ms by Michael Magee

reviewed by K. Silem Mohammad

ms, Michael Magee. Spuyten Duyvil, 2003.

Michael Magee has very weak pun control. In his new book ms, as in his last, Morning Constitutional, almost every poem is awash with the slosh of his verbal incontinence. (He should be wearing “Depunds.”) He takes endless pleasure in hunting the letter, rhyming us to death, committing random and senseless acts of epizeuxis, and otherwise choking his phonemic chicken all over the page. In addition to this semiotic superplus, Magee crams every inch of poem with high and low and middlebrow cultural references, allusions, and name-droppings: in short space, he invokes Albert Ayler, Ice-T, Wallace Stevens, Aphra Behn, Adrienne Rich, Richard Rorty, Groucho Marx, the Civil Rights Movement, and too many other polycontextual themes even to begin to list here. And somehow, it all coheres, or maybe “co-hears” is more like it: Magee has both ears to the ground (and the Plastic-Man image that you have to conjure in order to visualize such a feat is quite fitting), listening both to the receding hoofbeats of literary history and the oncoming roar of the runaway atomic train of postmodernity. In “Body of Thought,” we are given a double disclaimer that eschews both epiphany and elegy, transcendental breakthrough and sentimental breaking down:

                     no words
                                              worthian
                                              high resolution              on the
                                                                                 horizon or
la la
                     la la
meant of such….

Although there may in fact be no high Romantic resolution in sight in this work, and no straightforwardly nostalgic lament either, Magee locates himself un-squarely in a space commensurate with the Wordsworthian/Emersonian/Whitmanian/Barakan etc. project of a poetic whose models and goals are public, hyper-egalitarian, raucously noisy. This work brings the outside in, mixes it up, and spits it back out again as a potent cocktail of theory-jive, trash-talking, free-association, and variously corrupted social texts. In doing so, however, it never leaves out the possibility of “literary” response, of an ideal reader or community of readers who can both dance to the mindless funk and perform close readings that tease out a vast archival network of intertextual traces.

Magee is very much attuned to an aesthetic of stoopid: these poems are sometimes aggressively ill-wrought, like Bizarro-world artifacts whose parts determinedly refuse to contribute to anything like an organic whole or unified vision; instead, they strive for jarring inarticulacy, exaggeratedly awkward figurations, as in this stanza from “The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends!”:

My name’s twice when I was what
Wilbur wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong.
Eyeball it and tell me you wouldn’t
Elbow ere Ana wobble’t on a
Cowbell of the jarhead will. The dragon
Fly’s a wallflower to the shit. The shit
Flies like the crow. The crow’s an artifact.

The fundamental constructive principle here is one of idiot perseveration, a zombified insistence on following chains of random signifiers down whatever blind trail they happen to blaze—e.g., via the soundplay of eyeball/elbow/wobble/cowbell, or the degraded free-associative gradatio of shit > flies > crow. Although these poems are not parodies, they share with parody the tactic of pirating forms from particular modes and skeletalizing them into grotesque (dys)functional reductions: the modes that Magee targets, moreover, are just as often contemporary and “experimental” as they are canonical and “traditional.” The result is that the book insists on the obsolescence of satire in a world that has normalized and subsumed the satiric gesture into the habitus of everyday discourse.

It would be misleading to give the impression that ms is nothing more than one aphasic act of anti-mimicry after another: as in the hip-hop and funk musical models that Magee so often draws on, stoopid becomes a potentially liberatory force, an expression of faith in democratic ideals, however degraded and erased those ideals have become. Like Superman’s Bizarro-world, the world of ms is stubbornly opposite to the dominant values of the mainstream, but somehow its exhaustive series of reversals results in a purity of commitment that constitutes its own moral integrity and even system of faith. In“ Fragments for John Parker,” Magee writes:

“ God makes ’em, God takes ’em”
— my dad

a totally
insufficient thing
to say
                      except perhaps in
                      context: as response
to the body
gone ass-backwards
for no known reason: “it just does that”
the rhetoric of what’s appropriate
a needle or a ray, concrete, prepositionless

Magee’s application of the ancient rule of decorum to the chronic condition of ass-backwardness from which we all now suffer results in a perfectly appropriate rhetorical stance, if a sometimes perversely ironic one. By all conventional standards of sense and taste, this book ought not to succeed in its goofily errant air raid on the inarticulate, but “ it just does.” Uncle Mike is in the house.

© K. Silem Mohammad. All rights reserved.