Glitter Bomb by Aaron Belz

Persea Books http://www.perseabooks.com

 

I admire Aaron Belz’s quirky independence of thought and humour, which ranges from the self-deprecating, absurd slapstick to smart wordplay and irreverent. He is a poet and essayist, regular contributor to Tears in the Fence, who came to prominence with The Bird Hoverer (BlazeVox, 2007) and Lovely Raspberry (Persea, 2010), which was praised by John Ashbery as being like ‘dreaming of a summer vacation and taking it’. There are echoes of the lighter side of the New York School and the deadpan stand-up poetry of Los Angeles in the literariness, language play and conversational nature of his work. He is from St. Louis, Missouri, now living in North Carolina.

 

Thematically his work uses humour to probe, and ridicule, being and identity, obsessional behavior, social mores, and worries about success and failure. He is, at pains, to pinprick selfishness.

 

Thus:

 

Team

 

There’s no I in team

but there’s one in bitterness

and one in failure.

 

And

 

Your objective

 

In a given situation

Your objective should be

To act as much like yourself

As possible. Just imagine

 

The poetry connects through a diversity of linguistic strategies, which are characterized by a deadpan brevity and artful playfulness.

 

Hopkins Palindrome

 

I caught this

morning morning’s

minion, then gushed

Glossolalia thus:

“Suh tail a loss

olg deh sug neht!

Noinims gninrom

gninrom sihtth

Gu aci!!”

 

Two Utah Palindromes

 

Utah, I hatu!

 

We HATU, Utah. Ew.

 

His most memorable poems have a sharp directness.

 

Indianans

 

When I arrived here I thought it was Indiana.

I discovered people and called them “Indianans.”

I tried to convince them to become Christians.

I’ve since learned that this is not Indiana.

 

Belz collapses popular culture into high art in one tongue in cheek sweep, as in poems, such as ‘Thomas Hardy The Tank Engine’ and ‘Michael Jashbery’:

 

I’m starting with the man

in the convex mirror.

 

There’s more to Belz than being smart though. His style is an amalgamation of different approaches that produce a distinct and pleasurable peculiarity.

 

Avatar

 

Blue computer graphics woman

with smooth cat nose, you are

purer, more in touch with nature,

and actually quite a bit taller than I –

and although you’ve discovered

that your soul mate is really just a

small, physically challenged white guy

gasping for air in a mobile home,

you’ve decided to stick with him.

I’d taken you for one of those shallow

pantheistic utopian cartoon giantesses,

but now I see that I was way off.

 

Belz’s poetry hints at artifices, the metaphysical, and has many echoes, Ashbery for example. It stands tall on its own though.

 

David Caddy 19^th June 2014