The Daily Glance
Nate Pritts' [uniquely constructed self] contains a series of centos all created, we are told, from lines taken from freshman composition papers in college. This process makes for poems that are choppy at times but also fascinatingly full of insight. For me, the chapbook really shows how a good poet can craft most language uses into interesting work. Take the lines from the chapbook's last poem:
To make the person I write about more interesting
& also complex, I pretend he is a me
who is crazy-sad about a lot of things really
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Do not always expect to hear the answers you want.
I was in front of the locomotive & you started
snapping memories while I beamed from ear to ear.
This piece jumps around quite a bit, but the seams have been connected clearly, and there is a pattern and readings to be had here. The same is true of all of the poems; still, even more engaging is the question of the self in this chapbook. The I appears over and over, but it is a constructed I out of other people's language, but then again, isn't that always the case? So, if selves are always constructions of a sort, then the unique part about the construction of the persona(s) of these poems is that the set of language for his/her/their construction(s) is/are limited to language lifted from student papers.
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