Embracing the Wild Mind

Aacroi Review Martin continuedfrom previous page it ever so witty, this sort of cynicism quickly devolves into smugness unless leavened with genuine goodwill, which fortunately Dockins possesses. In "A Mugging," the victim's wallet is so empty that the moths flying from it have empty wallets of their own from which fly smaller moths with still smaller wallets and so forth. (Playing with scale again, the endlessly recurring recurrence.) The victim recognizes the mugger as the bully who tormented him in middle school. When the mugger begins to weep at the sheer futility of one loser trying to rob another, the victim, although irritated, speaks the final line, which ends the poem on a redemptive note: "It's all right, Joe, I won't go to the police." Everything turns to Play-Doh in Dockins's hands: quarks, tsunamis, quasars, and, most ofall, words. In the prose poem "Schrödinger's Coffin," the closed coffin of the theoretical physicist leads to uneasy speculation among the mourners. In the wake afterwards, Werner Heisenberg of the Uncertainty Principle makes a remark to his comely dance partner that is at once lascivious and naive; he tells her that, unlike an electron, he knows exactly where she is and what she is doing. Moments like this comically humanize the figures who have done so much to make the universe a very strange place for the rest of us. Apart from goodwill, the other thing that seduces us throughout these poems is Dockins's playfulness, which informs everything he writes. Everything turns to Play-Doh in his hands: quarks, tsunamis, quasars (again the sense of scale), and, most of all, words. Hence, it's inevitable Dockins would be drawn into perhaps the most maddening ofall poetic forms, the double abecedarian. It takes a serious commitment not to take oneselftoo seriously to attempt writing a poem in which the initial letters form an acrostic running through the alphabet on one side while the final letters run through the alphabet in reverse on the other. Of these, the best may be "The Fun Uncle," a lunatic dramatic monologue delivered by the sort of relative children adore but parents are ill-advised to trust. "Kickball inside the house?" he says, "OK, but only if we save time for the Hallway Long Jump." Reading this poem, all the while aware of the acrobatics the poet has performed in writing it, we suddenly realize that Dockins is the fun uncle. Permissive with us and kindhearted if slightly unhinged , he's come to babysit with his pockets full of tsunamis, quarks, tumbling moons, and moths. He is a risky guide to follow, but we know when he suggests going to the construction site to hunt for blasting caps, we won't be able to resist. A certain type ofreader will be impatient with poems that don't ultimately deliver meaning in neat parcels, but this is inconsistent with a world in which we are only certain ofuncertainty itself. Since the universe makes a game ofus, Dockins makes a game ofit, tumbling through a sequence ofcreations, recreations, destructions, and contradictions in the path of the comet. Man Martin 's debut novel, Days of the Endless Corvette, is due out this summerfrom Carroll and Graf Publishers. His fiction has been accepted by McSweeney's Online and Kenyon Review. Embracing the Wild Mind Larry Smith Outrider: Poems, Essays, Interviews Anne Waldman La Alameda Press http://www.laalamedapress.com 178 pages; paper, $18.00 Anne Waldman is what she is: a remarkable poet, performance artist, literary theorist, poet-activist , feminist, and cultural organizer. Don't expect her to also be a coherent essayist like E. B. White or Annie Dillard. Waldman's stance as a writer, Buddhist, and rebel poet runs counter to structured coherence and bends toward construction by association, intuition , accumulation, and imaginative leaps toward inclusion. A child of Charles Olson's open poetics, she discovers inner structure via midstream talkingconsciousness and by circumambulating the subject: "Life and its forms are all moving in circles!" And so her impressionistic prose poems and essays on the mythic Outrider of alternative writing are inspired and often brilliant in segments, yet incoherent in rational design: What...