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Garrett Kalleberg
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Psychological Coporations, Spuyten Duyvil, New York, NY 2002
Garrett Kalleberg’s Psychological Corporations finds that the subject’s position in psychic space can be rigidly fixed, just as “at exactly 12:10 AM a photograph will be taken of my garbage/ can from 5 miles up and in 2 or 3 years I could buy it for cheap.// That at exactly 12:30 AM a/ photograph etc. There’s an advertisement in Wired.” The speaker of “From a Psychological Atlas” tracks “very very very small scale” emotional movements from behind a terrifyingly blank lab coat, while he of “Agoraphobia” gazes “at the panorama and the whole/ glorious diorama of pedestrians going around, very slowly,/ for walks.// Not rats.” In 18 lyrics that take neo-Eliotic alienation to the breaking point, Kalleberg finds the zero point where morality disappears in action and feeling.
—Publishers Weekly
A David Lynch of deadly nightshade poetry, Garrett Kalleberg may enter posterity, like Thomas Grey for his “Elegy on a Country Courtyard,” on the basis of one or two perfect, scary poems.... Psychological Corporations... ends with a singularly memorable poem: “The Last Seven” takes images and words from The Book of Revelations.... Angels, plagues, beasts, troop by, only to terminate in an unforeseen volte face: “[And] he is the eighth, and is of the / angels which had the / vials full / of the seven last plagues, and / talked with me”. A complex problematics of subject (self/ego) are compressed into that final fillip: what could “me” be, in dialogue with such phantasmagoria?... Kalleberg goes as deep and vulnerable as childhood’s guilty traumas—“I have dark thoughts these nights, dreams / which are pretty violent, I / hope this doesn’t mean anything I’ve / never hurt a thing, really, not including / when Bryan and I went crazy with a / BB gun upstate, we were young, children / can be cruel, children are cruel”—and as high and cynically adult as meditations upon the career of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, in a plain, sometimes brutal, but brutally honest poetry.
—Rain Taxi The poems of Psychological Corporations challenge the limits and excesses of rationality and its requisite objectification on the one hand, and subjectivity as a state and as a condition, however tenuously constructed, on the other hand, through the linguistic medium of their equivocal interactions.
Psychological Corporations can be ordered from Amazon, or direct from Spuyten Duyvil (enter the SD site by clicking on the icon, then follow the Poetry link and select the title, or follow the Search link and enter title or author.).
* * *
Forces Act Upon the Skin
I sped towards a lake in
upstate New York where I laid
in the grass and thought,
let the rest of the world catch up with me.
Likewise a touch, a caress, thoughtful
and attentive, moves at times
towards a sudden withdrawal—a
heightening of intensity, of feeling or
depth, reaching down into the very innermost,
it’s a long way down.
Sound of slow slide whistle.
Wind in the thistle.
Crickets. Cow bells.
How beautiful it is here, that I
want to get out of my own skin, take a walk
before dinner, up the mountain,
Mont Blanc rosy pink now glowing
in the distance.
DEFENSE ABSOLUE
DANGER DE MORT, written across
an electrical tower—in this world
electromagnetic forces are
stronger than gravity, I know
but how I’ve always wanted
to fly—there was a boy
in Staten Island climbed an electrical
pole, one summer and
touched the wire, the shock
stopped his heart—he was dead—falling
to the ground, when the force of
hitting the street started
his heart again, he
walked home, complained
of some pain, took off
his clothes and with it
his skin.
* * *
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