A chainsaw’s God’s way of evening out the playing field between you and everything, even the invisible stuff.

This next installment of the Just Buffalo Small Press Readings Series comes with the above epigraph, courtesy of Jennifer L. Knox’s poem “Speech to the Crowd at the Rodeo.” We may need to bring the supersoakers, cowboy hats and corn dogs to Rust Belt Books to keep up with these three poets and their ability to amuse. And I mean amuse in Ted Berrigan’s sense: both pleasurable and pleasing to the muses.

The poetry of these three amuses and delivers some of the invisible stuff, at once playful and irreverent while striving towards the lurking imaginative mind at the center of each of us. These poets are working at turning us all into children with feverish dreams and potty-mouths. They promise to leave you laughing at the emptiness, imagining the inconsequential and wondering where you left your beer. This is a Buffalo lineup if I ever saw one; these poets balance emotion, smarts and frankness while often using language that approximates natural speech. Allow me to describe and display some of their newest work.

In Bed With Meryl Streep

Hard to believe your first movie

Came out in 1977—you are timeless,

Like a Dracula statue in the rain:

And now, as you rub my shoulders,

Wearing that flowered nightgown,

We hear actual rain, or is it wind,

Rushing around our Buena Vista condo.

You click off Cheers. I know what’s next.

—aaron belz

The above poem is taken from St. Louis native Aaron Belz’s first full-length book, The Bird Hoverer, which was published by Buffalo’s BlazeVOX this year. His poems have the remarkable ability to turn the mind in multiple directions, line by line. The subsequent dizziness approximates euphoria rather than chaos, as Belz’s energetic verse charges on to the next line, the next take, the next punch, the growing mystery masked by layers of representation. The Bird Hoverer is prolific in its use of proper nouns, incorporating utility infielder Tony Graffanino with distant cousins with Hollywood into the folds of the poems. In this way, the work appeals to the dreamers who have cable TV and high-speed Internet at their disposal. His poems are brought to us in HD-quality resolution. Within the layering, Belz often uses overheard speech in these poems, like: “I’m all about hidden microphones,” or “Unless you’re a hotshot African ambassador/It just ain’t happenin’, no how, no way.” Belz here is throwing the party; times are weird, God is a mummy, so let’s dance!

Jennifer L. Knox has been included in Best American Poetry three times (1997, 2003, 2006) and is the author of the brand-spanking new Drunk by Noon (Bloof Books). She has been described as Richard Pryor with an MFA. Like Pryor, Knox has the uncanny ability to make you laugh and then make you feel weird about what you just laughed at. The reason for this being, of course, that the subject matter is actually germane to something important. The entertainment value in Knox’s work is balanced by the intelligence and ingenuity of her verse. Poets like Belz and Knox promise to open new terrain in American poetry by writing sharp, funny and often short pieces, which torque the senses and blossom with meaning. They are poems at home in the vastness of the Internet while still creating a defined experience for the reader.

For example, the searing mock tribute Knox includes in Drunk by Noon for her native California is a perfect example of a lyric poem for the information age. The poem filters a series of unexpected images, allusions, and fragments that distill into a distinctly felt moment:

And Then There Is California

The horizon gutted, skinned, unfurled

and dried like a diamondback, no secrets,

no secret sea cave stash, so evident it all seems

invisible: fissures in the orange San Andreas,

smoldering asphalt under a run-away go cart, 100%

clear skies in Funky Town, Manson said,

“There’s no slack in my act.” Mercury spread

so see-through thin, see this on the other side:

A girl dribbling gas into a fresh-empty 40

out on 10th and Ave. K: for the broke down

Maverick or her friends to huff? Soon barefoot

before the swift, black aqueduct, nearly naked,

the parrot motif adorning her panties aquafies

her little butt peacockishly, but way cooler,

more Mexican—sudden color in a blinding

field of beige. The animals all live underground.

People shoot at nothing—water, the hills.

—jennifer l. knox

In one of the more somber poems from the book, Knox balances speech, pure image, reference, and landscape to create this lonely swirled cross section of California, which feels like it can be anywhere.

Shanna Compton’s various accolades and achievements include associate publisher and director of publicity at Soft Skull Press, founder of the DIY Poetry Publishing Cooperative and publisher of poetry chapbooks and broadsides via her micropress, Half Empty/Half Full.

Her new book from Bloof Books, For Girls, comes with a preface lifted verbatim from a popular health manual for girls and young women published under the same title in 1882:

PREFACE.

THE author of this book lays no claim to originality of subject matter. She has nothing new to say. She does, however, claim originality upon one ground, that of making selections from the writings and teachings of others, and from observation and experience; that of culling here and there knowledge, facts, motives, ideas, and grouping them into practical form.

Seeking to make the material for instruction as complete as possible, she has seized upon and appropriated anything which could contribute to the general design. She has only sought to adapt what others have said to the good of the class for whom she has written.

She herewith submits her efforts to the common sense of her audience, and the common need of our common natures.

Compton’s brilliant response to this is to reappropriate vast swaths of the unoriginal original book, add linebreaks and finesse them into poems with pseudo-chapter titles. The chapters (poems) have titles which recall the oppressive tightness of a corset: “Pride in Having Small Feet,” “On Thinking for Oneself” and “We Know She Knows About Her Elephantine Legs.” The text of the poems, culled from a variety of other sources as well, presents an unceasing attack on female humanity for the sake of perceived femininity (“never let them see you perspire”). The prevailing and unabashed objectification of women should not come as a surprise in a text that predates universal suffrage, however Compton makes her point inside the many surviving prejudices. When Britney Spears shearing her golden locks is followed with such intense public zeal, surely the unwritten gender rules continue to be heeded. Using this critique as her context, Compton delivers the unexpected other side of the coin, reaching beyond the politics on the surface and delivering delicately crafted and amusing poems:

The Wise Girl Will Prepare Herself as Well as She Can to be Happy

You are a bird

inside this cage

Sing

Throw your body

into the air

—shanna compton

Shanna Compton, Aaron Belz and Jennifer L. Knox read their poems on Thursday, October 25, at 7pm, at Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street.