twilight of the male ego
klipschutz (Tsunami
Inc. Walla Walla, Washington $12.00)
Review by Herbert Lomas in Ambit 173
There’s a sense of desperation in these sassy poems. They
appear to be written by one of those sane people that normal America,
with its parody of sanity, has driven into a parody of overt insanity.
Clichés become twisted: ‘My Sediments Exactly’;
‘A Mouth in the Country’; ‘I’m Wearing My
Heart on Your Sleeve’; “some disenchanted evening”;
“you can rest unassured”.
Kurt Lipschutz is evidently into Sufism, as he has written several
Ghazals. The first begins “She married a prick for her green
card” – not what you’d expect from Rumi. There’s
a sense of whistling in the light.
Sadness pours over us
like syrup at midnight.
The sweet tooth surrenders
to seconds, to thirds.
The male ego switches on the telly and hears “Freeze!”
“A woman’s voice./ Two of them, in uniform, feet planted,
guns trained/ on his topmost chest hair.” There’s more
than twilight of the male ego here: a sense of defeat before the
triumph of the rogue air-conditioned fast-food nightmare with weapons
of mass destruction. In ‘Little Knell’ “the left
is dead/ im dead too/ its on your head …” There’s
nothing left but low-grade survival and snook-cocking semi-surrealistic
satire about everything, including Pound, Stevens and other prominent
American poets, who are parodied. Klipschutz co-writes commercial
songs and is part-time scrivener for a criminal defence lawyer:
hence so many dead office hours in the poems. The life around him
is a sad noise. This is not a bang but a derisive streetwise whistle
at the end of a failed civilisation.
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