William Fuller: Sadly

Sadly, William Fuller (Flood Editions, 2003)

If anything, even more disorienting that Watchword, & at the same time a trifle more laconic. Still, tremendous stuff. Fuller indulges his lyrical gifts rather less in this one. The last poem, "I Now Think I Was Wrong," is Wallace Stevens without all illusions, stripped of all gaiety:

Returning to the spring, we see green on the surface

of the water. This is not the earth. Stand still, monkey,

do not run. None of us was ever here before.

[53/100]

William Fuller: Watchword

Watchword, William Fuller (Flood Editions, 2006)

[22/100]

Damn, William Fuller is one weird, fascinating poet. My own tendency is towards the musical, the lyrical, whether in the complex, baroque musics of Bunting, the bare dissonances of Zukofsky, or the super-lush organ-tones of Ronald Johnson, Swinburne, or Milton. Fuller's poems are so dissonant that I want to call them not just alyrical, but anti-lyrical. Nonetheless, for all their syntactic dead ends, their strange & abrupt shifts of register, their abstractions resting cheek-by-jowl with their vivid images – or perhaps because of all those things – the poems of Watchword are as imperatively readable – that is, they force you to read, & read on, & read again – as anything I've opened in the last year. I find this stuff hard to describe: maybe imagine Thomas Traherne crossed with some 17th-century philosopher, crossed with a particularly eloquent writer of legal briefs – but with an extraordinarily loose sense of syntax, & a keen eye for the visible & invisible worlds.