The Daily Glance
Skip Fox’s At That feels like it traces daily poetic experiences because he pulls in quite a lot, from elections to wars to cats to philosophy. In fact, so much is happening in these poems that it’s hard to point to some single themes. Fox likes to play with language and our expectations of what is poetry. Some of the pieces are letters, some present us with choices for readings, some read like pithy sayings strung together, and one is even a book blurb. Fox’s references range from Buddhism to Mardi Gras to Wittgenstein to Batman, and in most of the poems, we just listen to him talk/think through daily thing amplified and skewed by existing in Fox’s poetics/philosophic world. By that, I mean that the daily things might just be discussing the character of other poets, as he does with the Black Mountain poets and Objectivists. Really, it seems that the process of writing poetry is perhaps more important than the final product for Fox. I don’t mean that the final product is not interesting (it is), but this book works as the tracing of the process, and that process could be described alternatively as how to exist poetically.
Comments