Protuberances of the New Normalcy

The New Normalcy
By John Coletti
Boog Literature March 2002 NYC
Review by Tom Devaney

 

The title and many poems in John Coletti’s new chapbook (his first; published by Boog Literature) are an artistic refusal of what Foucault called “normalization,” the power of which imposes homogeneity and complacency. At their strongest, the poems are unabashed in Coletti’s various and deeply felt stance against the much touted and troubling notion of “the new normalcy.”

The book’s fine and apt cover art (a painting of three identical vacuum cleaners circa 1950) is by Jonathan Allen who has worked and collaborated with Coletti on several other poet and painter projects.

At their most realized Coletti’s poems are a kind of scrawl of emotional articulation. One of the demanding and more compelling aspects of Coletti’s work here is that little seems to intervene between his perceptions and the poems themselves. In the poem “A seat pulls under as the first falls out” Coletti writes:

what is accurate cannot be
just as bad or worse
I go through stupid phases
and think I’m different
I’m no different than my skips

One strong impulse is that there is little context beyond Coletti’s record, which are the poems; that is, Coletti translates his apprehensions into the tactile language of each poem: “I’m no different than my skips”.

Coletti’s poems are the aggregate register of innumerable low (or rather specific) intensity conflicts. In the collective Coletti piles counterforce against counterforce to make poems both perplexing as they are powerful. “Low Intensity Conflict,” he writes:

Normalized Bully Behavior
Thank God for my being
naïve and not simply
tired out     from a life of lost struggles
I am not that far from sky   from infancy
“the law of the jungle” still weeps
brokers power undeniably
you can stop a fight
or you can watch it go
new knowledge
tries to love the flag
but cannot
can’t love
like you did
when you were 8
hating Commies
on steroids
in Rocky IV

In many cases the poems feel as if they hold future disclosures. In other words, Coletti’s hyper-articulated poems form the sites of cultural memory under the aegis of “the new normalcy.” In an unpublished review of the painting of artist and friend Zachary Wollard, “So Many Zippers On That Brand New Backpack” Coletti touches upon much of what is most central in his own work and poems. He writes: “I remember being ten years old. And this isn’t how it was. But it’s what it felt like. At least now what I feel like having felt then. Here it is and Here I was. Together at once.”

Coletti’s poems expose and attempt to engage all that is the visibly false, inadvertently stuttered, hyper-manipulated in his intervening discourse. In the poem, “Dedication,” he writes:

You can’t mean  anything
To be anything
As long as you
Break something
With something else
        You exist.
You buy something
To break something
And are something

In their physical, atmospheric, and emotional scratched articulations the poems struggle with themselves struggling with everything to be themselves. Despite a resistance against all of the cheap, unjust, and abundantly insincere forces— including the poetic materials themselves—Coletti’s poems register and continually seek to embody the tonal tensions in the language and his own person in the poems all at once and one poem at a time.

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