cover image Paper Head Last Lyrics

Paper Head Last Lyrics

Andrew Levy. Roof Books, $11.95 (109pp) ISBN 978-0-937804-83-4

Levy, in books like Values Chauffeur You and Continuous Discontinuous, has quietly been producing some of the most fascinatingly meditative avant-garde writing around. In this ninth collection, Levy sets out with an ethics of observation and agitation, observing with no definable goals but with a quasi-Buddhist, quasi-materialist calling to be in the world, moment by moment, recording its contradictions and, when there is beauty, its necessity: ""A surfer in methodological self-consciousness/ forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting/ to wipe this clear screen with/ some cloth of disparity/ What we will try to become, that labor/ curious about each."" The idiom of the long title poem, taken up in much of the book, is somewhere between Williams's Asphodel and the fluid, polyglot and cross-cut rhetorical strategies of Barrett Watten's Progress. Levy never sounds entirely like he's speaking to one singular figure (like a Flossie), but his poem-including-history seems poignant in a way that suggests modernism, though it never entirely submits to the rigors of method or foregrounded structure ""to convey, translate, transfer/ colonize the writer's fairness."" Indeed, Levy can be willfully transcendental, but takes explicit shots at the way Dialist proclivities have become class-defined within American culture: ""A memory of light/ The turd of transcendence establishes a hillside estate:/ Transcendence Hill Club/ Croquet is the game of choice."" When politics take center stage, they can seem undeveloped (the GOP and the Democrats are ""Troglodytes and Neanderthals""), but on the whole, these ""last"" lyrics, and the essay on aesthetics that appears as a postscript, present a complex, invested mind at play among words, trying to find a way to ""do what you're thinking."" (Aug.)