"In my late teens, I began to hear the voices of all of the animals I had killed and stacked into barrels." That's how Matt Jasper begins to describe how he came to write his long poem, The Tip of the Iceberg, which is the latest from Chapbook Genius. Jasper's description is a long, miraculous author's note, one that you can read in its entirety at the Publishing Genius blog, but here's another section that squarely informs my reading of the piece:
I forgot to feed or house myself for a few days and then started selling my body to the cheerful phlebotomists at Medical Technical Research Incorporated of Jamaica Plain. As a human guinea pig testing experimental dosages of theopheline and other drugs, I discovered that going insane is a great way to meet other crazy people. The solipsism of mental illness often has people going crazy in different directions--becoming more and more isolated. Yet at times one can go out of one's mind and meet other people who have exited their minds in a similar way and toward the same goal. Or one can recognize someone who can share and live in whatever world you happen to be dreaming up at the moment. I've stretched out the thread of my reason beyond my ability to reel it all back in, yet there really is such a thing as being a magnet for insane people and I became that. I felt that by absorbing all forms of madness, I would no longer be able to go mad. One way to absorb madness was to capture it in words. The pressures I was under made poetry a natural form of expression. It could compress experience. It didn't have to make sense. I could use it as a spell. The line breaks broke at fluctuations in or the collapse of conscious thought.The Tip of the Iceberg is a framed poem about a guy being hunted by a mentally unstable woman. Most of it is a life story recounted by the woman. She moves quickly through her experiences, speaking from a distance, in an almost old-fashioned way. Detached from the content, Jasper has written a poem that reads like a fan letter to Frank O'Hara. The poem is taut and fragile. Once again, I find that Jasper introduces the poem better than I can:
I wrote poems about delusions and crazy people. I had many insane girlfriends. The iceberg poem lifts the remembered inflections, incantations, and obsessions of at least two or three of them but does approximately center on one who was indeed committed for trying (quite seriously) to kill me. I really didn't mind at the time. I was sort of flattered. Other people committed her. I never would have.
I wanted her more as a disembodied voice that had been cast out into the world. She is broken down into voice and thoughts that scatter across landscapes and then weave themselves back into her always with a misplaced significance, odd magnifications, something crucial forgotten. She is furiously trying to create a beautiful and whole picture of herself as someone capable of being alive and loved while crucial elements of her desired self dissolve, undermine her.As always, it's available to read online at Issuu or to print (double-sided) at home, fold, staple and enjoy (tips on doing that).
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