Our guest columnist this week is Somerville Bagel Bard, Lo Galluccio. Galluccio reviewed a new poetry book by Marc Zegans, who once pounded the pavement around these parts, but is now living on the West Coast. Marc’s work has appeared in this column before.

The Underwater Typewriter
Poetry by Marc Zegans
Pelekinesis Press
Copyright 2015
134 pages

Marc Zegans new book of poems, The Underwater Typewriter, is such a stellar work that I’m hard-pressed to narrow this review to just a few poems, though that’s what I can do. Rarely does anyone combine his formal sense of space and syntax with an underlying passion and profound perception. He is the aerialist walking a tightrope, never faltering from dizzying heights of an intense trip over a continent of ideas and experience. And neither does his underwater journey through subterranean coral reefs get soggy or sentimental or brutal, like other modernist poets, even the likes of Frost or Collins, or one of my favorites for his scope and rhyme schemes, Frederick Seidel. In this book you feel like you are staring into the lens of an acutely focused camera, at black and white, color and colorized pictures of the landscape of human emotions and transactions with society’s undercurrents of regeneration and rejection and evolution.

Here is an explication of three poems from this truly amazing book.

Perhaps my favorite poem is titled Out, a work that is composed in tiny type and forms an inverted cliff flush left on the page. It’s both a confessional and nuanced grid exploring the different things that “out” implies or generates. He begins:

“I suppose I am out now,
Out of excuses, out of art,
Out of contrivances, out.”

1. 72

This repetition, like a song form, immediately has lyrical impact. He goes on to say:

“So I am out, naked and ugly
And I make some people’s skin
Crawl when I tell them my truths
And I don’t disclose all of myself”

1. 72

Then he dollops us with the colloquial curse word we all use sometimes for fornication:

“It’s funny that, in and out – fucking.”

And ends with:
“And there is strange justice in that,
Seeing it all, feeling it all and
Not letting it condition me in any
Way, learning to hold on as best
I can to nothing….”

A brilliant sequence that resolves around an existential condition of life, something Buddhist or as the Hindu Mantra goes: “I am that.”

Conversely, the poem Night which addresses the night as in the persona of a woman, is a strand of short lines and pithy descriptions…about being alone except for the night’s presence…”languid, smooth.”

“I relish the liquid
Tumble into her
Timeless opening.”

1. 42

And ends with an ambivalence about her devotion and trust:

“Knowing her
As I do
Simple
And simply”

And yet
Nothing
And I mean
Nothing
Is harder.

45. 45.

A Hipster Retires takes on the meaning of the term “hipster” as it’s existed in America since, perhaps the 50s.  This poem turns a wide-angle look, with socio-cultural references and gibes, at what “hipster” has represented to us.  In perfect four line stanzas, Marc describes the accessories and heart of “hipsterism.”  The turning point and real soul of the poem for me is:

“To be hip to the truth that power denies
To be knowing of the shadow pulsing
In the night of our American soul
To give birth to the cool and forget it

As soon as Miles turned his back on stage
Because a change was gonna come
Real soon; when to be hip was to be invested,
With one’s brothers in defiant meaning.

1. 79

In the finale, as often in his poems, he reverses course or lets a looming Inversion to occur. Instead of identifying with hip, he chooses to disavow it for himself, for the present, when maybe hip no longer applies—the paradox of once being or striving to be something that is no longer applicable or meaningful.

“…as for me, I’ve no need
To be hip to the inside joke

My time is short, there’s hearts to be won
The time has come for our hipster to retire.”

1. 80

I highly recommend this book. For me it rivals John Ashbury’s Flow Chart or Frank O’Hara’s Lunch-time Poems. It’s a thoughtful, vibrant and incredibly diverse collection. It’s a game changer in term of form and language, using many poetic devices – compression, refraction, and enjambment and still maintaining a wry idiomatic style. He truly exposes his inner self while donning many verbal get-ups … read it! He will definitely win over “many hearts.”

By Lo Galluccio
Poet and vocalist
Author of “Hot Rain” and “Sarasota VII”