The Brooklyn Rail

There’s a Malagasy proverb that warns: “Distracted by what is far away, one does not see their own nose.” Considering the degree to which our attention spans are affixed to phone, tablet, screen—to some form or other of technological or ideological mediation—incessantly diminishing any sense of a shared material reality, it’s tempting to invert this adage, and equally admonish: “Distracted by our own (or each other’s) noses, one does not notice something smells funny.” This book smells something funny. And it might be something burning.

did my house
catch fire
& I not
even know

if your house
catches fire

save the fire
save the fire
(100)

The short poems that make up Buck Downs’s new collection NICE NOSE inhabit the quotidian world, the day-to-day realities right underneath our proverbial nose. Yet their flames escape being smothered by the bric-a-brac that surrounds that common hearth. These are poems that talk back at the box; those now ubiquitous objects and interfaces—appliances, phones, apps, tweets, and television—that mediate our communication, that warp our sense of collective agency and individual value—in other words: our age’s toys and tools.

As the dimensions of our social world become more and more made up of our tools, and it becomes increasingly harder to distinguish between toy and tool, NICE NOSE appears as a book that casually inhabits spaces outside our well-fed assumptions of utility. Contained herein are sly insights, wisecracks, comebacks, and punchlines, usually aimed at and haunted by a joltingly literal context: the mediums amidst which they appear. These poems reveal how the tools we use objectify the user in turn, and the degrees to which our tools make tools of us.

THE EMAIL

if I had read
the message twice
before writing
back once I might
not have needed
to write at all

(64)

Many of these poems allude to that unmistakable moment of recognition and pathos that occurs when there’s a glitch in the daily matrix: a frozen app, an orphaned comment, a register of utter futility. They reveal the moment of disconnection between our technology and its designated functions; the irony of a tool meant for expediency, meeting the needless complexities it produces. Never the voice of a user’s guide, or some enlightened omniscient narrator with a guru-complex, this is the voice, or overheard voice, of anybody.

my mom was like,

you can’t google
worth a fuck,
gimme that—
(49)

The unending dialogues about poetry’s primary functions are surely as old as the art itself. Aside from the personally expressive, there are presumptions that linger: namely, that a book of poetry offers some insight into the culture-at-large, or imparts some sort of wisdom; whether esoteric or common-sensical.

Even amongst the vast traditions of poetry, where function and form are as endlessly various as any other art, aesthetic considerations are still often bound to questions of utility, of occasion and reception. But what happens to that sense of utility, of import, when we are constantly compelled to speak, to write, to comment—when the dispensation of wisdom has never been quite so compulsory, or common? Anybody out there?

they say we are all one
but I think it must be
more like three quarters
because so many of us
are not entirely here

(93)

Hovering behind these splinters of speech and off-handed rejoinders are also the interwoven themes of technological isolation and alienation. Here are the minute and specific ways our mediums mediate us; how we recognize ourselves and each other, clearly, in the all-consuming need for connection and validation that these mediums engender, and how our own disconnection is amplified by the desires they manufacture.

my sweet little phone chirps
and I always think it’s you
but it’s just my phone,
battery low again

(99)

These poems work cumulatively, as they reveal the passive consumer mentality at play behind many of our practical quandaries, our heartbreaking bids for agency. Functionality is not what it seems; social platforms are often registered as mirages, distractions, and disguised corporate surveillance, a self-contained panopticon of mirrored motive and reaction. As we eagerly sop up attention, and are encouraged to do so, as we are conditioned to watch ourselves, and watch each other: “you just have to forget / that you are being watched / as often as you can // and notice how much time you spend / looking at yourself ” one poem advises, an encapsulating adage for the Targeted Ad Age, with overtones of foreboding.

“NICE NOSE” was a phrase printed on one of a series of small stickers Buck Downs created and distributed during the height of the pandemic; when anti-science zeal, technological mediation, and infotainment saturation seemed to reach a disorienting, almost fever-dream pitch.

LEAF BLOWER

you’d be surprised
how fragile
cops are these days
now that everything
has been weaponized

(106)

Elliptically sparse, and often aphoristic, many of the poems in NICE NOSE could first be encountered around Washington DC, as various ephemera, often affixed to the corners of public spaces, containing “passive aggressive pro-mask propaganda, dusty riddles, a record of meals made or missed—sometimes appearing as a sticker on a lamp-post or on the back of a bus seat, or posted on a feed amid the clatter of feeds” as the poem-in-itself back cover copy describes.

And these poems do function like they were once stickers, in that they stick, just like any old folk saying would, in perfect symbiosis of sound pattern and allusion. Messages in a bottle, flung out into a perilous and unforgiving sea of circular discourse; composed to float. Adhesives affixed by music and theme to the larger world of utility, outside the prescribed codex.

But NICE NOSE is also very much a book to be taken as a whole, and it is a nice book. Nice, meaning: friendly, open to passerby, generally operative, both in style and tone. Not pandering in its accessibility, nor sarcastically othering itself from conceptions of a shared social reality. This is a “my heart is in my pocket” type of book.

There is a quality (slyly) almost like a tome intended for popular consumption to this collection. Maybe a wink and giggle at old compendiums of parables, proverbs, maxims, and jokes. Although the mode is primarily axiomatic; it’s made of rejoinders to the program of ceaseless consumption foisted upon us, to the nuggets of wisdom doled out in the daily deluge of hot-takes, life-hacks, and consumer manipulation disguised as social connectivity. A voice from the margins of mass-cultural givens, revealing the authority our tools have taken over our lives, giving fair warning.

REMEMBER

an algorithm

is always a guess

never an answer

(27)

Alongside these themes of beleaguered connectivity, and thwarted utility, many of the poems register small degrees of refusal. Refusal is offered as a positive value, one of human agency, and often of revelation: refusal to believe solely in the options offered, and refusal to invest value, (the most precious of commodities) in what are, quite often, dialogues generated for and by that great Moloch: the market. As expression becomes pre-packaged, and idiom an obligatory placeholder, these poems locate and occupy (not reflect) the vacancies at the heart of much mediated exchange. Something essential is being soused out.

RESOLUTION

stop responding
to people
you don’t know
and who aren’t
addressing you
anyway

(34)

Buck Downs reached such a resolution several decades ago. Dissatisfied with the kinds of reception offered by the insular mechanisms of standard poetry presses and print distribution channels, renouncing the ennui that eagerly hoping for “proper” publication often brings, Downs began a decades-long practice of regularly producing postcards upon which to frame his sometimes avuncular, often angular lyrics, and sending them out to a self-compiled, ever-expanding mailing list.

Since the inception of this regular postcard production and self-distribution practice, and informed by the amorphous traditions of mail-art and micro-press design, Downs has continued to rigorously experiment with various vehicles for poetry’s dissemination and reception. Voicemail poems, odd-sized printing experiments, poems that engage various fonts and typographies, all manner of quickly and practically reproducible ephemera—conceived as idiosyncratic manifestations of each project’s specific lyric impulse. Each impulse attuned to the materials used in its dissemination.

American poetry has a long-standing tendency towards utilizing the physical medium, and the holographic limitation of the materials at hand, as a written composition’s primary organizing principle. Consider Emily Dickinson’s lines dashed on envelopes and chocolate wrappers, Lorine Niedecker’s discreet units carefully writ inside desktop calendars, Frank O’Hara’s “Lines for the Fortune Cookies,” or even Jack Kerouac’s long teletype scroll, as formal and conceptual (not just incidental) constraints that effect theme, style, and tone, as much as duration.

In Buck Downs’s work, and particularly in NICE NOSE, what makes the poems composed for these common mediums not merely byproducts of a desire for novelty but a serious, committed practice, is the degree to which the methodology of production and composition becomes part and parcel with the mode of distribution. The dimensions of a small sticker, the quick screenshot from a phone’s notepad app, the frame of a social media post—all meant for practical daily application and consumption, are transformed into possibilities of occasion and address.

This interchangeability, this constant flux of potential contexts, offer a range of new considerations and strategies for poems to differentiate themselves from—(and resonate from within)—the thicket of online meta-text, or any number of speech-cluttered public spaces. Imagine seeing this poem on a sticker in a subway, suddenly realizing you missed your stop:

WHERE AM I

people! stop

asking me

where you are

(11)

Its brevity—as a cry of desperation—is not just practical, but a means of creating resonance through its starkness. This is not a poetry that merely reflects or laments the mechanisms of the culture-at-large: it quips, ripostes, roasts, counterpunches and competes. It takes itself literally: that this poem will be appearing in some context of the wider world, encountered as if you might have found, overheard, or overheard yourself thinking it, within the flow of life’s ceaseless trivialities. These poems are not just about modes of reception, they embody them. Within this openness, each poem’s uncannily subtle lyric framing creates an outsized agency to the smallest scraps of speech and thought, as in “[small talk]”:

she’s all like, treat you
like an animal,

I’m like, animals
treat me pretty good

(115)

Now that is a classical zinger, a sharp little diamond of witty exchange—but also a perfect specimen of isolated vernacular, and a consciously considered rhythmic unit, right down to its stuttering “like.” The nuance of its telling is very much part of that resonance.

While everywhere there is the shadow of popular forms: song, riddle, punchline, there’s also that sense of equilibrium you get in the prosody of someone like Gertrude Stein, where each phrase and word feels equal in weight. Balanced, but also wobbling, cooing, creaking, and teetering on the page.

the bat has its own
art of clicks
and cries

we could call it a song
if not for our fears

(88)

Downs’s poems are an “art of clicks / and cries,” framed with a similarly magnifying attention as in much of Robert Creeley, Joanne Kyger, Aram Saroyan, Robert Grenier, or any number of various practitioners in that lineage of the American “mini/micro/nano poem” (as Downs calls them); where every phrase, syllable, and letter, has foundational importance as an element of composition.

Because many of these aforementioned methods of dissemination are visual, Downs’s poems scan with a particular felicity. This delicate sense of spatial relation and visual lineation never feels precious, never ponderous, unlike so many “short” poems. The occasionally clipped feeling of notation contributes to a dynamic tension between the oracular and the written, between isolated minutiae (like the “isolate flecks” of W.C. Williams) and the occasion of their appearance.

It’s through this open-ended dedication to the poem’s actualization in the world, it’s concurrence of theme and tone, with sight, sound, and medium, that keeps them from being merely a series of static objets d’arte.

NICE NOSE is the result of a continuing methodology that removes poetry from its normative, codex-bound contexts, and is constantly engaged with finding new ways to enact its function as that of a public art. No import is lost in any poem’s degree of intimacy or scale. Nothing is slight about the statements these poems contain, despite their surface minimalism.

They are not aimed at everyone, but they are, emphatically, for anyone. They seem to speak to, and from, the same anonymous utility we find ourselves (wittingly or not) continually inhabiting. Their tone, their jocular irreverence, and their barbed wisdom, seem closely tied to that most beloved of all poets: Anonymous.

A large part of this resonance, again, is the poem’s astounding literalness: sharp scraps of sound and speech, perfectly framed on the ephemera of the daily. Few practitioners are as industrious with their materials, or have such a finely tuned eye and ear, for considering the real economy of expression. Taken as a book, these poems seem to advise: “You can follow your nose, but you better heed where it leads you.”

cat on a toaster

something smells good
and warm and weird
I’m out of here

(94)