I Am Not Dead, Poetry

A cautionary note to you-yes, you, with this book in your hands, reading these words: If your ideas about poetry are in any way "frail," "gentle," "sweet-scented," or "meek," it's recommended strongly that you not open, buy, or read this book, Gregory Marszal's I Am Not Dead. Why the admonition? Well, it's not because Marszal's poetry is difficult (it isn't). It's not because it lacks beauty (it's filled with beauty). And it's not because it fails to be evocative, lyric, inventive, unusual, and surprising (it never fails in those ways). No. It's because Marszal's poetry is written, solely and only, out of and about the truth. And so, you ask? The truth about what? Well, let's put it this way: Marszal concerns himself solely and only with the truth about our existence-and as if that's not bad enough, after that he concerns himself solely with the truth of our being alive within that existence. Marszal writes: The poet, so to speak, must be able to disembody. He must practice, among other things, the art of inhabiting objects: Fences, broken beer bottles, shattered crab shells, splintered mountain stones, grasses, trees, stars, and the walls of ruined cities. He must practice this discipline: His consciousness, imaginative, rational, as well as emotional, must touch being empathetically by entering It; he must watch, he must witness, the universe of humankind and nature from its point of view. But also, he must feel its resistance to him, its otherness. The poet must begin with the particular and elongate, expand, consciousness to experience the conditions of other subjectivities. But he must not be deluded into believing that he has achieved this subjectivity. To avoid this typical totalitarian error, he must grasp that all otherness is what it is in light of its congenital resistance to assimilative conceptualizations. The silence will not tell you how to live, but it will grow an intractable tree with a wild shimmering crown of leaves inside of you; and when the wind heaves, it shall speak to you; and you shall survive every bomb, but one. "Take the sudden beauty of Wallace Stevens, mix in the wise weirdness of Ashbery, top it off with the somber naturalism of A.R. Ammons--and you get Gregory Marzsal"-Adam Engel Gregory Marszal is a native of New York City. He now lives with his wife of twenty years in the San Francisco Bay Area.