Local poets Daniel Comiskey and C. E. Putnam have published a poem
titled Crawlspace, and as an object it’s compelling. It’s a
tall, lean book, packaged with a CD and a pair of cheap, cardboard 3-D
glasses, and you just kind of want to touch it. The cover looks
like an old punk 45: A man wearing a cloak of tentacles stands,
bare-chested, in the middle of a pool of hypnotic ripples, and the
whole thing is printed in the blurry violet of old-school 3-D.
When you put on the glasses, though, the only part of the collage
that stands out is the man’s disgustingly realistic chest hair.
On further inspection, it appears that the chest hair is actually an
upside-down photograph of someone’s happy trail, leaking from a black
hole of a belly button up into a thatch of pubic hair tucked
just under the man’s chin. It’s a ghastly revelation, thematically
resonating with the title’s 1950s horror-movie font.
A few dozen people have gathered at the Rendezvous’s Jewel Box
Theater for the Crawlspace release party. Doug Nufer, Seattle’s
most gloriously Oulipian force for good, introduces the authors by
first comparing them to bullfighters, and then suggesting that they
wrote the poem more in the style of a wrestling tag team. “When
we apply the rules of professional wrestling to the mayhem of poetry,”
Nufer says, “who or what are we fighting?”
Comiskey and Putnam take the stage, dressed as foppish dandies in
britches and waistcoats, with large buckles on their shoes and
frilly lace everywhere. Putnam reads the flashier bits, the chapters
named things like “Kicks from the House of Shock.” The idea seems to be
a love song to popular culture. Lines like “Maybe/a melancholic
power/chord or two/would clear/the air” suggest a desire to live a
life like in the movies, but many others, like “I’ll put aside my
antediluvian/ways and just hit the showers,” exist solely to be
precious.
Putnam and Comiskey certainly know how to put on a show, and
Crawlspace‘s accompanying CD, with its dramatic readings
interspersed with snippets of songs and sound effects, is great fun.
But Nufer’s introductory question—who are we
fighting?—remains unanswered.
There are about 90 different forces pulling on this poem and, in
performance at least, the end result seems to be an easy laugh.
Crawlspace is an attempt to stitch together poetry and
cliché in order to create something different, but ultimately,
it’s just a fucked-up experiment with some electricity pumped through
it, all sound and fury signifying a cheap thrill. 