Experience in Groups - Softcover

O'Brien, Geoffrey G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940696666 ISBN 13: 9781940696669

Publisher: Wave Books, 2018

Synopsis

Experience in Groups sings and thinks the forms of belonging that organize our lives, offering poems that move with honesty and formal intelligence between the individual and the collective. In a time of ascendant fascism and creative political resistance, O'Brien's work demands that an elegy, love poem, and a sonnet sequence become occasions where personal tragedies and joys find a pattern and a place within national and global struggle.

About this title

About the Author:

Geoffrey G. O'Brien is the author of Experience in Groups (Wave Books, forthcoming 2018) and People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013), as well as the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002), all from The University of California Press. His chapbooks included Hesiod (Song Cave, 2010) and Poem with No Good Lines (Hand Held Editions, 2010). He is the coauthor (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O’Brien (Minus A Press, 2012) and (in collaboration with the poet Jeff Clark) of 2A (Quemadura, 2006). O’Brien is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley and also teaches for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

EXPERIENCE IN GROUPS

Things are worse than they are.
The earth returns a usable world.
All my cells are pages stamped.

Half the time reach comes back
With nothing though everything
Touches everything else. The sun

Has gone out in the poem
In both senses of out, all senses
Of in. Or hasn’t yet come, has

Too weakly to be felt on your back.
Sunlight messaging the streets
Makes them look spread with quiet

Excuses for motion called place.
One day hate-rhymes with the next.
Things stay together, the center can hold.

We know a few reasons for this
Through which the ones we don’t
Escape. But be calm, as calm as

Small green plums in the fridge
At the end of August. If only one’s left
Be easy instead. Each feeling

Departs the time in which it lasts
For another point on the graph,
The next chest in the world. You are

A host of the temporary, taking
The short view of a long century
Already ending, leaving, left behind.

The difference between escape and departure,
The difference between command and
Instruction, between description and praise,

Praise and assent, assent and complicity,
Complicity and fold, fold and seam,
Seam and border, border and line,

Line and detention (at a border),
Detention and camp, camp and asylum,
Asylum and detention at a border,

Detention at a border and rest,
Rest and care, care and worry is
Fog become rain when it hits the pines.

Dramatic irony not not knowing things
But not knowing the things you do.
And they aren’t things, but a time,

The jail of the year. What can be done?
The dishes somehow are clean,
That struggle is over. You can leave

The kitchen entirely, without guilt,
Flick, turn, or pull down the light.
It’s been one of those lives in a day

Repeating vague portions of the new
To make time right, but it isn’t, filled
With objects at the end of the aisle

Of a stare. So the little collisions
Experienced as progress through.
But it isn’t, it won’t, so be patient

As the future, things not even
Yet in the ground. Be ground,
Though not the one we having are.

 

 

NOTHING, EVERYTHING

I have many things to tell you
Having nothing to do with each other
Except for having itself.

Recently I suffered a mild case.
Some things stop short while others.
Still others continue a while,

Almost long enough to propose
An argument were someone there to
Pick it up and run toward away.

Spring will come maybe four or five
More times tops, as real as being
Told it will, airy thinness

After which nothing but
Non sequitur. Time is like that,
A farewell that returns across

The autumn proscenium
Hardship in general is,
Stirring the blood till the mind snaps to

Attention, makes inaudible
Protests to invisible persons
About as present as the past.

I consider spring at present to be
Street theater, meaning
It doesn’t yet know it’s already dead.

I feel about its auditorium
The way I feel about in the dark:
They built it by letting it happen,

Living like sleeping while standing
Until unsure what perhaps means.
Your parents know until you ask them.

They are or are not here; you do and do not
Belong, the set now empty or struck.
Scaffolding is the catwalk of capital.

So are sidewalks, elevators, planes,
Platforms, stalls, arenas, parks,
Screens, cells, bars, bodies, sounds.

In fact sounds are the worst of it,
Confessing without having done so
Like a cough, a cough at a reading.

This is the cost of doing business as usual.
They build it by letting it happen
Again and again, the dark between days.

An I-don’t-do-this, don’t-do-that
Poem where you get what they need
And half like it, are all about it, get it

Coming and going, and to go.
Holding something’s juggling slowed down.
Having feels like living on a bridge

Between non sequiturs.
At its best the house falls away
Like a curtain going up and to the sides

Of everything beyond it, but
We shouldn’t speak of what’s happening
Elsewhere as though it were the dark

Because it’s not dark there right now.
If they, if that is their real name,
Taught us anything, and they didn’t,

It’s this, that we see them where they aren’t
Because they aren’t where they are.
Thinking is like juggling at night

And juggling like walking on your hands
Across the rocks in a poisoned stream
That gives onto rivers there are fewer than

Where numbness and intensity are one
Painless sense there’s work ahead
And just why would you do that.

Life is horrible but pleasant to recall.
Though you vary the things you say,
Though you alter your expression,

The snowglobe is always at rest,
Little more than a scene.
And if you had the long present,

Bridged its days and nights as if
Thinking saying having holding
Links up the lost with all the not yet

Until they both? But they doesn’t.
Instead the September of it all,
Tension as the stations fill

With the props a day needs to make
The next, the light underground
Almost convincing. Then out

To the surface like a prayer
For validity, the one indistinct
From silently walking among.

 

 

1956–

Light dark then light again.
A black and white image of
A man on his back in the snow,
Blank side up. He awaits
The beginning of a general eve,
Time that won’t quite arrive
In the gap between what is
Had and can’t yet be
Otherwise imagined. This
The period style: to leave
Your body for nothing, return
All mornings but one,
A kind of French exit.
Walser’s dead. Work is too
Much, a madness poetry almost
Successfully resists, staring
Up at the blank sky
But you know how that
Silent conversation goes
And where. Distance
Enters the face to look out,
Eavesdropping on
The unconcluded hence
Perfect game. One
Feels a little accessory,
Dim glow of the screen. Light
Then light then light again.
No, the facts are these. Suez
And Hungary, steel strikes,
The battle of Algiers.
Hail in April, Christmas
In July. This is now
But what’s it during, snow
That falling out of step
With time for too long
Seems to hang white
On the wrong side of
Some trees. They’re going
To try to keep it.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1940696666
• ISBN 13: 9781940696669
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144