Recreational Vehicles on Fire

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New & Selected Poems by Jane Ormerod

Anyone who has heard Jane Ormerod read, and she reads often
in the Bay Area, knows what it means to perform a poem.

On the page her words offer a different kind of pleasure. In
performance those repeated phrases, her incantations, structure
the text and focus our attention:

intuitive imagination, that and a willingness to give up foregone and
grand conclusions:

Meaning is mauve
Meaning is teeny

There is no theory behind me

This is the day they lost the talking horse
This is the day they lost the talking horse
This is the day they lost the talking horse

"My Open Mouth Years"

She remembers instead "the lawlessness of pure song." ("Preparation
for the Body")

"Hurricane"

On the page a rich linguistic chaos comes to the surface, filled
with humor, wordplay, exuberant riffs that hurry us along:

Her poems rely on association and a bit of magic. Step into one

of them and step into a whitewater of language. Or to switch
metaphors midstream, her poems continually jump the tracks to
rush us through a landscape of wild invention. There in the jumble
and rubble of language, the goofing around-"Do not get caught
with a quail or a woman in a tie" ("Suspicion")-there in its music,
we also find the somber reflection:

Conmen comets comments cormorants condiments
Electrical magnetical surges of birds

In formation down Broadway

"Thoughts Not Yet Poeticized"

For Ormerod, the poet is an "arranger" of the unpredictable, a
method that displaces without abandoning conscious control:

Sky lights the finality of flesh as we baffle,
battle, and bottle-mothership our bodies

There is a language, the girl says
Which may be predicted like weather

"The Fly"

"Mindapoloyies"

These are poems for the twenty-first century, filled with wit,
disruption, bad news, and song. And what comes next? She has
an answer, sort of, in the spirit of the moment, a kind of comic
apocalypse, or maybe just an end of a day:

But a poet's language spills "like potatoes tumbling from market
speeding trucks." Her poet accumulates fragments, disrupts
standard narrative flow, discovers the unexpected, and the
success of such writing depends on an acute descriptive and

After the event

Invite a thousand insects

"Thoughts Not Yet Poeticized"

A review by Patrick Cahill