Billy Mills Reviews Self Geofferential on Elliptical Movements

Billy Mills Review : Friday March 21, 2025

https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/recent-reading-march-2025-a-review/

Geoffrey Gatza is a poet, publisher and, it turns out, a visual artist, an aspect of his work that features heavily in his latest book, Self Geofferential, which contains a large number of his mixed media collages, a couple of drawings, and a painting and photograph alongside, and interacting with, a set of very interesting poems. I claim no expertise in visual art, but the collages in particular strike me as being a cross between the best kind of children’s book illustration, say Eric Carle, Dada and 1960s Vispo. The poems, despite the title, are personal but not confessional, and approach the real by way of the imagined, or maybe the other way round,  as in these lines from ‘America’:

I can see the pleasant house I live in from here.
This house is Kenmore, but it is not what I see when I walk by.
On the orange and red leaf-covered street, my home lifts the skies.
It has been here since time began, or maybe 1924, when it was built.

I purchase goods in the shops near my home in Kenmore,
But these shops are not what I imagine when I see my home.
I see the many different businesses these buildings have housed,
They have moved forward, stopping only to mark the passing time.

Kenmore being a ‘real’ place, one where Gatza lives in both real and imagined life. And the imagination enables a clearer, more comprehensive, view of the real, so that you see not just what is now, but where it has come from. And this depends on the power of actually seeing what’s in front of you, of seeing:

Maybe he had never really looked at anything, ever.
He adjusted his glasses and looked deeply
Into the daffodils standing in their crystal vase.

They looked so familiar yet the drawing he rendered
Was squiggles and shapes resembling yellow flowers,
But they were not what he saw in the vase.
(from ‘Drawing Daffodils’)

In other poems. Gatza reimagines fables and fairy stories as ways into that imaginary reality:

Even though you know all the story by heart, your heart skips a beat
When your grandmother reads out the wolf’s lines. Her voice becomes
Quite growly, wolf-like, and dangerous. It feels real when she pretends.

That last sentence could stand as epigraph for the entire collection, while the matter-of-fact surface of the language is representative Gatza’s style in the book. It’s a style that owes something to Ashbery and the New York poets, but the poet’s distinctive approach absorbs any such influences into a coherent tone that revolves around the nuances of language:

In Cooking, apples are pommes.
In Cooking, potatoes are pommes.

Under the unity of naming
I hoped to bridge that gap, but

The hungry spirit of time
looks truth in the eyes.

No amount of experiment,
experience, and discovery
can change my disappointment

Apples are not potatoes,
And burn in hot oil.
(from ‘Disappointment Apples’)

Language, specifically poetry, being the medium by which the imagined and real worlds are brought into alignment:

At the bar we read
In the New Yorker
John Ashbery has died.

Also, hurricane Irma
is barreling down
On the Leeward Islands.

Turns out
The whole world is a hurricane.

The whole fucking world is a poem
About hurricanes flooding
Our streets with red geraniums.

But enough. It’s always telling when I find myself quoting more than writing about a book; I can only hope that the bits I’ve quoted are enough to inspire you to go read the full thing. You won’t regret it.