"...an exuberant Charles Ives type..."  George Myers, Jr.



NOW includes inserts which are not to be read,
viewed, in book form, but are for wall display.

      
When James Dickey read his poem 'Falling' at Vanderbilt, back in 1970, dressed in swanky embroidered cowboy boots, his hair loosely drawn over his head, his massive frame swaying to the cadence of his poem, I never imagined the poem could be on the page as it was in his body, floating across the page with spaces, with lines, leaving the reader with time to float as the 29 year old stewardess in the poem floated when she was sucked out of an airliner and found later in a corn field.

Although I have often tried to use the page as an artistic ally to the poem, I never succeeded making the word and the space dance on the page as Dickey did.

Tom Fallon has mastered the use of space to be an artists ally in a poem. His poems are panoramicly like an 18th century landscape. When he delves, as poet Frank Bidart, into the inner psyche of a student pressed to the limit by bullying and firing handgun at his tormentors of a girl raped and murdered, the long lines allow him to repeat words, to set apart words like dabs of color the page, so that you see at once the driving rhythm of languages. It’s cinematic – its effect assaulting as the topic, the tow being one. The meaning of the poem leaps at your as word image does in an advertisement. But unlike an ad, it presses you to front, the facts of our commercial, often violent culture.

When he is ranting against greed, the incantation is transparent like a protest placard with GREED standing out, large and imposing. Some poems, particularly one to 29 black children murdered in Georgia, use the visual to tear the heart. In its simplicity is its horror.

Fallon has a striking emotional range. His poem to Whitman – in particular his diminished vitality, his pathetic obsession with his failing organs – is a sad, candid testimony of a great spirit racked by illness and the diminishment of words and body.  Yet like Whitman Tom celebrates his body and the natural world in a range of poems.  His poem about running naked, his 'penis/flopping free, free/green leaves' shade, green/grass shushing,/brook, sun light, open sky, white pines,/wind on my body...' (19) speaks lovingly of our ale anatomy. Yet his poem about painting a naked lady – 'he...thickened the line with orange, muting/the harshness of red, adding ocher to the orange...the line vibration/with an orange light of fire' (94) – lauds femininity. Whatever his topic, he speaks reverentially and respectfully, adding to the given, not detracting from it.

At the recent Belfast Arts Festival where a poet collaborates with a visual artist, one poet exclaimed as she described how she put in words what she saw, 'I am in the paint!' Tom Fallon blends the canvas of the page with the word so we can see how the medium of the written word is married with the visual. I may not have known what to make of Dickey back in my youth. But I see what Fallon has done, and I like it.



Tom Fallon, working out of Rumford, has been industriously stirring up the hinterlands of Maine’s literary scenes for at least 30 years. The hallmarks of his project — as it has strayed intermittently onto my radar, at least — have been energy and quirk. And those qualities are abundant in Now, which appears to be a retrospective on his literary oddity.

The book comprises efforts to burst conventional poetic boundaries. There are the narrative poems made of shreds and shards of imagery, like "Ghost Dance" —

                                                          "The natives corralled
                                                                       in a hollow, Wounded Knee,
                                                                                    gathered around chief Big Foot..."

which seem strongly derivative of Charles Olson’s "Maximus" poems of 50 years ago.  Poems such as last word splatter type over entire pages, also an old trick. Folded up and tucked into a flap in the back cover of the 10-by-8-inch book are works on paper, with instructions: "This work is a recent direction. They are to be placed on a wall:  They should not be read ‘in the lap.'"

Many of the poems express tremendous exuberance for experiences of beauty, sex, social rage and mental illumination. The long poem The Arena recounts intense church experiences bordering on, or striving to be, mystical.

Some lines and verses are syntactically inventive, while others try so hard to innovate that they’re just clumsy, as though the Beat poets’ guideline, 'first thought, best thought,' got stretched too thin. There’s also a persistent sense of Richard Cory-like isolation, with the ironic twist that the author has for decades emphasized his status as factory worker rather than town patrician.

What you get out of these writings is energy, much of it untamed. On that score, the journey for the author appears definitely to have been worth it. And in a literary age whose dullness is hardly to be believed, Now seems almost Blakean despite its  
shortcomings.

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