Lewis Freedman’s Catfish Po’ Boys

by Paul Killebrew

Catfish Po’ Boys by Lewis Freedman
MinutesBooks 2009

Language, in Lewis Freedman’s Catfish Po’ Boys, is a mess. It starts with the book’s rambling physicality—seventeen 8.5” by 11” pages covered over with alternating passages of stanzas in a large typewriter font and exuberant, Manson-like handwriting tumbling down each page like a portrait. That’ll make more sense if you see it for yourself:

I find this visual composition to be totally arresting. The two textures of writing—scrawly handwriting and a quaint, typo-prone typewriter—relate to each other a little like titles and bodies of poems, but not quite. What I mean is that the handwriting knocks against the type meaningfully, but I wouldn’t say that the handwritten parts trace out the kind of thematic kernels we often expect out of titles; one of them reads, “wind / offers / pronunciation / of / already / letter / a c k / nowledged / how does / it it does / through a / very particular / order.” Also, aside from the wavy lines drawn to the side of the handwriting, there are no clear boundaries between what happens in the handwriting and what happens in the type, and there are any number of ways to imagine how they fit or don’t fit together. They could, for instance, be parallel tracks through the book, or two characters speaking, or one speaker with two ways of talking.

At heart this is concrete poetry, but, at the risk of being a little cute, it’s more like abstract expressionist concrete poetry. Its shape is what it is, which here isn’t a heart or a pair of wings, but instead a bathroom mirror intensity and a messy earnestness. The lines “Let’s make / no let’s not / too late / you drive / me to / work / forever” are scrawled across a whole page, and another page of dense type has this handwritten line falling down the middle of it: “melt no mark it’s my fault we weren’t real friends i kept reneging.” The denser, typed-out portions involve similar interesting messes, like how horrible it is to be and to write:

   Not to delight the wide open
This
Is strange I’m not looking at the keys just the screen that
      streaming into smudge before
arrival. The old days’ suck now
turned into its all seen forwards
but misshaped as though taking out
   the rest happened before the cuss.
       Why can’t we know why we can’t be
                       deranged? Reprieve is less
       necessary, not the art of words but
                the unremitting habit of misuse.

What’s so striking about Catfish Po’Boys is its compositional brilliance; these are messy, “difficult” poems of real earnestness spattered over the page in clumps and smears. It’s a glorious clutter in appearance, subject, and execution. The surface of the language, the grammar, syntax, and spelling, is as jumpy and rattled as the surface of the page:

Undestructable indestroyed tbe second understands
the moment and falsifies it teaching where,
    celebrated as absence of place where it
                 destroys this, the dead teaching the
                   death of.

Catfish Po’Boys is a beautiful book, a beautiful object, a long poem at seven-teen pages that could easily be longer and, I hope, will be.

© Paul Killebrew. All rights reserved.