'The sentence in my mind is turn your breasts into cash with music.'i found this book by reading ben mirov’s e-chapbook collected ghost at h_ngm_n, and then going to ben mirov’s blog and going to his twitter at some point
ghost machine won the 2009 caketrain chapbook competition. it is 97 pages, so it seems kind of like a full-length book
themes in the book are ghosts, machines, kids, dreams, sex, hoodies, headphones, and the san francisco bay area, and some kind of relationship, maybe a dying/dead relationship
the book has 7 sections that vary in form. there are a lot of prose poems and short poems. one section has longer prose poems, but still less than a page each. two sections have poems with page breaks in the middle of sentences. one section has the word ‘Eye’ instead of the pronoun ‘I’
Eye touch a night machine
[page break]
in the shape of a woman.
the collection has a lot of unity/coherence. there is a lot of repetition or near-repetition of lines and phrases, like references to ‘the "green bunny poem"’ or ‘green bunnies’ and someone being in a room with fleetwood mac. also, the speaker refers to a lot of characters by using one letter (‘R,’ ‘D’), and some characters return multiple times
sometimes because of the returning references, you can ‘put together’ more of the story of the characters. the speaker states in one poem that they don’t think they will ever take the train to berkeley, and in another poem, the speaker states that a woman they know lives in a cottage in berkeley
some poems end abruptly with lines that don’t seem ‘significant’ in any immediately apparent way. here is the end of the poem ‘ghost receptor’
I tell Meric it makes me sad.
I tell Dan I’m wiser now.
My head is full of Love is Chemicals.
I’m sleeping on a couch.
the sentences in the book are mostly short and direct, and the sentence structure is usually ‘subject-verb-object’ in present tense. some poems include almost only sentences with this structure, so it feels repetitive, maybe monotonous or deadpan
He’s staring at neon graffiti and doesn’t look away. He looks like a rich kid on acid. He turns into a duffle bag. The man I have sex with is me. I don’t dream about you. I find your feelings’ cloud. It doesn’t end with Brain and Jeremy at Delirium. It’s better without music in the dark.
the poems remind me of a lot of different writers and texts for different reasons
the poems that have page breaks in the middle of sentences remind me of ethusiasm: odes & otium by jean day, which has a similar form in its ‘romantic fragments’ section
the poems juxtapose a lot of lines that don’t fit together in any immediately apparent way
We go to the roof and put a blanket on Victor. I search his head for something to do. I remember how to carry a snare drum.
this form reminded me of what t.s. eliot wrote in ‘the metaphysical poets’
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
the juxtapositions also remind me of ‘ketjak’ by ron silliman, and maybe his poem ‘BART’ (which i've written about). also the repetition in ghost machine reminds me of ‘ketjak,’ and the way the repeating lines have a different feeling each time
in a couple sentences of the book, i get a feeling similar to what i wrote about robert grenier’s ‘sentences.’ a sentence describes something that i have done, like wearing a hoody and walking out of a building, and i feel kind of nostalgic about it
some poems seem to stay with the same characters or situation for multiple sentences or a whole poem, but those poems are still usually a little ambiguous or surreal
E thinks things are over. I didn’t know how to do it in a hotel. I put a wet rag over my head. I was breathing fast.
the ghost theme in the book and design seems maybe more prominent than necessary, but i like the look of the black and white, and the circles
the first 40 pages of the book can be viewed in this pdf (poems start on page 17)
you can buy the book from ben mirov here; you can buy the book from caketrain here
