O by Jared Schickling

Jared Schickling, the Poetry of the imagination expansive, no master, not forms that restrict, not the commercialism of print.   Not the Government of Poetry, with this an anarchistic being is where all might of the elemental as a construction without end with wisdom and magic, behold begins a future

—Michael Basinski

Ezra Pound, in the 116 th Canto, writes: “I cannot make it cohere.”   Later on in the same song: “it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere.”   Something of the same awfulness and same awe riddles itself throughout Jared Schickling’s O— a book whose very title evokes this poetry’s deepest crisis, the word preceding prayer and the word preceding despair, a picture of the world’s sphere and the number zero, the mouth before it speaks and just after.   Schickling’s is a poetry connected to the full panoply of post-modern poetics, from Language poetry to poetry embracing Aleatory constructions, from the vestige of confession to the conviction of witness.   Schickling doesn’t appropriate such methods but stands in consequence of them.   It is a poetry that gives back to us what we have wrought, and suffers to do so.   What suffers is that subjectivity—poet and poet’s voice—unable to find a boundary against which to define the world, and so the world pours in incoherent but undeniable.   The same description might hold for the poems themselves, such true messengers of the world they suffer and of which they speak.

—Dan Beachy-Quick

What is “common ground?”  How does it come about in a nation?  In a poem?  In Schickling’s project, limning the portals between expression and repression, common ground is sought and thwarted, and sought again, bringing to bear the grand project of all our poetry—what does it say?  How do we mean?  What if a flock of our voices, civic and private, were let lose, flurrying and colliding in the echo chamber of the poem?

—Eleni Sikelianos

Jared Schickling has two other books with BlazeVOX, Aurora (2007) and submissions (2008).  He is an editor at Mayday Magazine, New American Press, and Reconfigurations.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 137 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402275

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