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  • Putting it All Down
  • Jason Labbe (bio)
Visible Instruments
Michael Kelleher
Chax Press
www.chax.org/product/visible-instruments-by-michael-kelleher
71 Pages; Print, $17.00

Reading new poetry shortly after John Ashbery's passing is proving an interesting and rich experience. In certain circles of the poetry world, it goes without saying: the ways in which Ashbery broke ground for those who have followed are immeasurable, and few would claim exemption from his influence. Visible Instruments, Michael Kelleher's gorgeous new collection from CHAX is a pleasure and an accomplishment on its own terms, while perpetuating Ashbery's mode in ways that are appropriative and therefore a continuation, rather than merely imitative. The trajectory of Kelleher's body of work thus far brings to mind the opening of Ashbery's 1972 masterpiece, Three Poems: "I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way." But for Kelleher, the inverse seems true; since the petite trim size and minimalist lyrics of Human Scale (2007), Kelleher has gone on to write fuller, longer, and rangier poems. Although still compact at 71 pages, Visible Instruments presents Kelleher's most ambitious and enjoyable work to date, poems that sprawl and expand as they freely employ abstraction, collage, and narrative—anything he needs, as Ashbery says, to "put it all down."

Visible Instruments is not the sort of book one can grab in odd moments and just pick off a poem or two, snack sized and easily digested. Although there are only eleven poems here, the majority are quite long, including the eleven-page opener, "The God Poem"—a single, impossibly long sentence. A reader doesn't have to get very far to realize the attention reading this book requires. There are no stanza breaks anywhere, and Kelleher uses a uniform line throughout, a loose pentameter. For some readers the lack of formal variety might grow tiresome, especially in times of difficult subject matter where one could use the occasional breath; but others will find the consistency in form skillful, focused, and disciplined, giving a sense of unity and pacing to the collection. Kelleher takes on the the big ideas, the big mysteries, without offensive grandiosity or didacticism, leaving the reader not with answers, but everything leading up to the furthest lengths of the poet's own questioning, the limits of his comprehension, which we see here in "The God Poem:"

the edge of which is like more than oneUniverse expanding, an infinityOf universes burning up and outWhose infinite deaths leave infinite trailsOf past life in the form of particles

Kelleher's God "Might be explained as human failure to / Comprehend the meaning of light." This human failure to comprehend meaning in the face of a miraculous cosmos—this bewilderment—propels Kelleher's lines to cascade, each idea flowing into the next, always with the suggestion that the poem goes on long after it ends, with the indeterminacy necessary for discovery.

The way these poems sometimes dwell in the realm of ideas (rather than images) brings to mind USA: Poetry, a documentary that recently surfaced on YouTube and features John Ashbery in 1966, shortly after his return from ten years in Paris. He says about his then-new book, Rivers and Mountains (1966): "What has happened . . . in these recent poems is that they've been getting more and more abstract, in the sense that scenery, objects, and people seem to be kind of disappearing, and what I'm involved with is trying to make concrete passing states of mind." How lucky we are that Ashbery—building off Wallace Stevens, whom he sites as an influence in the outtakes—preferred ideas over things and introduced to poetry his manner of thinking-in-language, without which it would be difficult to imagine "The God Poem," as well as "But Do They Suffer?" In the latter, Kelleher uses David Foster Wallace's argument against boiling lobsters alive as a point of departure for his own meditation on cruelty and speciesism—as well as a variety of other...

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