The bowling alley sounds like a bottling factory its lines uncorked and every lane a light show of spilling prolepsis and soft bottomed shoe slide with curving anticipation and explosive excitement.
Splits appear and show in the piqued spin of the turn about after the pause as the ball rolls to its clatter in the gutter of chagrin at the pins left standing and smiling
wingless pigeons dithering in place the lane vast with its snowy beer stained past the air warm with smoke pin boys hiding in darkened wings.
His metaPhone (Q 1) holstered on his belt and boasted like a pearl-handled spatula a fine tweezer feature purest in the kitchen but as a mycophagist on vacation he was slow to get the picture: he should have left the phone at home.
She skiffed his phone like a stone across the stream and it smacked the face of a rapid rose to the lip and flipped onto the river rocks where it slipped like a fish and caught between silly and sorry mess
while the water ebbed aback and swirled about him he dove again and again for the mother-of-pearl case for his applications and poisonous twins and recipies his personal algorithms and desserts
calendars his files and messages tips and notes settings and cameras and his unfinished Joy of… his meals his awards medals commendations his secret usernames passwords fundamental
identities his capabilities capacities radio interface multi-mode banking signaling his data to Universe. Drown rather than lose his cell. They were supposed to be on vacation, but he was on his cell phone
and while he was on his call stung was she by the venomous double away they swam leaving him and his phone in the hot sand where he smelled the world at his feet.
Now we must close our caper of the nose before the plot thickens the dickens to play for a meal is saga but a poem mere snack one is shared the other kept under the hat.
Along line where words follow one by one each distanced and obscure like items of trash along highway stuck in weeds between ditch and fence lift shifting cars passing sailing into wind of logic
or like grocery carts out of line and place scattered about full of claptrap and flapdoodle unexpected foundation for absurding suburban where shopping rigs
get garaged for night like pigs asleep in makeshift huts with conquistadors while in city in loose deduce gathered around poles trees once lived
covered in plastic people under new moon of normal dining al fresco in fresh air of improvised jail things will never be same way things have always been.
When the urge to write slows to a trickle and the need to talk seems superfluous the funnel of listen fills with earwax summer’s vase stuck with dry flies and all the flowers fall drooped one awakes yet again and gets up aroused by the unsurpassable sun spilling coffee on the backs of its studs.
An urban photographer idling along on foot found a plein air painter her portable kit easel, small canvas, box of luscious bright wet paints open and with one brush loose and light all the motion in her wrist at the edge of the street like frosting a cake her subject the poet scribbling on a napkin at a sidewalk cafe table sitting cool under an umbrella saturated scarlet his poem about a live oil painter out and about creeped up on cautiously for the stolen image no one likely would object.
If to identify is to accuse, I probably shouldn’t mention Keith Kopka’s travelling punk band past in easy to get front row outlier venues where the stage is so close to the audience sweat exchanges and curls the tickets, nor mention his emergence as a poet with enough good material to fill a book, “Count Four.” Good title for a book of poems, readers waiting for the rim shot, the close cadence that bridges music and language, a command, like Basic Training drill marching, the poet soldier the sensitive one who saves the Motel 8 (or 6 or 4 or 12 bar blues) weekend pass receipt on the back of which is scribbled a waitress’s name and phone number which might appear in some future poem about a past mistake. She gotta way, don’t she, babe. And we’ll never know if she’s still a waitress (speaking of identity, and so what if she is?) or if she found success (if not happiness in apple pie crust) by turning her con artist skills into legitimate work as an adjunct and now only waitresses part time to make ends meet:
She’s a waitress, no older than nineteen, mouth caked in lipstick, pie flour streaked on her thigh. Watching her, I can tell by how she keeps her apron on during sex, that she’ll wait tables forever.
III. Lafayette, Indiana, Star City (50)
Kopka’s poetry seems to successfully bridge what should satisfy simultaneously the respectable academic reader with diplomatic credentials and the still street smart fighting guys and gals intellectually inclined but unwilling to sell their future for a degree, happy to wait for an encore they know deep down where the blood runs true will never come:
but on the entire crowd who continues to believe it, when you sing about the coal vein of hillbilly music being the only thing that keep you hangin’ on, the expensive idea that you still break our hearts, and have your heart broken.
Dwight Yoakam’s Hat (89)
Just so the key to the effectiveness and efficiencies of Kopka’s poems, which will be popular scratched on the walls of an egalitarian latrine or published in the pure pages of a Poetry magazine, where normal wears formal:
Asia is a sexual astronaut, surrounded by a radiated halo, a solar system of pleasure choices, links to videos, and a chat room.
Asia Carrera’s XXX Butt-kicking Homepage, 1998 (12)
Yet there are domestic, familial, moral imperatives, purposeful and meaningful roots to Kopka’s poetry. One doesn’t become a Punk (or poet) by chance, but by choice. The decision is existential and requires a rebirth. All life begins as a kid and spins like a top:
By then I’d circled all the way around to my father’s house again. Same house I grew up in. So I ring the doorbell, and when my father answers I start to name what I’ve lifted.
Interrogation (1)
His dad sets him up in a suit in a poem that contains the ritual of a sacrament, the Sacrament of Confirmation. On the way home they rehearse a lie for his mom about how they got the suit, as if she won’t guess the truth. They won’t mention “Vinny the Tailor,” the kid’s sponsor, who never sewed a stitch in his life:
Vinny, menace of the Jersey Turnpike, man who never stitched a thing more complicated than an alibi,
Vinny the Tailor (20)
The world turns, as in a soap opera, life grows hairy, there are chores to get done, some things change and others don’t:
like an un-staked scarecrow. My aunt dries dishes while my mother washes. My uncle rolls his eyes when I toss Danielle a dish rag, and take my mother’s place
Homecoming (33)
The roots of now old trees rise up, raise the sidewalk, crack the cement. You can’t go home again, but neither will you feel at home in Harvard Yard. You find yourself starting to talk about punctuation, a concern for commas:
This comma, handed down from generations of working class parents
Georgic on the Boston Comma (37)
“Count Four,” and place a comma. As good a rule as any. And with rules come sophistications, affairs of the road, where poems become counts of indictments, stories are told slant, as Emily suggested, where “Success in Circuit lies.” But there are more guns in these poems than guitars, and a violence that cries out for meaning. The words are crisp and intelligible, not muddy as if through a Marshall 100 watt amp built to take squelching and squealing abuse. The poems waiver in stereo back and forth between anecdotal narratives laced with abuse and epiphanic moments and where some never awaken from the noise of self-abuse. These poems were written over time, the book collecting from a myriad of sources, a few independent or alternative, and are brought together under the imprimatur of a vintage label. The book’s title appears in the poem “All We Do Is Begin,” as in “Begin the Beguine,” where poetry translates noise into music, mosh pit convulsions into slow dance. It’s poetry where the Punk finds their way out of the mosh pit and into the solo business of writing poems to make sense of it all:
Through the wall you heard a song end, and in its ring the singer counted to four. You were just starting to understand how he’d count four thirty times a night for twenty years. It is easy to hate what we’re given, especially when it’s all we know.
All We Do Is Begin (85).
The guns are not symbols, as any guitars might have been; they’re literal and costly and deadly and like tattoos hard to erase. And the poems come loaded with history lessons, poems like “You, Strung,” that meld the personal with the general, reality with fantasy. These are poems Holden might have written, if he had written poems. And an epigram might make for the stunning occasion of the argument, as in “Square Dance Conspiracy,” above which Henry Ford gives us his opinion on the source of jazz, which he gets wrong, though his description seems to work. In any case, “Square Dance” a great exercise in poetic apostrophe, where “Wild nights – Wild nights!” are calmed if not tamed.
I don’t get the feeling Kopka’s poems are hastily written. There’s an underlying patience, notes of growth and maturation, and his poems show both temperamental talent and writerly skills at work. The ideas begin in observation, might be confessional, but could be fictional, and ethical choices are made, dug out, and then backfilled. Description moves us forward, closer to the action:
We’re eating poutine in a courtyard canopied by hackberry trees…. Under the table, the brunette unfolds a napkin on my lap, her palm holding me through the cloth makes a slow, migratory circuit.
The Birds of Montreal (86)
There are three sections to “Count Four,” and a single poem introduction (“Interrogation”), for a total of 32 poems. The book is well organized and presented. No very short, tweet-like poems. The poems are formally written using poetic devices both hidden and obvious. Not that these need to be recognized for enjoyment of the book. The poems are accessible, and in that sense traditional and conservative, at least in form, rather than radical and blurred. There’s humor as well as remorse. The narrators are dynamic characters, changing from their beginnings as a result of their experiences. It seems there is no end to some of these experiences for each new generation that cometh. The poem “Hollywood Ave,” for example, takes a new pic of an old icon. Originally named Prospect Avenue, but changed to Hollywood Boulevard; too bad, Prospect far more telling. Or maybe the poem is about any one of the other 90,000 Hollywood Avenues spread throughout the country. And “Coke Folks” could easily be a nowadays sitcom.
Final Note: I very much enjoyed and like the poems in this book. I don’t want to be in most of them, but I imagine Keith Kopka doesn’t either these days. He’s no doubt moved on, this book seems to function as a kind of memoir, and I look forward to reading his future writing. For readers who would like to know more about Kopka now, here’s a link to an essay he wrote last year, titled PUNK ROCK, POETRY & THE MYTH OF MASCULINITY (OCTOBER 14, 2020 VOL. 1 BROOKLYN). But get a copy of “Count Four”; it’s the real thing.
he walked under paid & unemployed among rocks and whirlpools between antiquity and the gift of now of uncertainty treading water waiting for his own antiquity to come when someone might remember he walked on water treading trudged and carried no grudge.
the sun has stopped it seems capsized bottoms up slithering south in the sky somewhere there must be a gargantuan sale on of cars or mattresses or a drive-in movie premier or midsummer festival the searchlight swiveling in spherical place all day and all night or maybe there’s just another fight on and the night ringsters awake outside some old development rising to nouveau sea lows and climbing salt heights a tsunami of fossil fuels.
The Coming of the Toads 