By Buck Downs
Angel Island & Other Poems
Bather Library
www.Bathers-library.square.site
Steve Orth is thinking about you. His hands are busy, sorting and shelving, so that people can find what is there to be found. Occupied hands liberate the mind, and Steve goes where Safeway cannot follow.
What he finds there is not for sale, even as the poems come together in the form of Angel Island & Other Poems, which you can buy from the good folks at Bathers Library in Oakland, Calif.
“I am not doing anything, doing this” Alice Notley writes in At Night the States, and I think Steve would agree—not, as it has often been read, as meaninglessness disguising a deeper meaning (that would be a sop to literature, giving the big brains something to figure out) but as community, saying, you can do it, babe; come on in.
The poems experience their embodiment, like the poet does, as trauma and as joy, and as a lot of plain old meh in between. Watching shows, buying stuff, here we are. It’s tempting to think the experience makes us an expert, in what? living? Yeah, no.
The poems are clear about their non-expert status, even down to specific word choices, like using “sorta philosophical” where others might choose “semi-philosophical” or “quasi-philosophical”. Steve’s approach is rigorously casual. That’s because “I” is not the point; “You” is.
This is not one of those bait-and-switch deals where not-knowing is some special kind of knowledge. I am a cipher to myself until I talk to someone else, and if they hear me and think, for example, geez what a dope, it’s all good. Your opinion is none of my business, and nothing changes faster than a feeling. The fact that you were, are, there, here, at all, is a vital source of pleasure, not to be missed.
About as close to a literary device as Steve uses is to end the poem as close to where it started as it’s practical to get. I like to turn my nose up at that sort of thing, because that makes me feel smart. But this is poetry, not literature. It is useful to loop back around and try to make sure that you guys are at least no more lost than you were when the poem started.
If Steve’s reach seems to exceed his grasp, that’s just an all-time hallmark of good poetry. We have nothing to prove, and we are proving it, every day. You are cordially invited to get involved.