay on the topic, “Confessional poetry, as a historical literary movement, is generally thought to have ended by the 1970s, but its concerns and techniques seeped into numerous other styles and circles, from performance poetry to slam.”
Springsteed is a poet who strives to understand the inexplicable, to speak the unspeakable, and share with the reader a sense that more is going on in the world around us…
Springsteed's source of fascination in the nine inter-related poems that make up the section titled “Weasel” is a strange and rather humorous occurrence that took place at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in April 2016. A weasel (or possibly a marten, the weasel's slightly larger cousin, according to one report) gnawed through a power cable with its tiny teeth shutting down the complex experimental research done by the 7 billion dollar particle collider for a week. As one of my favorite YouTubers, music producer Dom Sigalas often exults after revealing an especially useful yet little know technique available to users of the Cubase Digital Audio Workstation, “How cool is that!?!”
While the third section of the book, “Corpse,” contains poems that are somewhat thematically related and the final section, “Other,” is made up of a more random selection of poems not thematically related but sharing a similar emotional register, the poems in “Weasel” are related enough that it may reasonably be described as a long poem made up of titled sections. This is likewise true of the second section and/or long poem, “Salt,” which is inspired by the labyrinthian, 1,073-foot-deep Wieliczka Salt Mine near Krakow, Poland. Are they sections made up of poems or poems made up of sections (which are themselves poems)? Well, both. Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of the parts as Aristotle pointed out so long ago. How many of you are old enough to remember when people liked to throw the word “synergy” around a lot? You may enjoy the poems individually or as parts of a greater whole as with songs on a concept album or in a rock opera.
“Weasel” begins with a poem about the weasel then one about the work of the Large Hadron Collider:
Body In the Nest
That which can be used to kill
can be used to dig.
A triangle head
and two jet black eyes
are burrowing.
Six inches of slender.
It wraps its spine
and snaps its jaws.
It is always ready
to defend solitude with violence.
In winter there is metamorphosis.
The white creeps from the stomach.
Soon the entire body is white.
Soon nothing is seen.
The weasel in its body.
Accelerated
To create the beginning you need heat
and speed. You need density.
You need gold.
This is the land of quarks.
This is the tube of birth.
17 miles beneath two countries.
Non-zero fields are found everywhere.
God is discovered in particle form.
There is no spin. He is his own antiparticle.
Black holes that are lab grown.
They are held here like pets.
Time is bent down a tunnel.
We put our fingers in a stream
of unknown withins.
We keep going faster.
The poems that follow ping pong back and forth from facts about the lives of weasels to information about the work of the Large Hadron Collider. The two narrative threads intertwine in "The Meeting," the final poem of "Weasel."
“Seven Strikes,” in Springsteed's collection A Guide To Getting Lost, is a darker example of the poetry of fascination. The source of fascination there is lightning. The poem weaves personal reminiscences of his childhood fascination with those astonishing bolts of electricity from the sky and strange historical incidents of the phenomenon. The seven strikes of the title refer to the seven bolts of lightning which hit Roy Sullivan, the man who, tragically, was struck by lightning seven times in his seventy-one-year-long life. He is mentioned on the third page of the poem:
Roy Sullivan,
struck repeatedly.
In 71 years
he was hit
7 times. Once
a decade comes
also the bolt. Then his suicide.
In school
we learned of kites
and storms
and revolutions.
Our parents didn't like any
of our experiments.
Still I haven't harnessed a strike.
I don't mean to suggest that what I'm calling the poetry of fascination is Springsteed's only mode. In poems such as "Memory of a Secret," "Emptying My Aunt's House After Her Death in Saint George, Utah," and "Rebecca," he delves into more personal, first-hand experiences of family, friendship, community, happiness, heartbreak, and loss, but the instances of poetry of fascination stood out to me in reading his two recent books. I sometimes like to think in terms of artists or particular works of art as divided into two types—"look at that" vs. "look at me." The poetry of fascination sits solidly on the side of "look at that."
It's refreshing to read poems that are outward-looking more so than inward-looking and that, additionally, are outward looking in a mostly positive way, even if the weasel dies at the end and the man keeps getting struck by lightning. The poetry of fascination explores and celebrates the awe-inspiring, the miraculous, the mysterious, and the wonderful. It's healthy to have some, "How cool is that," mixed in with all the, "Look how awful they are behaving," "We're all doomed," and, "Woe is me." Note to self: don't forget to celebrate the good stuff.
Springsteed is a poet who strives to understand the inexplicable, to speak the unspeakable, and share with the reader a sense that more is going on in the world around us than our limited human minds allow us to know. Reality is far deeper and vaster than we could ever possibly understand no matter how we try. Every answer leads to new questions.
Jeremy Springsteed is a barista living in Seattle. He was one of the founders of the Breadline Performance Series and a member of ReDrum Poetry Collective. His work has been recently published in The Book Of Black, an anthology by Wingless Dreamer, SPREAD, The Paragon Press, Pidgeonholes, Underwood, Pageboy and Internet Void.
Steve Potter is the author of the novel Gangs With Greek Names, a short fiction collection called Easy Money & Other Stories, and two poetry collections: Mendacity Quirk Slipstream Snafu and Social Distance Sing. His poems, stories, and reviews have appeared in publications such as E·Ratio, Otoliths, Parole, and Word For/Word. Real Stand-Up Guys, the sequel to Gangs With Greek Names, is forthcoming.
Salt, Weasel, Corpse, and Other
by Jeremy Springsteed
ISBN 978-8-1962026-8-2
CyberWit.net
https://www.cyberwit.net/publications/2118
2023, paperback, 93 pages, $15.
A Guide To Getting Lost
by Jeremy Springsteed
ISBN 978-8-1825394-1-9
CyberWit.net
https://www.cyberwit.net/publications/1917
2022, paperback, 75 pages, $15.