For Love by Jared Schickling

How refreshing and enlightening to read a poet who is close reading another poet through the art of poetry (as opposed to commentary, its inverse). There is no greater homage to a great teacher than to take what he held most dear—assonance, sibilance, language, and love—and elevate it into a new consciousness: one that dives deeply into a great poet’s failures in order to reverberate his echoing prosody into new form. Like Creeley—who could turn an angel on a pin by writing tiny poems, or expand a field into a universe by drawing out long ones—Schickling’s poems eschew easy images by making metaphors move the mind into a composted groundlessness. Here, the particulars of daily life are the rich material which Schickling’s poems order into such eloquent echoes.

—Kristin Prevallet

Jared Schickling makes no bones about his intent. Cribbing the title of one of the more famous books of poetry in the late twentieth century, Robert Creeley’s For Love, Schickling reorients it with the subtitle, (the order of the echoes), and sets out to rewrite love in a context where the lover becomes “the grape of my obscene lip.” Beginning with a reflection on Creeley’s “The Door” and it’s hall-of-mirrors reluctance to enter the garden beyond the door, Schickling takes us straight into a phantasmagorical engagement with language that constantly evades the predictable in its quest to find a way in. Raucous, rollicking, and rowdy—“Come with me to the nougat of secretions. / Brings all the impaled promises”—and “guided by the fluidic serendipity’s coat”—Schickling takes us on a wild ride through love’s perennial issues, but always with a fresh eye and an ear for the unprecedented.

—Michael Boughn

Homage is too often hagiography, imitation, or direct echo. Jared Schickling’s homage to Robert Creeley and his 1962 book, For Love, is a more complicated thing. Schickling, who has lived his own decades with Creeley’s book, pays homage in a process like the one described in “The Antennae of Individual Points”: “How hearing is the brandishing / violence and its rosy / pigeon holes.” Violence and love were Creeley’s muses; Schickling orders his echoes in the muscle of a language dense with image and metaphor. This is a maximal response to a minimalist’s work. “The phenomenon it signals is the lack thereof.” Or: in its lack of direct echo, the poems speak back to Creeley’s through the strangeness of a new alphabet.

—Susan M. Schultz

For Love (the order of the echoes) is thoughtfully both a tribute and anti-tribute, simultaneously, to one of American poetry’s most celebrated figures. But this celebration doesn’t mean that the author wasn’t flawed at times. Schickling uses this writer’s aesthetic to write against his sentiments. In essence, this is a book of form versus content. This book embraces the idea of the echoes and shifts its sound in its many returns so that no sound is as the original. No message is what was found in the original text, but love remains. And as Schickling writes, “All forms become lonely roads.” I say, take this lonely road of words that are “lyrical as silent elephants” and see what outcomes can come from a nuanced love.

—Kenning Jean-Paul Garcia

Jared Schickling is the author of Guides, Translators, Assistants, Porters: a polyvocal American epic minus the details (BlazeVOX, 2018), The Mercury Poem (2017), and Province of Numb Errs (2016), as well as other books, and he edited A Lyrebird: Selected Poems of Michael Farrell (2017). He is a high school English teacher in Buffalo, NY, and he edits Delete Press and The Mute Canary, publishers of poetry.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 64 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-365-2