Mainstream
Right from the start, Magee’s work bristles with the spirit
of improvisation. Everything about it pops: classic poetry chops,
a serious sense of humor, unabashed rawness. Mainstream is thrilling
because it can turn in any direction at any time, moving effortlessly
from wacked units of thought turning inside out to tender moments
of highly focused nonsense and song that get, paradoxically, straight
to the point. The frames we bring to these poems can’t remain
intact stanza to stanza -- and in this instability there are great
poetic pleasures and possibilities.
--Drew Gardner
Author Note on Mainstream:
The preceding poems are mainstream poems. When I realized I was
writing mainstream poetry, I quickly wrote the poem "Mainstream
Poetry." K. Silem Mohammad responded:
Want to take seriously [Pixar-esque weasel/clown-faces behind
me fleer and moue] for a bit here Mike Magee's reconfiguration
of the poetic Mainstream. Others have pointed this out before,
of course, but "mainstream poetry" as usually construed
by its opponents is anything but...A mainstream is a forceful,
central current that carries in its path all the debris and livestock
and entire vacationing families that get vortexed into it. It
is not a carefully constructed iron walkway that escorts the effete
peripatetic poet safely above a scenic view of the countryside
and its filthy horizon. In the mainstream, you have to shout to
be heard above the roar of the already-tired water metaphor I'm
spinning out here. In the mainstream, the weasels with clown faces
have uzis. The mainstream is the scary global video game we live
in, everyday, and it has nothing to do with some absurd publishing
scam within which a few bloodless surrealists and failed classicists
and Tools of the Homespun False Consciousness get to define what
is normative.
O, God the Reader, you are in the middle of it!
Praise for Michael Magee’s previous books…
Morning Constitutional
Equal parts philosophy and free jazz, standup and rap, Michael
Magee's roving first book melds an anarchic energy with a willingness
to try anything in poetry; like a jazz soloist, Magee has the
audacity to hit sour notes, with the conviction that he can bend
them back into song.
––Philip Metres, writing in Jacket
MS
Stuttering turns into syncopation in this edgily engaging collocation
of accents, attitudes, occasions. The poems in MS
are provocative, certainly without idealization, the dollars-and-cents
context of our grainy American dream. Mike Magee's detailed optical-ocular
orbiting effects –– "other-wise / waning or adroitly
loitering" –– make reading this collection a
constant surprise.
––Susan Howe
Does the poet diagnose a medical condition or continue a feminist
tradition? Is it a motor ship or a manuscript? A degree of science
or a software appliance? Recklessly eyeballing Mike Magee's "grainy
American dream," my optic nerves jangle to the tune of jump-cut
language, slurred and blurred words flashed on the screen of memory
with a quick trigger finger on the universal remote. Magee's MS
interrupts our programming with his alternative vision.
––Harryette Mullen
Book Information:
· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] (April 2006)
· ISBN: 0975922818
· Product Number: 53292272
$11
