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“Anthony McCann's Father of Noise, his first book, is terrific: an intelligent, surreal, original bulletin from contemporary America, its landscape, its violent history, its wild humor, its experience of and secret longing for disaster. ‘I need to pretend/ that I am under attack from the air,’ concludes the paranoid, deranged, yet still-lucid speaker of ‘Skywalker Ranch.’ The poem ‘Empire State’ (invoking New York state, for those unfamiliar with its official nickname) brings us efficiently, sparely, ‘Further north into/Deepest Indian Country.’
Strange metamorphoses happen in these poems, transformative flares of consciousness: ‘Beneath my dead skin/My true skin was burning.’ The often deadpan tone and occasionally bizarre dramatis personae—‘In the Kitchen I am called Snowflake’ begins the poem ‘Valium’--never obscure McCann's acute diagnosis of where we live now, our ‘American Experience,’ as the title of one poem has it.
McCann is a mordant environmentalist, alive to the pressure of noise on our psyches, materialism on our resources, egotism on our ecology. ‘We are all engaged in this lugubrious parody of pleasure/ because we/are Phony Balonies. (I am looking/for a real commitment),’ he writes in ‘Walk and Missive.’ Below the fun and sudden violence, one hears a strange, keening prophecy: ‘We will say things to each other when we meet/in the skyway, in the future. . . . /[B]ecause we are tender/and electronically sensitized’ (‘My People’).
Poet and critic Charles Bernstein has said poetry should be at least as interesting as TV. McCann is up to that challenge.”—Maureen N. McLane , The Chicago Tribune
Anthony McCann seeks out the elusive Other with all the raucous self-loathing of a mad saint. Eroticized, debunked, adored and despised, the sayer of these incantations ventures fearlessly into the known, buoyed only by the persistence of the body in its current manifestation. His penetrating, pervasive doubt lends a perverse clarity to the journey, and lends shape to the spirit world. "I approach the house in tiger pants/ thinking of surrender and of holding on."
Presences human, tactile, divine or merely posing as such are paradoxically within grasp and unreachable in the volatile landscapes Anthony McCann’s poems inhabit. His poems engage in a slippery push-me/pull-me game between one’s own skin and the packagings that define and obscure identity. Invaded and intruded upon by forces sometimes nameable, at other times restlessly vague, the self searches not for escape, but for raw presence. America in all its colonizing, seamless, awkward fabrications plays center stage here, but in the end McCann’s poems find resolution nether in revolt nor unity: “Words come because we are built from noise.”
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From the Book:
Skywalker Ranch
I was struggling to embrace the new technology
when quite on accident I drained the harbor, dredged
the locks,
and devastated the local economy now finding myself
still trying to yoke this motor, runaway outboard
in a burrowing fury.
O my heart, manic mudskipper, surging in mud.
Writing these lines I am overcome with fatigue and
despair as if
the temperature had risen suddenly and I,
inner pioneer and amateur pharmacologist, were
sweating
true bricks!
I give up, get off my knees, take off my lifejacket.
Because no one lives here anymore, except security
and the gardeners. I am the world's last actor,
I have to inspect the "winery." Add some more dust
to the bottles, peel more paint from the barn,
or perhaps a stick of commemorative gum? I need to
pretend
that I am under attack from the air.
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ANTHONY McCANN was born and raised in the Upper Hudson Valley region of New York state. He holds degrees from the University of New Hampshire and the University of Iowa. His poems have appeared in various magazines as well as in a chapbook, In Praise of Reason, published by Pine Press of Vilnius, Lithuania in 2001. Currently he teaches English as a Second Language in Brooklyn, NY, where he lives with his wife, cartoonist and fellow ESL teacher, Ellen Sharp.
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