spuytenduyvil

rob mclennan’s How the alphabet was made, overflows with poetic community. Poets met and mentioned inhabit the pages, wrapping the reader further and further into mclennan’s poetic affinities. These affinities spawn new poems documenting what is read, and what is found in the daily and foreign. The poems journey through a poet’s life with alphabet and breath. Travels to New Orleans commune with celebrations for and with the many poets he has published through his essential above/ground press. Tourism, commerce, history and daily life converse as he asks us to “Consider, pines. Punctuate the difference.”

        Sarah Mangold

 

 

In How the alphabet was made, rob mclennan revisits Kipling’s narrative in which a girl invents the alphabet in order to better communicate— with her father first, & with the world at large as well. mclennan’s alphabet includes “G-d” & “N/A” & “Ph” & “xxx” — letters which, in minimal combination & in abbreviation, express ideas far larger than their number. “N/A,” in its entirety, says “Is disappeared; irrelevant.” With which letters do we express what has disappeared or what is beyond our connections? In “Initial, middle C,” mclennan writes around & into where we start in language. We learn middle C first & move out from there on the piano. A letter, a starting point of language, can be a place. The starting point of language can be central— not the start or end of a line but inhabiting the center of our thinking. “Speak, low fancy. Using words I know you trust, I erase carelessness.” History, language, place, children— these form a beautiful, complex plait in mclennan’s new book. “This is how we speak. Exist.”

         Pattie McCarthy